Sunlight

It begins with sunlight, which jiggles chlorophyll and moves electrons in a cell which hop down a chain and store their energy in the bond of a phosphate. This introduces energy to the system constituting life, and eventually we eat it, and use its gifts and the ancient mineral stocks of the earth to make the objects and movements that surround us.

A man gets better when he gets bigger; finer tools replace old fingers and enrich his life. Finer tools take more from the world and allow him to expand. Diving headlong into expansion he loses sight of his hands that hold the tools that do the dirty work of taking things from the world, and it goes faster, unchecked.

Bigger is better, but there is only all the space in the world, and when you’re big enough the rest is squeezed against the margins. One can’t take any more from the world when they get too big; it becomes an impotent periphery to the drama of growth, runs dry (ironic that those who do not care for sunlight and rain are the ones who would take it all). But where the world is limited, the capability of man is not. Bigger is the certain end, and technology the means, and with our controlling faculties augmented by siliconic consciousness, the “rest” is but a problem in design and engineering.

A man can’t stay on the ground forever; the sun only puts out so much light. His potential lies at the extreme of existence, the evolutionary summit. Farm the photons of the universe, mine its elements, and synthesize what you need. Depend on nothing but the inescapable physics, and answer to no living peer. Live on a space ship, like they would in a movie, with the outside a little blanker than it was, but the inside all the richer.

Space is cold and I don’t find unfettered existence appealing. Mass culture is for many reasons an unsatisfactory definition of life; outside, one can find greater beauty, variety, and simplicity in the natural world. I have looked outside, and I have been impressed with the partiality and smallness of the human endeavor; even should we overrun this place, still it encompasses and transcends us. I don’t think we should be satisfied with overrunning it, then, even if we could. Stability represents a far better mode of partial existence with the world.

There is a poetry in being ruled by sunlight, in loosening fruitless competition, and growing not oneself, but one’s conception of the other. And many of us do not care for poetry, so there is also history, and indeed utility. Plenty has its limits in promoting well-being. Culture and spirituality have their bases in a world outside human creation. To accept temporal equilibrium could bring out more meaning-filled uses of our time here.

Social inertia slows change to a snail’s multifaceted waltz, but it would be a stride just to accept in principle our place as denizens of the earth, and put to rest a simplistic ideal. Preserving the essential diversity of life requires fashioning our interactions with sun and rain as humanly and not just economically meaningful, as they once were. More human than escape, I think, is to let sunlight find a green earth, a system we have kept whole and vibrant, and to let culture and environment sustain one another.