42 Reasons for Fish - and Other Things
Created | Updated Jun 21, 2005
Life… what is it about? Life, the Universe and Everything is that famous line from Douglas Adams’ creation The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It is something that we have, and then we appear not to have.
It’s a complicated subject. So naturally I’m going to attempt to find out what it is here. And I fully expect to find it. Should I not I expect at least a dozen complaints in the conversations section at the bottom.
So Life… I don’t know about you but I started it as a baby. Maybe you’re immortal, maybe you were sneezed out of the Great Green Arkleseizure’s nose and appeared complete. I freely admit that I have never met an Alien… or no one who has owned up to the fact.
There are so many forms of life on Earth… amongst which I would include the Earth herself… that when something dies there always appear to be at least ten things to take its place.
A strange thing about life, is that life also eats life… hence creating death. But what is death?
In fiction, we often see the Grim Reaper as the bringer of death. Where our souls are ‘reaped’, and taken to another place.
In ancient times people believed in an underworld, some believed was ran by one of the ancient Gods - Hades. My vision of Hades is some Disney cartoon character with blue fire coming from his head in the cartoon TV series version of Hercules. Perhaps not a very good image, but that’s my image. In this Underworld people went there when they were dead irrespective of whether they had lead a good life or not.
A more modern (well the last couple of millennia) version death leads to going to hell or Heaven. These two places being located on a different astral plane. But for some reason people always look up for heaven and down for hell1… promoted by this strange view we have of these places where heaven being full of clouds, and hell being full of fire and lakes of molten lava… as in nature.
But by us ‘going somewhere’, we of course don’t mean our physical bodies. Everyone, whatever your view on life, would have to say that evidence is fairly conclusive that when we snuff it, our bodies are pretty knackered. We ‘return to the ground from which we came’.
So what are we talking about? We’re talking about our soul, our spirit, our essence. Now this is when it gets controversial.
I’ll come out and say I don’t know what to believe. For the sake of this article I’ll sit on the fence a little, my metaphorical behind sitting precariously on the edge, with my legs dangling either side. Not necessarily the most comfortable situation for a gentleman. But that’s where I am.
The Universe is big. I mean you may think it’s a long way to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to the Universe, listen… to paraphrase the great Douglas Adams. Its processes are so phenomenally complicated that we are a long way off understanding it. We can see patterns in space that we recognise from our limited point of view on this planet, so we can make some very good guesses about it. Some would say that you can find the answer to everything in a single formula. I think that was recently said in the news to be highly unlikely. I don’t know enough about it, but I would have suspect that was the case anyway.
Where I’m going with this is that people can make assumptions based on what we can see around us… but what about what we can’t see? Personally, if you stuck a revolver to my head, stuck a tickling stick between my legs, and stuck a rainbow coloured beret on my head I would have to say that I think there is a lot more to the Universe than what we can see around us.
I think we have a sixth sense of sorts. As someone who has been brought up in the computer science discipline I would say that our brainwaves work on a kind of wireless network. And continuing the computer analogy, I tend to think of the brain as hardware, and the systems that work on it as software.
As much as humanity mimics life, I do think there are problems with ideas such as mine. We don’t know how the brain works. It clearly has activity going on… but why and how… trying to begin to understand it in one small article would have the same effect that drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster would have… and not even a 30 ton mega elephant with bronchial pneumonia would survive its intoxicating mix.
So life is exceptionally complicated. Just when you think you’ve tied it down to an explanation, it throws up new things which open up holes so big… well several very large people (the kind that take up three king sized beds and live off constant fast food restaurant food) would fit through it… as well as maybe the odd galaxy or so.
Anyway… where am I going with this? Well I did once try to turn piece of text in to the M1 motorway, but there was a horrible mess. But in a saner sentence, I think the question of life is massive. And I expect lots of complaints.
Next week I’ll speak about shavers. And maybe Fish. And the odd hedge clipper.
