Humanity’s Burden

“Whatever that is worth doing, why is it worth doing?”, says Elon Musk while talking about dilemmas as a child during his early tryst with philosophy. I remember recently, a video by Simon Sinek went viral. It talked about the fact that great companies were built on the Why’s. That the Why is the most important question for a company to answer. As Human’s this Why, is something that has confronted all of us at some point or the other. It is a very human thing. And thats it, its a human thing. There is no other animal that wonders why, because it does not have the capacity to do so. But the human why, has lead us to scale new heights, invent new technology, go to the moon and maybe someday strive to go on another planet. The quest for the why is what drives us as a species.

But is the why real? Like I said previously it is important to understand that the why is just a human thing. Richard Dawkins says this very well. Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and one of the greatest thinkers of the modern era. He explains how evolutions which resulted in us being present today, put as much effort into creating the human brain as it did in creating a peacocks tale or a cheetahs ability to run. That evolution works without purpose, and that natural selection thereby has none. So the process by which we got these big brains did not really have a purpose. Does that then mean that there is no purpose? Hardly.

The survival mechanism that our bodies adopted to propogate our own genes, gave us our big brains. And finally arose a brain which could ask Why. Why are we here. It was Darwin who first explained how we got here, the first great breakthrough. Then we reached the stars and beyond and looked inside atoms for our quest for understanding. In a universe which shows no purpose, conscious being like us, we created the purpose.

And that is Humanity’s great burden. For all we know, the sort of consciousness, purpose that we have might be unprecedented in the universe. We have no proof it has happened before or that it will happen again. We are the only species that can ask Why, and uncover the secrets to this Cosmos we live in. We are the reason that suddenly a tiny, unimportant planet, might be special. We give meaning to the universe, because we can ask Why.