On the eight o'clock news, Bruno Masure announced that an American study had detected signs of fossil life on Mars. The fossils were of bacterial organisms, probably-methane based archea. It seemed that biological macromolecules had succeeded in forming on earth's closest neighbor, giving rise to nebulous self-replicating life-forms consisting of a nucleus and an ill-defined membrane. It had all ended there, however, presumably the result of climatic changes that made reproduction increasingly difficult to sustain, until eventually it ceased entirely. The story of life on Mars was a modest one. However (and Bruno Masure did not seem to understand this), this brief, feeble misfire brutally refuted all the mythological and religious constructs in which the human race delights. There had been no unique, wondrous act of creation; no chosen people; no chosen species or planet; simply a series of tentative attempts, flawed for the most part, scattered across the universe. It was all so distressingly banal.
-Page 102, The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq
No comments:
Post a Comment