What Is The Meaning Of Life? | Unveiled XL Documentary

<h4>

What is the Meaning of Life?</h4>

Why are you here? Why is anyone here? And why is the universe here to begin with? If existential questions are your kind of thing then this is the video for you! Today, we’re taking an in-depth look at the theories and philosophies seeking to answer the greatest and deepest inquiry of all. Because, ultimately, it’s a dilemma, a problem, that affects everyone and everything, across all of time and space.

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what is the meaning of life?

Sometimes life is beautiful. But sometimes it can seem like a drag. And, for all the fantastic moments they throw our way, our lives are also punctuated by tragic events… and guided by the inevitability of suffering, aging, and our own mortality, too. The problems and pains that we all must endure from time to time can often lead us to wonder in our low moments, what’s the point of it all? But, as it turns out, there are lots of responses to that one, crucial inquiry.

What’s the meaning of existence?

First up, the ideas of one of the most famous philosophers of all time, Plato. For Plato, the ultimate goal of any life worth living is to obtain the highest form of knowledge possible. This word, “Form”, is important. Plato believed in the existence of universal Forms, which are ideas or concepts in their purest, most abstract state. These Forms do not exist in the real world, but rather in a kind of spiritual realm - and accessing that realm is to pursue the meaning of life. Plato’s Forms could be anything… from Beauty to Squareness, to Blueness, and so on. A particularly important form, however, is that of Goodness… and for Plato the purpose of all our lives is to try to obtain the highest possible understanding of the Good.

A different philosopher, Antisthenes, took a different approach though… one which emphasized virtuous action as opposed to knowledge. This school is known as Cynicism, and to a cynic the purpose of life is to distinguish between wholesome and unwholesome values. Do so, and it’s believed that one can live a happy life in accordance with nature. To be a Cynic, you must reject unvirtuous desires such as fame, possessions, power, and wealth - as these will never bring you the peace that true happiness needs. Get rid of fame, possessions, power, and wealth, and you free yourself from unhealthy mental baggage in favor of leading a pure life.

Cyrenaicism offers a vastly different approach, however. It’s a smaller school coming out of Ancient Greece, but it advocates most of what cynicism denies. Cyrenaics believe that the most sensible course of action for each individual in their individual life… is to constantly seek short-term gratification. Including things like money, material goods, and physical experiences. Even if doing so means sacrificing their long-term interests. In stark contradiction to followers of Plato, too, Cyrenaics are skeptical of the value of knowledge. Instead, they exclusively trust in their immediate perceptual awareness. Again, valuing short-term pleasure over long-term gain, they see the meaning of life as being clearest when we trust our innate instincts about what we want right now. They don’t delay, they don’t second-guess themselves, they just go for it!

To flip the debate again, the school of Epicureanism takes an often opposite approach, despite also valuing the pursuit of pleasure. For its founder Epicurus, the ultimate goal in life is to maximize long-term pleasure… and you do that by minimizing pain and fear. With most humans wanting to be free from pain and fear, this should perhaps be one of the more straightforward worldviews out there? But, of course, inconsistencies arise by the fact that different humans find different things pleasurable and painful. There doesn’t appear to be one right answer here, but Epicurus generally believed that the pursuit of mental pleasures is more meaningful than chasing physical ones, because physical is usually short-term gratification whereas mental can often result in long-term wellness.

Next, there’s nihilism, a famously pessimistic philosophical movement (it would seem) which refuses to believe in any kind of objective meaning to existence… and claims that all value systems are baseless. Nihilists view other philosophies as just desperate attempts to find meaning in what’s really an unforgiving and meaningless world. With that said, there are some nihilists with at least a little optimism. Many, for example, refuse to let the meaninglessness of everything get them down… and so they develop a more heroic mindset that strives to preserve their own happiness (in spite of the lack of meaning). Others go one step further, to emphasize the positive side of the lack of meaning itself… namely that if everything is meaningless, then that takes the sting out of all the apparently negative aspects of life, too - such as fear, humiliation, and guilt. Because if, in the end, nothing really matters… then all those things that we worry about on a daily basis don’t matter either.

There’s also Absurdism, which could be considered a branch of Nihilism, put forward by amongst others the French writer Albert Camus. The “absurd” part here is directly referring to the contradiction between an individual’s innate desire to find a meaning to life, and the impossibility of doing that in an ultimately meaningless universe. This leads to an unavoidable dissatisfaction with pretty much everything… but one solution is again to simply accept the absurdity of life, and to live it regardless without any identifiable reason for doing so. 

But the final philosophy we’ll examine today is something of a meeting point for many philosophies. Existentialism holds free will as the most important value in life. Existentialists therefore believe in the uniqueness of all individuals and generally deny that it’s even possible to prescribe a one-size-fits all rulebook (or meaning) for everyone. From cynicism to nihilism, no one idea could ever solve all of life’s big questions. Instead, for existentialists, it’s the individual’s responsibility to seek their own meaning… and this can be found in a variety of places. The existential dread we sometimes feel is then not an indication that life is pointless, but rather a motivation to seek our own truth... and to discover for ourselves why we’re here.

To finish, however, we know that most religions offer their own take on the meaning of life, too. And there are some common themes. The major monotheistic religions, for example, preach that a single God created the world, and that it’s our duty to submit to this God in order to lead a good life. The specifics of what we should and shouldn’t do often differ from religion to religion, though. In Christianity, for example, the purpose of life is to seek salvation through the grace of God… with most denominations implying that all people are sinners by nature, but that all can be forgiven for their sins by following Christian teachings. Islam also refers to life as though it’s a kind of test, although it places more emphasis on service to God… with the purpose of life being more to know and worship God.

Generally speaking, eastern religions differ in a number of ways, with one common theme being that the universe (and therefore our existence) in eastern faiths has a cyclical nature. In Hinduism, for example, it’s believed that human beings have an immortal soul that’s reincarnated after death. The purpose of our existence, then, is to gain liberation from the concept of Karma… which is the idea that all our actions have future consequences, even if those consequences don’t occur until a future reincarnation. Worship of Gods, moral action, and enjoyment of life are worthy pursuits in Hinduism, too... but the meaning of life is more about arriving at a higher level of existence, beyond the cycles and structures that bind us.

Buddhism also refers to higher levels of being, but never really concerns itself with directly answering the question of existence. Nor does it especially claim to understand how the world was created. Buddhism instead emphasizes the impermanence of all aspects of our lives, and suggests that all human suffering comes from our tendency to cling to things that can’t last. While there’s no explicit meaning or purpose to life here, Buddhists do still follow a path; the path to enlightenment or nirvana, a state of being in which suffering has been eliminated. Meanwhile Taoists also seek a similar inner peace, by trying to follow the Tao, or the Way, which is the perceived natural order of the universe. You follow the Tao by trusting your intuitive knowledge about how to proceed through life towards wisdom. 

We’ve briefly covered a wide range of philosophies and ideas today, and we can already see how links can be made across almost all of them. Life is certainly complicated, then, and people have always (and will always) see it through different lenses. Whether or not there’s truly any meaning to existence may not be a question we can ever definitively answer… but which of these modes of thought most resonates with you?

Do you ever contemplate the universe and feel totally overwhelmed? Do you ever wonder what difference you can make in something so unimaginably vast? Well, hold tight, because according to one idea… it could be that, actually, no-one is more important than you are, right now. 

What is the egg theory?

The Egg Theory was born via a short story written in 2009 by the US novelist Andy Weir. Weir is also known for “The Martian” which was, in 2015, adapted into a Hollywood movie starring Matt Damon… but perhaps “The Egg” is what will truly enshrine him in the annals of theoretical science and philosophy. Weir himself has expressed some surprise at the enthusiasm shown for his Egg idea, which he says took him less than an hour to jot down before posting to an online forum. But really, in a modern world where a “meaning” for life perhaps feels more and more difficult to understand… maybe it’s not so surprising that the Egg should catch on.

So, what actually happens in the story? Weir’s main character is known simply as “you”, and quickly you meet God, who’s referred to as “me”. What follows is essentially a conversation between you and God, then, through which the true nature of reality is revealed. At the beginning, the bad news is that you’ve just died in a car crash. God explains this to you, but also explains that you’ll soon be reincarnated as somebody different - as a young Chinese girl, alive almost 1,500 years ago. God further reveals that this isn’t your first reincarnation, either, far from it. You’ve actually been brought back countless times before… into countless different bodies, living in all Earthly locations, and at all times in the past, present, and future.

In the story, you then muse over the fact that this means you were once the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Adolf Hitler, and even Jesus Christ. While God reminds you that you’ve also been everyone else, too, including Lincoln’s assassin, Hitler’s victims, and Jesus’ followers. God continues, explaining further that, in fact, the universe was made for you as a kind of structure through which you could live every human life possible. The realization is that now (and actually always) you are (or have been) so much more than just the person who died in the car crash at the apparent beginning. Rather, you are everyone. Everyone that’s been, and everyone that will be. Essentially, the universe is for you.

Finally, God explains what the thinking behind all of this is. The idea is that through being everyone you would learn that everything you do, you do to yourself. Every time you hurt someone, you hurt yourself. Every time you help someone, you help yourself. Every time you’re kind or mean, happy or sad, selfish or selfless, you’re actually being all those things as everyone. Every human experience that ever was (or will be) is your experience. And, when you’ve lived every human life possible - today and in history and in the future - then, so the story says, you will become a god just like the one you’re currently talking to. Only then will you have infinite wisdom of what it really means to live. And so the story ends.

For the reader, there’s perhaps a clear moral message here, as it’s implied that you should always try to think, act and be your best side. Not just because it’s in your best interests, but because it simply is you. Everything is you, so would you rather everything was good or bad? However, perversely, the story also relies on the realization that all bad people are essentially your responsibility, too. This is a wide open thought experiment, then, with endless conclusions that could be reached. Meanwhile, the entire thing doubles up as a journey toward your ultimate enlightenment, and your ascension to god status. This is how Weir pitches the universe as an Egg, because it’s where you grow and develop until you reach that stage.

There are some schools of philosophical and scientific thought that this story could fall into. Or at least that it blurs boundaries with. Eternalism is a philosophy of time wherein the flow of time doesn’t really exist. Instead of the universe, your life and everything else moving through time (with the past behind it, the present always here, and the future to come) eternalism says that all those states of time are real together. Time is more a box to open up and look into, rather than a one-way road down which to travel. In Weir’s story, this is one of the first major revelations for “you”, the main character. When you reincarnate in China 1,500 years ago, it’s not exactly as though you’ll have traveled back in time… it’s more like you’ll have opened the book of time at a different page.

Next, there’s the theory of Open Individualism, another key concept in “The Egg”. Broadly, this is the idea that you are everyone. Or that everyone is you. There have been many variations to it coined over recent decades, but again it usually relies on the dismantling of the flow - or passage - of time. Time, as it’s commonly understood, doesn’t really exist for the open individual, or how else could it be that you could be anyone else, at all? Instead, and by some understandings of it, it might be said that you - your “self” - exists like a sheen over the world, applying itself to all. Or, that every apparent individual person is, in fact, linked simply by their shared experience of being here. It might feel as though all of us are different, but actually we’re not at all… at the most fundamental layer. We’re the same. Literally, the same.

Theories of Open Individualism don’t usually lead to the final point of Weir’s story, however - when it’s explained to you (by God) that once you’ve lived as everyone, you too will become a God. Here, “The Egg” takes a more theological turn, with similar concepts appearing across most major religions, but especially in Hinduism. While most religions have some form of “God the Creator” - an all-seeing, all-powerful entity - in Hinduism there’s the Brahman. This is a kind of topmost, metaphysical layer that rests over everything else, including Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva - the trinity of supreme Hindu gods. The Brahman is unsurpassable. It’s the ultimate truth of all things. It never changes, can never be changed, and represents the ultimate reality in Hindu thought. One reading of Weir’s story could perhaps cast the God figure within it as something close to the Brahman… although the implication is that even it exists somewhere else, so Weir doesn’t quite tie up reality in exactly the same way.

But what’s your verdict? Do you subscribe to the Egg Theory? Would you like to but can’t quite bring yourself to accept it? Of course, it’s not as though this is something that could ever provide proof of itself. It’s an idea proposed by Weir, and a blending of various other approaches to life, as well. Similarly, there are perhaps some signs of us building in some aspects of “The Egg” with regard to our future lives, as we currently appreciate them. The hive mind, for example, is an often-cited advanced technology that human society could be moving towards. A unifying something that enables us all to think, understand, and perhaps even feel the same things. Usually it’s pitched as though it’s a path toward ultimate efficiency… but could it also lead to a greater wisdom, and effectively fast track us (you? me?) toward the Egg’s end point? Toward living every human life possible? Or would a hive mind actually take us further away from that total truth? 

When it comes to future technology like that, it’s easy to steer ourselves into an early dystopia. But, really, and while interpretations obviously differ, that’s probably not the main takeaway from the Egg Theory. Instead, this is an idea more about the boundless possibilities for life… and it’s a re-pitching of the universe, with you at the heart of it. But not “you” you… not exactly. Because, if the Egg rings true, then you are me… and I am them… and they are us. You, me, he, she and they are growing as one, and there’s literally all the time (in the past, present and future) in which to do so. 

The universe seems like a vast and empty place, with billions of distant stars but currently no substantial signs of intelligent life beyond our own. But maybe there are much deeper and more insidious reasons than we even realize for our apparent cosmic loneliness. 

What if our lives are an alien experiment? 

First off, what are the chances of alien life existing in the first place? The Fermi Paradox, proposed by the 20th century physicist Enrico Fermi, summarizes the problem. It argues that; given the billions of stars not just in the Milky Way but across all the universe, and the millions of Earth-like (or potentially Earth-like) planets out there (many of which are much older than our own), it stands to reason that at least some of those celestial bodies should have developed intelligent life, and even interstellar travel. In fact, the Milky Way should’ve really been colonized already, a long time ago. Clearly, though, as far as we’re aware, no advanced alien race has yet to conquer the entire galaxy, unless they’re so advanced that they remain completely undetectable to all of our technologies. 

According to the Paradox; this either means there are no aliens at all, or that the aliens are purposefully avoiding or hiding from us. As such, the idea that our lives could simply be an experiment carried out by an alien race is a solid answer to the Fermi Paradox problem… because, if true, the alien experimenters wouldn’t want to intervene by alerting us to their existence as it would ruin the integrity of their study. Which takes us neatly to the Zoo Hypothesis, another idea on why we seem to be alone in the universe. 

The Zoo Hypothesis suggests that there are many alien civilisations out there much more advanced than us, but that the reason they haven’t declared themselves to us is that they’re waiting for us to pass a certain point in our own evolution - be that technologically, ethically or philosophically. Only then will they make first contact so that humankind can finally integrate into an interstellar community that we’re currently unaware of. Until then, we’re like caged animals in a zoo, with our alien onlookers preferring not to cross-contaminate between their lives and ours. 

While this type of well-meaning observation could very easily fit the definition of an “experiment,” it’s not necessarily the active and nefarious brand of alien experimentation we might expect. The pseudoscientific Ancient Astronauts theory claims to offer some kind of reason for what the aliens' end goal is. The theory - which, by contrast, isn’t widely supported in academic circles - focuses on ancient megastructures which it says are the product of extra-terrestrial intelligence. The Pyramids of Giza, the Easter Island Statues, the Nazca Lines and Stonehenge; all have been linked to supposed “ancient astronauts” at some stage. According to advocates, these buildings and monuments are call-backs to when aliens were setting up their experiment millennia ago; they were left here to see how we (the puny humans) would react to them. Some versions of the theory even suggest that if we can one day ‘solve’ the mysteries of places like Stonehenge, only then will we be deemed worthy of the attention of our alien overlords.

Given that archaeologists and historians have more feasible explanations for most (if not all) of these structures, though, it’s not an idea that has ever especially taken hold. So, failing the ancient astronaut proposal, there’s the theory of panspermia, which argues that human life on Earth is actually extraterrestrial in origin. This could mean that we just happened to grow from far-flung materials that by sheer coincidence crashed down onto our planet, or that aliens from the distant past purposefully sent us to Earth, once again to begin their experiment. Otherwise known as Directed Panspermia, the theory has had some high-profile supporters - including Francis Crick and Carl Sagan. And some recent discoveries have continued to stoke the debate, including in 2015 when UK scientists found a microscopic, metallic, unknown particle during an otherwise routine collection of space debris. According to the theory, that particle was actually a seed sent to Earth to spread biological material, and seeds like these could have been showing up for millions of years to essentially create humanity. 

As for where these aliens could’ve come from - regardless of whether they are, in fact, us or they aren’t - a couple of relatively close possibilities have been tabled in the past. First, there’s Mars. In one of the simpler theories around, humankind is but the remnants of an ancient Martian race that fled its home when the Red Planet became impossible to live on, billions of years ago. Elsewhere, we have the very hypothetical “Planet Five” - a now-non-existent world which believers say was once a part of our Solar System, before it disappeared around four billion years ago amidst the Late Heavy Bombardment. In either case, humanity are the leftovers of an alien race that we no longer know about because it no longer exists. In this way, our lives essentially are a long-winded alien experiment in that we’re actually the descendants of ancient creatures that hopped off of their original planet rather than perishing with it. 

But those theories still bill us as the almost accidental after-effects of some sort of ancient alien behavior. The more disturbing interpretation of the Zoo Hypothesis has us as the specifically-chosen ‘guinea pigs’ or ‘lab rats’ in an ongoing study conducted by higher beings. And if that’s the case, we have to wonder what the aliens’ true intentions are… Are they really just leaving us alone to develop at our own pace, or are they exerting some sort of control like a real-life simulation game? Are they manipulating our world from behind the scenes, perhaps to discover new truths about their own existences? And, if they knowingly started the experiment, couldn’t they willingly end it, too? Perhaps they’ll one day decide that it isn’t going as they had hoped, or that they’ve collected all of the data they need. What would happen to us then? 

Naturally, we’d never actually find out any of this - at least not without breaking the bonds of the experiment itself - but if our lives really did turn out to be an alien trial, that trial would never pass even the most lenient ethics board in our own world. With no consent agreement or any indication that we’re even being studied, no right to withdraw from an experiment we don’t even know is happening, and no idea about what will happen at the end of it because we didn’t even realize it had started… we’d be in a completely helpless situation. The best we could really hope for is that the all-powerful aliens would at least grant us a global Q&A to bring us up to speed with our own insignificance, once the experiment concludes. Of course, they could also just plain eliminate us and switch focus to another planet, galaxy or universe instead. 

If we really are just the product of extraterrestrial intervention, being watched, controlled, and studied from the present day all the way back to when we first crawled out of the sea, then the whole of human history could well feel quite meaningless. But, if these particular theories ever proved even half-true, it’d completely change everything we thought we knew. 

Perhaps the most exciting and fascinating mystery in the universe is whether or not we’re alone. For many ancient civilizations, it was believed that Earth was at the center of everything… Now, of course, we know that it’s not, and that our planet is but a tiny speck in the cosmos. So, we have to ask, why don’t we see signs of other life out there? 

Why is Earth the only planet with life? 

There are an extraordinary number of planets in the universe. According to most estimates, planets should be more abundant in space than stars… which is saying something seeing as it’s thought there are upwards of a septillion stars in just the observable universe - just the parts we can see. 

As we stand, then, we haven’t yet managed to study even close to one percent of all the planets theorized to exist, simply because we’re too far away from most of them. But we have extensively studied those in our own solar system, and some more beyond… and although some planets might have possibly harbored life at some other time in their past, we can’t say for certain that any do now. Many scientists do, of course, suspect that there is life on other planets… and probably on one or more of the two-to-ten billion Earth-like worlds calculated to exist in our galaxy alone. But, others argue that the circumstances which led to life on Earth are so spectacularly unlikely that it really could be unique. Whatever your view on it, Earth is the only planet we know of that supports life. But why exactly is that?

The oldest fossils we’ve found date back to around 3.5 billion years ago. We don’t have a definitive answer as to how life originally came to be here, but we do have a few theories. One idea known as Panspermia suggests that life didn’t actually start on Earth at all, but arrived here on an asteroid from another planet. That could be the case, but the panspermia theory still doesn’t answer how life in general began. One of the most popular theories on that is the idea of a “primordial soup”, or that life formed in a specific, circumstantial solution of materials which eventually became rich in organic compounds. Life came about because these “building block” compounds just so happened to form at the right place, at the right time.

It was originally said that these ultra-early chemical reactions were energized by UV rays from the sun. Then, in the 1950s, studies including the Miller-Urey experiment moved scientific thought more toward the idea that the soup would have had to have experienced an early-universe version of something like a lightning strike - that it was in some way “electrified”. More recently, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, some have called for the traditional soup theory to be discarded altogether, arguing instead that life most likely started deep in the sea near hydrothermal vents - that it was the vents which provided the energy it needed to form. Most models now have it that life did emerge out of the oceans and onto land, but there is still debate over how it occurred in our waters in the first place. What we do have a firmer grasp on is how the conditions on Earth sustain life as we know it.

It isn’t just one feature of Earth that makes it the only planet with life. There are dozens of small but vital aspects which come together to create the habitable world we know. Among these are Earth’s magnetic field, its atmosphere, the water cycle, and its size. Even the conditions outside of Earth itself seem to aid our existence. Jupiter, for example, acts as something like a bodyguard to Earth. It’s positioned at just the right location in the solar system so that its massive gravitational pull attracts most of the wayward asteroids that might have otherwise struck our planet. Our own moon, too, is a key player in our planet’s habitability, with its gravity helping to stabilize Earth’s rotation… which helps to keep the climate steady and the conditions reliable. But there are some aspects of Earth that are so important that scientists specifically look for evidence of them when investigating life on other planets. 

Water is considered the most vital ingredient for life, and it’s almost always the first thing we search for when considering other worlds. Today, Mars has water ice, it’s thought it could have liquid water below the surface, and it’s likely that the Red Planet had lots of water in the past… but the only other objects in the solar system we can say with any confidence “have water” are various moons, like Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus. For this reason, these moons are among the top contenders for harboring alien life. 

So, why is water so essential? Well, it’s important for a few reasons. Water basically acts as a lubricant to facilitate all the complex molecular chemistry that occurs on Earth. It’s also considered a universal solvent and, crucially, liquid water can transport nutrients from one place to another as well as acting as a cleaning fluid. It’s key to enabling most essential processes to happen - so it makes quite a lot of sense that the human body should be 60% water. In humans specifically, water regulates body temperature, facilitates digestion, protects the brain and spinal cord, helps to distribute oxygen… and the list goes on. Because of its versatility and uniqueness, it’s no wonder that NASA has the strategy to “follow the water” when searching for life.

It’s why determining a given planet’s climate is also so crucial; to see whether that planet experiences the right range of temperatures for liquid water to exist. The easiest way to do this is to see if the planet you're studying is in the habitable zone around its host star. Earth happens to be positioned inside this range of distances out from our sun, which allows it to sustain water. If our sun were a different type of star, however, that range would change and Earth would be a totally different, most likely totally inhospitable place. 

Just “being in the habitable zone” isn’t enough, though. By some accounts, both Venus and Mars are in the confines of the habitable zone at certain points in their orbits, but only one planet out of three actually has life. We also have to take into consideration a planet’s immediate atmosphere; to see what types of gasses it’s made out of. Venus, for example, is just on the inner edge of the habitable zone and has some of the right conditions to maintain liquid water on its surface, but not all. Not by a long shot. And that’s because the Venusian atmosphere is mainly carbon dioxide, meaning that thanks to the greenhouse effect, the average temperature skyrockets to about 462 degrees Celsius - at which point water can only exist as a gas. By comparison, Earth happens to be the right distance from the sun, and it has a favorable atmospheric composition to sustain liquid water. It’s capable of hosting life, while Venus really… isn’t.

There’s one final thing, though, that most other planets don’t do (or don’t do as well as Earth does); recycle. Earth is able to recycle and reuse its resources naturally and in various ways. The water cycle allows water to be naturally cleansed and the carbon cycle allows carbon, life’s primary building block, to be scattered around the surface. The acceleration of the greenhouse effect caused by manmade pollution is one thing, but Earth’s own carbon-churning processes are integral to how it works. 

Much of what makes Earth tick rests on tectonic plates. The movement of whole sections of the Earth’s crust helps to shift and release stored carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere… but it also moves, redistributes and facilitates other chemical processes all over the planet.  At the highest level, it creates and destroys land; it ensures that our planet’s surface is always “under development”. Nothing on Earth is left to stagnate, and everything is part of one giant, moving machine. Scientists think, then, that tectonic plates are the major reason why Earth boasts such a vibrant and diverse terrain, from barren deserts to vast oceans to dense jungles. And, therefore, plate tectonics could be the reason that life has been able to survive for as long as it has; long enough for intelligent life to form. There’s strength and resilience in the variety of life, and that variety has come about because Earth itself is constantly changing.

The challenging part about drawing conclusions from Earth is that, in the grand scheme of space, life on our planet is just one piece of data. And it’s the only piece of positive data we have so far. By studying the diversity of life as we know it, we can better gauge its possibilities and constraints, but only from our perspective on Earth. Perhaps life elsewhere constitutes something that’s actually incomprehensible to us, in our form. It could be rare; it could be abundant. We could be right on the cusp of discovering it; we might never discover it. It could still, truly, just not exist at all.

So, what’s your verdict? Taking into account the various philosophical approaches, the many religions doctrines, the growing scientific understanding, and the far out alternate theories, including the potential guiding hand of an alien presence… why are we here? What’s the reason for all of this stuff? This universe, this world and this life? Clearly, in searching for the answer there’s a lot to think about.

The mystery continues. Some of the unknowns remain. But, ultimately, that’s the meaning of life.