Reader query
“Well, rocks do not die, and yet they are part of nature.” My correspondent may not have seen the rocks, being crushed into gravel by a road crew with machines. Who will hear their cry, and who stand for their rights, the way the environmentalists stand for innocent vegetables and other defenceless creatures?
Granted, I am being facetious, but let us imagine instead a planet formed by processes of nature into an immense diamond in the sky, or better a Red Dwarf, such as our Sun’s nearest neighbouring star, Proxima Centauri — as I could have sworn until Monday evening. But this is because I failed to distinguish hardness from density, as I am prone to do. Plenty of metals out-dense a diamond; my personal preference is for gold. The luminosity of Proxima Centauri is so slight that there is risk we may bump into it, or into one of the several dozen other Red Dwarves in our vicinity, when Elon Musk first develops the giant rocket that will launch us through the galaxy. Indeed, this is one of the many worries for the near-speed-of-light travels that surely he is planning. Velocity like that, and you are sure to hit something on your way. It is among the reasons you will never get there; and may not even settle Mars, in my understanding. But that is simply a question of what humans can endure, when removed from their necessary bourgeois supports on interminably long missions.
Brown Dwarves are also a danger, to interstellar travellers, although they are just huge gas-bags, rather bigger than Jupiter, according to another of my informants. Surprisingly, I hadn’t noticed them until the day before yesterday.
Or whatever. Each of the items we find in nature is on a course out of existence, which by convention we call extinction, or often, death. There will, sooner or later, be nothing left, although there may be replacements. Material nature is, indeed, Maya, as the Hindoo philosophers maintained in their Upanishads and Vedantas. It is an illusion, merely, or as some translate, magic. The “fact” that the reader has a body, let alone a headache, is among his fantastic apparitions. Or perhaps we should be diplomatic, and call it a misunderstanding. Wait patiently, and it will pass away.