I rarely read disaster stories, but perhaps I should change course on that (I hear Shackleton’s story is good). This post is useful for me as a reminder that I live beyond the reach of God, in a place that does not wish to see me live. The universe is a ridiculously dangerous booby trap, an arrangement of energy which seems to want to kill me in every place but in the strongest fortresses that have been built by humans. Just look up at the sky to see how vulnerable we are: above you is 100 kilometers of air or so and that’s it. After the Karman line, by definition, it’s the infinite and hostile expanse of space. (100 kilometers is nothing: it’s 300 Eiffel Towers or so.) There is no strong border because the Karman line is imaginary: all that is protecting you from the vacuum of space is gas particles. Mere air. You live inside a very thin scrap of gas, the membrane of a bubble of air that clings on to the surface of a speck of dust because of the weakest fundamental force. This scrap of gas (which is really where we live, not “Earth”) is not beyond the reach of death either: it is not an Eden and can only go so far in permitting us to live lives unhampered by a universe which very much wants to kill us. (We are statistical anomalies and entropy dislikes us.) People still die, sometimes horrible, morbid deaths on the icy edges of mountains that barely reach the 8% mark of the air-scrap’s surface. Like with a serial killer in a horror movie who can hear you breathing no matter where you hide in the mansion, whose creaking footsteps are painfully slow and obvious, there is nowhere to hide.
Humans often go out by throwing the closet door they were hiding in to the side, running and roaring toward the killer. I’m not sure what to think of it. It probably has something to do with what makes us the species that has the best chance of actually circumventing death (temporarily). Whatever brain-quirk makes Toni Kurz throw himself willingly at the Eigerwand, it’s also responsible for every success we’ve had in consolidating our thin membrane.
I rarely read disaster stories, but perhaps I should change course on that (I hear Shackleton’s story is good). This post is useful for me as a reminder that I live beyond the reach of God, in a place that does not wish to see me live. The universe is a ridiculously dangerous booby trap, an arrangement of energy which seems to want to kill me in every place but in the strongest fortresses that have been built by humans. Just look up at the sky to see how vulnerable we are: above you is 100 kilometers of air or so and that’s it. After the Karman line, by definition, it’s the infinite and hostile expanse of space. (100 kilometers is nothing: it’s 300 Eiffel Towers or so.) There is no strong border because the Karman line is imaginary: all that is protecting you from the vacuum of space is gas particles. Mere air. You live inside a very thin scrap of gas, the membrane of a bubble of air that clings on to the surface of a speck of dust because of the weakest fundamental force. This scrap of gas (which is really where we live, not “Earth”) is not beyond the reach of death either: it is not an Eden and can only go so far in permitting us to live lives unhampered by a universe which very much wants to kill us. (We are statistical anomalies and entropy dislikes us.) People still die, sometimes horrible, morbid deaths on the icy edges of mountains that barely reach the 8% mark of the air-scrap’s surface. Like with a serial killer in a horror movie who can hear you breathing no matter where you hide in the mansion, whose creaking footsteps are painfully slow and obvious, there is nowhere to hide.
Humans often go out by throwing the closet door they were hiding in to the side, running and roaring toward the killer. I’m not sure what to think of it. It probably has something to do with what makes us the species that has the best chance of actually circumventing death (temporarily). Whatever brain-quirk makes Toni Kurz throw himself willingly at the Eigerwand, it’s also responsible for every success we’ve had in consolidating our thin membrane.