“Does the Universe Hate Me?”

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Yes. In fact, the universe is trying to kill you. That was my exact response to the above question on an internet discussion forum last week. My full answer referred to Charles Darwin’s chapter “Struggle for Existence” in his book On the Origin of Species. I encouraged the kid to consider that the universe has been trying to kill the entire human race for many thousands of years. It has largely succeeded, and he is the remnant that has survived. He should rejoice.

We should all rejoice, really. Even if you don’t enjoy your life much. Even if you are pretty much ready to head for the showers, you can still look around at the cemeteries and archeological digs of the world and say, “Hey, I’m on the winning team, at least.”

When the ice ages came, we learned to make knives from rocks and to make very romantic and dashing outfits from lovely, furry animals. Somehow we learned to make fire to stay warm and make our food yummy. Most of us have even stopped building cities at the bases of active volcanoes. We haven’t done anything about NASCAR, yet, but we’re trying.

Speaking of NASCAR, there is the whole organized religion thing we are still trying to fix. It will take a while. Can’t be this close to 9/11 and not bring up the Allah/God thing. In case you have trouble keeping them straight, God has a sense of humor; Allah doesn’t (see illustration).

Monotheism has existed for only about three-thousand years, so it will take time to straighten out whose deity is really in charge. We really haven’t had time to even think about it. I mean if the time span of modern homo sapiens were represented as a twenty-four-hour day, monotheism would have occurred to us around about 11:03 at night. Besides, that’s when “Robot Chicken” comes on. I say, let’s just leave monotheism until morning.

We should not take it personally that the universe is trying to kill us. We’re spending half of our time and effort trying to kill each other and the other half trying not to. And even the very sun is burning out before our eyes. It has only a mere three billion years left. That’s barely more time than a NASCAR race lasts.