Carbon Slime

Go climb a mountain on a clear day; stand on the summit, look around.
If you can see a few miles in every direction, that's perfect.

How's the view?
Do you see rolling hills, trees, may be some water, perhaps roads, vehicles, homes and other human artefacts?

Look up.
What a pretty blue cozy blanket the sky is!

You feel free, and safe, and empowered.
Free, because you could go anywhere on this world and do what you want.
Safe, because that pretty blue cozy blanket is made for you - it's just perfect.
Empowered, because you climbed thousands of feet. You can do what you want.

And then there is a sudden change in perspective.
What looks like a flat world is in fact round: it looks flat to you because it's imperceivably huge.
Those impressive thousands of feet of elevation you climbed: that's not even a wrinkle on the skin of this planet.
And that pretty blue cozy blanket? Well, it's not real! It's not material. It's just some air and scattered light.

You are being fooled by your senses.

You are an insignificant piece of carbon based slime, crawling on the minute skin folds of a giant planet.
And you are completely exposed above your head for trillions and trillions of miles of hostile space.

This thought sends a chill down your spine.
You crave the innocence of a moment ago, that feeling of safety, above all else.
You want the world to be nice to you, to cater to your needs, to bend to your will.
You know there are forces beyond you - the waves, the storms, the quakes, the fires, the comets and gamma ray bursts.
You concede there are powers out there that may be vastly superior.

You crave that they be benevolent.
You dearly hope they look out for you.
You appeal to them, you want to appease them.

And now, you are no different than your ancestor from the African Rift Valley a quarter million years ago.
You are a hairless ape. Mostly clueless.
You have fancy titles, wear fancy badges, use fancy words.
Ape, nevertheless.

Part of a thin layer of slime coating a speck of rock hurtling around a small nondescript yellow star in one of the 200 billion galaxies in the known universe.

But there is something funny about this slime - it is sentient, it is conscious!
Is it this way in all those trillions and trillions of rocks in all those billions and billions of galaxies out there?
Or is this rare? Even unique?

This sentient slime likes to ponder. It is fond of asking those why questions.
Those why questions are mean; they don't budge easy.
Slime can't wait, it wants answers. Sometimes, it imagines them, and starts taking them too seriously.
And gets in trouble.

But at other times slime devices beautiful methods to get at those answers.
Layer by layer, generation by generation.
Avoiding some pitfalls, but falling in some.
And recovering. Dusting itself off and moving on.
Forward.
Mostly.

So what's the point? The slime sometimes wonders.
It is certainly remarkable that slime, which is really little different from all the non-slime, can wonder about itself.
About it all.
But still, what's the point?

This question vexes slime quite a bit.
Slime craves the innocence of earlier times, the comfort of those skin folds of its rock cradle.
Those big questions and answers can wait another day.

But you climbed thousands of feet today. You earned your beer.
Perhaps that's the point?