I was maybe six years old, driving somewhere with my dad and I took a little nap and I woke up, and he said, "Where did you go?" and I said,
" I...dunno know" and he said,
" Well, what do you think sleep is for?" and I said,
"I... Dunno" and he said,
"Sleep is kinda wierd though, huh?"
And I said,
"Eh..." and he said,
"Sleep is a lot like dying, really, isn't it?" And I said,
"I am six... FUCKING YEARS OLD!"
The Greek God of sleep is called Hypnos. He has a brother called Thanatos and he's the God of death.
(This is gonna be a wierd ten minutes!)
Sleep make no sense. It leaves us completely defenseless for hours. And it probably isn't even for saving energy, either.
Compared to just laying down awake, sleep is goina save you about 100 calories, or a banana of slightly above average...girth?
Humans need about 8 hours of sleep a night, But our animals friends vary wildly.
Koalas prefer 22 hours, bunnies about 9...
Elephants need just 4.
But whatever sleep is for it's so essential that nature wired it into almost every half intelligent organism on the planet.
For example dolphines. If they slept like us they would drown because they don't have gills and they need oxygen. So they sleep unihrmisperically.
That is, they float just below the water and one side of their brain sleeps while other stays awake. Then they swap over.
Human death rehearsal
Eh heh, excuse me..
I mean, sleep, is a bit more straight forword. Teeth, toilet, spot of hysterical crying, and it's of to bed.
Stage one : Brainwaves slow down abit.
Stage two : Your pulse will slow down and you'll begin producing sleep spindles, witch are a little burst of brain waves that... Eh we don't know what they do..exactly but...yea anyways
Stage 3 and 4 are the deepest levels of sleep.
Growth hormone is released, tissue is being repaired, Then
Stage 5: Rapid Eye Movement or REM stage. Your brain kindly paralyses your body, mostly. The eyes roll about, the face twitches, brainwaves go mental, and this is where about 80% of dreams occur.
Anyway, the funny part about all this of course is when we're not dreaming while asleep, where do we go?
It's just black. It's just oblivion. Every night. Over and over. Because sleep it's just the shy side of death.
If we got news that an asteroid was approaching, schedule for arrival, say 60 years from now, and it was so gigantic it'll wipe out our entire civilization, we would probably go fucking nuclear.
Riots, war, maybe end the world before the asteroid even arrived.
And yet there is an asteroid, approaching slowly in the distance. But it only gets on of us at a time.
And we practice for it every night and it's name.. Is death.
With an asteroid the whole species would be gone in a few days, probably.
With death, as it stands today thought, maybe we take comfort in the fact that even though we'll be gone the world will still carry on without us.
But ignoring technology and politics, we do know a bit about the future we'll all miss out on. And if it cheers you up, we can take a little tour of that future.
Just for fun, let's say sometime in the next few years you become parent to 2 children
And that the average human generation cycle is about 30 years.
Well by the time
2080: you are now a grandparent and 6 humans have inherited your DNA. If humans have made it on Mars the colonists will witness the transit of earth from Mars. The earth resembling a black disc passing across the sun.
2110: Your children have grandchileden now. It's quite possible they attended your funeral. Don't worry! Everyone got smashed in the bar afterwards and said nice things about your haiiir. The world population is probably around 12 billion humans.
2200: we can no longer speculate what culture and technology looks like so yea
12.000AD: if sex is even still in fashion, you now have at least several million descendants.
52.000AD: the earth rotation will have slowed enough courtesy of the moon
100.000AD: You might recognise the constellations, but they'll be altered.
250.000AD: Lohi, curnetly a submarine volcano in. 2019 will have risen out of the ocean and become a volcanic island.
50.000.000AD: Eurasia and Africa collide, forming an entirely new mountain range.
5-600.000.000AD: It's possible the earth continents have fused back into a singe super continent. A day on earth has probably gained at least an hour.
Our moon is now so distant, solar eclipse never happen again.
1 billion AD: The sun is 10% more luminous meaning out oceans have begun to evaporate. Plant life is unlikely.
4 billion AD: The milky way, our galaxy and our neighbouring galaxy Andromeda collide, forming milkomeda.
10billion AD: The sun is now 250 times its current size and has almost certainly swallowed mercury, venus and earth.
1 trillion AD: it's possible the big crunch Las now begun. The remains of the universe falling back in on herself. Galactic clusters will begine to converge, stars will collide. The resulting explosions illuminating the heavens nearby an distant
Eventually the black holes of the universe will collide with one another, amassing into a single, super supermassive black hole consuming itself.
1 quadrillion AD: It's also possible no Big Crunch will occur and the universe will continue to expand indefinitely.
In this scenario, the main points of interest for the next almost infinite period of time will be the decay of nucleons, beginning an Era only black holes exist in the universe, and assuming a new universe has not begun, the current universe will achieve its final resting energy. Uninhabited. Limitless dark...
We all must have gone through that phase as a kid, when it hit us, well people die eventually... And mum an dad are people... and I'm a person so... OH GOD.
Some of us, never recovered from that phase. It is simply too much to live as the only animal that knows its projects and loves and lifetimes are limited, and when the animal is gone, after a while, it'll be as though the animal never was, at all.
And that, is a nation too wide and spiky to fit inside the head.
The things we will miss after we're gone, the parties, the birth of humans we would come to love, or the walks, or the hugs, or the plucky steps into the dark our species will take yet.
Humans. The only animal conscious of it's approaching demise, and conscious of the worlds approaching demise too.
I suspect you, like me, have run into these people in life who are terribly clever and yet terribly broken.
Because they've looked into the abyss and concluded that on a long enough timescale, and in a universe so wide and apparently indifferent, we have no ultimate significance and the point has dropped out of everything for them.
But there is a middle way.
Between Denial : I'm so fucking important look at my bank balance ect.
And
Despair :There's no point to anything if we all just go off to the dark, etc.
Because the world is just as fantastic as it is horrific. And it's just as casual to lose hope as it is to find it.
If everything was forever, would that really change too much?
80 years or a trillion. Whiskey would still taste just as good. Wasps would still be pricks. YEA THAT'S RIGHT WASPS.
And maybe tomorrow we'll kill ageing and death, and stay up infinitely past bedtime.
But as it stands today, we don't have the science yet. And so God fearing or not, we have to find some way of making peace with the thing.
For you it might be religion, or some variant or spirituality, and fair enough.
But I'll tell you what works for me personally though.
When it's late and I can't sleep and the abyss starts whispering about how I'm going to go into the dark one day, I keep in mind that whether I like it or not, I'm part of something bigger.
An experiment conducted across the entire planet, conducted across all of history. Called "Us"
Somewhere in the future we're gone and someone who loves us is remembering us.
Somewhere, ahead of that, they are gone. And someone who loves them is remembering them.
The rise and fall of generations. How many of us have been gone down here since we became homo sapiens?
Billions, at least.
To have stubbed one's toe.
To have heard a new word and looked it up.
To have yelled at the GPS as though it's the GPS fault you got lost.
To have watched another human blowing their nose or picking their teeth or something equally disgusting.
And quitely thought one stuff.
"Oh fuck. I've fallen in love with you, haven't I..."
Just to have been anything. What a wierd honor.
Courtesy of being human.
Birht, Death, The silly bit in between. If none of it has any sighificance, if, In a cosmic scale, none of it matters, does that really fucking matter?
We won't last forever, but we're here, what a silly decision it would be to waste our day out in the cosmos. That brief period of time when matter woke up. On a world as interesting as this one, with hair as excellent as yours, with all the other carbon units around us, who we can hang out with, and been fond of and talk shit to, and keep the abyss, well at bay.
And if all that wasn't enough, just in case,
In the words of Ursula K. Le Guinn,
A human who left us just last year,
"When I take you to the valley, you'll see the blue hills on the left and the blue hills on the right. The rainbow and the vineyards under the rainbow late in the rainy season. And maybe you'll say," There it is, that's it. " but I'll say," A little farther."
And we'll go on. I hope.
And you'll see the roofs of the little towns and the hillsides yellow with wild oats. A buzzard soaring and a woman singing by the shadows of a creek in the dry season.
And maybe you'll say" Let's stop here, this is it. " but I'll say," A little farther yet. "
And we'll go on and you'll hear the quail calling on the mountain, but he springs of the river. And looking back, you'll see the river running downwards. Through the wild hills behind, below.
And you'll say," Isn't that the valley? "
And all I will be able to say is "Drink this water of the spring. Rest here a while.
We have a long way yet to go.
And i can't go without you."
