Today it’s easy to erase a text, just delete a file and its possible backups. You don't even need to burn anything or throw away the ashes.
I had about a thousand pages written, and then one day I saw that almost everything was already said, so I erased them. Then, I remembered that when someone dies, a world dies, I remembered the end of Blade Runner and decided to write, to start over really, to at least leave a testimony.
I believe we are a juncture generation, in the 1800s the average life span was 35 years, today, in this part of the world, it’s around 75 years, but that difference is growing, it’s estimated that by 2045 aging will cease to exist, no doubt new and unpredictable problems will appear, others might be more predictable. Some people are going to get tired of living, others are going to try and perpetuate themselves in power, surely it will be discovered that death is very hygienic, but we are surely not going to live to see that. They are going to look to the here and now with more incomprehension and lack of empathy than we feel in relation to the men and women of the stone age.
I deludedly thought that this would be easy, but I am now realizing that it’s not easy at all to remember what was penned in a thousand pages, but what I did has had its usefulness. Chaplin, I think, said that a film had to be shaken, like a big tree, and what kept on clinging to its branches was what was worth it, I think something similar happens with my thousand pages, let's see what stuck to my memory.
Life
Well, as many of my friends know, I do not believe in any religion, but I do believe in God, what I think is in some way God, we can call him in many ways, I believe, he gave life to man, to investigate and discover the reason for our existence, but I don’t think even he knows.
Our generation lives at a time where life is finite, limited to less than 90 years or so, I suppose in the future it will not be like that. I consider death as something similar to what happens before birth, one ceases to exist, period. Hell is an invention of religion, to make man and woman "behave well." But that same religion at one time sold "indulgences" so that those who could buy them could behave "badly." All very lucrative. As is said "hell is not a place but a state of consciousness." Also, consider how not even the top leaders of religions live longer than a normal human being, how can they then speak of miracles when a disease is cured, if it always ends, at least today, as we all know, with death.?
There is a phrase attributed to Plato, which Bob Dylan includes in a song of his, "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle", I think this phrase is important, one has a tendency to focus on oneself and forget that we all have our stories, problems, dramas, etc...
Humans didn’t know how to fly in 1900, in 1969 they reached the Moon. Today or yesterday (I’m writing this in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic), flying was relatively common, and will be so again.
Formerly it was thought that the earth was flat, to explain how it did not fall, it was said that it was flat and supported by elephants perched on a giant sea turtle, which itself swam through a very large ocean, according to legend, whomever asked “who or what holds that ocean?” was killed. Killing someone who asks uncomfortable questions is not something new, is a much older costume, and then in the inquisition those people were burned. But, in the framework of free science, those questions began to be accepted. And they continue to be, one of the questions of the moment is: what is dark matter? Why isn't there a unified theory that explains macro and micro physics?
Energy
If before the discovery of nuclear energy some scientists were to have found a nuclear reactor, they would have said "what a wonderful machine, it produces heat and nothing enters, neither coal nor oil", they would have started to disassemble it, they would have reached the core and would have died all by exposure to radiation. I prefer to use the nuclear energy of something like the Sun, which is approximately 8 light minutes from the Earth, with small variations in distance through the year (a light second equals about 300,000 km.).
Luckily, solar energy is being used more and more, it’s cheap and safe, wind power is produced by the first, by heating the air.
Dive
A dive. My current theme is nothing less than death. What a topic. The fact is I spent 70 days in the Británico ICU, 10 in a coma, after a neurosurgery operation for a ruptured brain aneurysm. My motor skills were affected, but never my intellect, that is, I came out of the intervention alive, but without being able to walk or speak. Imagine the torture, like being locked up. Then I went to CEREI, a rehabilitation center in Parque Batlle, where they taught me to walk again, it took us about six months, and then to talk, that took longer, I can't do it the same way as before, but at least people understand me.
The human being has a great fear of there being nothing after death, to the point of creating stories to demonstrate the opposite. It happens in literature, it also happens in cinema, in short, in all areas of human creation. I really like astrophotography, one day with my wife we traveled to the Valdes Peninsula in Argentina, to the city of Puerto Pirámides. At night it occurred to me to go take photos from the city's cemetery, a dark place. In the dark, once there, my companion told me she was scared a little, I replied "you have to be afraid of the living, not the dead."
Personally, I believe that when we die something happens, the same as what we felt before birth, that is, nothing, we simply cease to exist, there is no transcendence after death. I am more and more in a position, undoubtedly influenced by Sartre's phrase "Man is a useless passion" he said it referring to something else, I use it in the sense that we simply disappear, every time someone dies, many die worlds with them. In any case, there is a justification for existence, and it’s that search to explain the reason for our very existence.
I know that the above may be far from other considerations, but it is what comes to me now, and so I write it. The more years go by, I am now 64, I am approaching death, some friends have already died; more experiences and memories are lost along the way. Our time has two sides, at the least, the physical and the psychological, it occurs to me that psychological time passes in relation to what we have lived, let me try to explain, if we are 6 years old, a year is a sixth of our life, something huge, if we have 64 it is a 1/64 part, much less. I mention it for no other reason that the years seem shorter to us as time goes on. But human time, our time, is nothing compared to astronomical time, hundreds or thousands of years between event and event. Perhaps, to share another perspective, it is because of that that I like astronomy so much, the distances are enormous and the times too, our temporal and physical scale is extremely small, also to the extent that, at least for me, our problems seem diminished.
For example, the COVID-19 that leads us to use these methods, how important is it on an astronomical scale?
To write, to leave something, it’s important, perhaps for that reason, now that I think about it, I have been collaborating with Wikipedia, I already have about 9,000 edits in the online encyclopedia, as well as hundreds of photos. It’s nothing compared to others, and let me tell you something that few know, the media do not spread it, but Uruguay is the country of Wikipedia in Spanish that has the most collaborators per inhabitants. And Uruguay, as a Spanish-speaking country, when compared to most of the world, is very small in area and inhabitants. Why is the above happening?.
There are people
Perhaps it may be a defense mechanism, but there are people who live without even thinking that they will cease to exist, in much less time than they think, that is inexorable, sooner or later we are all going to die, at least in this generation. At least for now. Who remembers the scribes of the pharaohs today? And boy, in their time they were important positions, today many leave everything for a position.
The day old age and death are conquered, surely with the progress of genetics, life will be taken care of and valued much more, that will be one of the consequences. But there are going to be many, all kinds, good and bad, of consequences that’ll create many new problems, others that will solve old problems.