Professor Michael Mautner of Virginia Commonwealth University believes that we have a moral obligation to spread life throughout the universe. What sort of life? Anything, really. Man, microbe, bio-engineered whatnots; so long as Life goes on and on.
It isn't often that one stumbles across this sort of Wellsian thinking these days. It rather reminds me of this exchange from Out of the Silent Planet where our hero Ransom is translating a speech by the villainous fellow-Earthman Weston for the benefit of his Martian audience:
“Life is greater than any system of morality; her claims are absolute. It is not by tribal taboos and copy-book maxims that she has pursued her relentless march from the amoeba to man and from man to civilization.”
“He says,” began Ransom, “That living creatures are stronger than the question whether an act is bent or good—no, that cannot be right— he says it is better to be alive and bent than to be dead—no—he says, he says—I cannot say what he says, Oyarsa, in your language. But he goes on to say that the only good thing is that there should be very many creatures alive He says there were many other animals before the first men and the later ones were better than the earlier ones; but he says the animals were not born because of what is said to the young about bent and good action by their elders. And he says these animals did not feel any pity.”
Doesn't quite come across the same when plain language changes a ringing call for a cosmic crusade into advocacy of an intergalactic sneeze.
1 comment:
Insofar as life has any purpose, that purpose is to perpetuate itself. Given that (and I realize not everyone agrees with that assessment), spreading Life (preferably human life) throughout the universe is pretty much what it's all about. And absent FTL, some kind of religious crusade is probably the only thing that will motivate interstellar colonization, so "Life Must Go On" is a pretty good basis for such a crusade, IMO.
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