8/24/2002 – Robert

This is an excerpt from a drunken email I sent to someone I once had a thing for.  (Hopefully this makes sense, as I wrote it after drinking most of a bottle of wine).  

I just watched the movie Contact again.

Anyway, I couldn't help but be swept by emotion several times throughout the movie.  Even though that was probably my 4th viewing since I have seen that movie, I can't help it.  Throughout a good half of my life, I wanted to be an astronomer.  I believed (still do) that there is life out there.  The universe is too big for just us, and out of the billions upon billions of stars, a handful must have developed some sort of life, and out of a handful of those, intelligent life had to develop.  That'd make for an awful lot life out there. 

So, the universe is bigger than us, we are precious, we are fragile, and there's a slight chance that we'll survive long enough to confirm that we are not alone.  We all end up searching for a purpose to this existence, some of us never find out why we are here, maybe we'll never really know for sure.  Maybe we were a random fluke of some amino acids that happened to have interacted with each other.  Maybe we were bound to happen... not by religious influences (or maybe so), but by conditions being right long enough for life to form. 

So, by some chance, perhaps we really are a miracle of existence.  Perhaps we really are as fragile as I think we are.  Don't you think we (humanity) all owe it to ourselves to stop our petty bickering, wars, stepping on each other's backs to make more money, being concerned about who has the biggest house, whose morals are right, who has the right to which natural resources...  don't you think we owe it to ourselves, as a species, to get over our differences, to strive to make this a better place for all life, to make ourselves happier, to reach for the stars, to end our raping of our only home, Earth? 

Maybe we should stop wasting our lives away trying to acquire more than our neighbors...  there might be another way to achieve happiness.  There might be a greater purpose to life.  We are on earth for far too short of a time to waste away on nothingness.