Cyanobacteria Cover

Content

Imagine you’re a little cyanobacteria. Chilling in a swamp. 3 billion years ago. Minding your own business - chilling around with your cyanobacterian friends, reproducing, dying. What a boring life that was. And it was all for nothing. What difference did you make in the world, huh?

Well you just made all complex life possible. Like plants and ants and humans and stuff.

By existing you accidentally put oxygen everywhere around. Which lead to ozone being created, which lead to more complicated stuff to be created down the line.

Could you know this? Assuming you’d have a 1200 cm³ brain. Could you do a brainstorming with your team on how to make turtles exist? So that you could know you “made a difference” afterwards? Could you make a few million year long bet on the chain of events that would lead to humans existing?

Yet here you are, just trying to survive, creating all that.

What if this applies also for us, humans? What if all this meaning is just completely beyond our understanding? What if looking back, 3 billion years from now, all that we’re doing now is so meaningful, whatever that means. What if some complex creatures down the line can appreciate what you’re doing now in a way you cannot comprehend?

Would be existentialist cyanobacterias of any use? Like questioning their existence and being angry at the meaninglessness of it all? Or just like their purpose was photosynthesis which didn’t make sense at the time, maybe our purpose is philosophising about all this? Which is what will enable greater fanciness of being for the ones to come after us? Or is it enough to just chill around with our friends & family and call it a life?