Thanatosphere

Death and the Rave, by Gustave Doré

Although it is not a technical term, it is relatively common to read and hear astronomers and astronomy enthusiasts in general refer to planets devoid of life as “dead planets”. It is an informal way of saying that these places do not have the basic conditions for the existence of the phenomenon of life, although in some cases, such as Mars for example, the conditions for life may have existed many millions of years ago. Apart from our planet, all the other planets and celestial bodies in our solar system and all the exoplanets analyzed to date do not appear to be capable of sustaining life, not even microbial life.

Recently, a planet just over 124 light-years from Earth was analyzed by a multinational team using the James Webb Space Telescope, and two molecules that are only produced by microbes were detected on it. However, the data was later reviewed by several other scientists and they found inconsistencies in the initial team's methodology, casting doubt on the idea that these molecules were even present in the atmosphere of that world. Apparently, the method used ended up forcing the detection of these chemical compounds even though they were not actually present.

But even if the detection had occurred beyond a shadow of a doubt and this confirmed the existence of microbial life outside of Earth, or even complex multicellular life, life would still be a very rare phenomenon in the universe. The vast majority of celestial bodies will still have no chance of producing or sustaining living beings on their surfaces. Many planets do not even have surfaces, as is the case of the gas giants in our solar system, such as Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune. Others will be like Mercury, too close to their stars. Others will be like Venus or Mars, rocky planets, but inhospitable to life for various reasons. Still others do not even orbit stars, but instead wander aimlessly in interstellar space, being too cold.

The only place in the universe where we are absolutely certain that there is life is Earth, our planet. It is the only biosphere that we know of. It is the only planet that is not dead, according to common parlance. However, while the other planets may all be dead, in the sense of being composed of rocks, gases and inorganic chemicals in general, it is only on Earth that there is, in fact, death. These other planets never lived in the first place. And if they once lived, as is thought to be the case of Mars, today they are no longer alive, so they no longer have the conditions to produce the phenomenon of death itself. Peace reigns on them, even if they are in a state of total and constant storm, like Jupiter. Since there are no sentient beings there, the storm does not take away anyone's peace.

The etymology of the word biosphere is simple. It combines two words: bio, from the Greek bíos, meaning life, and sphere. Biosphere, therefore, refers to the part of the Earth's sphere where life is possible. Far above the surface, we reach space, where life is not possible. Further down, we are in the hell of the crust's magma, where life cannot flourish either. I would like to propose, therefore, an alternative name to biosphere to refer to our planet and other celestial bodies that are capable of sustaining life. The name I propose is thanatosphere: from the Greek thánatos, death.

It is only on Earth that people die all the time, every day. It is only on Earth that there are hundreds of trillions of living beings ready for slaughter. It is only here that predators painfully pursue and devour their confused and terrified prey. It is only here that beings capable of entering into conflict with each other have emerged, from ants battling other ants and insects, to groups of chimpanzees fighting over territory, to humans fighting to ensure their political and cultural supremacy. Lions who kill the cubs of solitary lionesses as a way of ensuring the perpetuation their own genetic code. Only here do cancer and car accidents exist. Misfortunes only happen here and, perhaps, in a few other thanatospheres throughout the universe.

Like all other planets in the solar system and all exoplanets in the universe, Earth was born from the protoplanetary disk formed by the solar nebula that existed around a star during its formation. In this case, the star is our Sun. This process formed planet Earth about 4.54 billion years ago. Shortly thereafter, still in the primitive solar system, a celestial body the size of Mars collided with Earth and the Moon was formed from the debris of this collision. If there was any incipient life before the collision, it was eradicated. It is not known for sure when and how the abiogenesis responsible for the temporal chain of living beings that led to us today occurred, but it is known that life has existed here on Earth for at least 4 billion years. This means that life arose relatively quickly after the formation of the planet.

In other words: from the first organic molecules capable of organization, energy consumption and reproduction, to me and you who are reading or listening to this essay, 4 billion years have passed. During most of this time, life was microbial and unicellular. Multicellular life, which allowed the existence of animals sensitive to suffering and the terror caused by pain and death, may have emerged around 1 billion years ago. Animals, on the other hand, have existed for at least 600 million years, according to the fossil record. It is possible that they emerged a few hundred million years earlier and left little or no record of their presence in ancient rocks. But practically all animals alive today descend from those that emerged during the so-called Cambrian explosion, which occurred around 540 million years ago.

Those animals had almost certainly already developed a primitive capacity to feel and suffer. Mere cells can even move away from harmful stimuli, but there is no sensation of pain, there is no terror or despair that precedes death. Complex animals, endowed by nature with a nervous system, suffer. And the more complex the animals, the more they suffer, on a dark scale of pain and knowledge that precedes death. The thanatosphere is a gigantic slaughterhouse of beings that are born to die. Lucky are those who do not feel this with painful stimuli, as in the case of plants and fungi that, despite being multicellular and complex, were not cursed with a nervous system.

As Cioran writes in The Trouble with Being Born:

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

Happy are those celestial bodies in which life has been able to generate only plants. Even happier are those in which minerals prevail over everything else. These are perhaps second only to gaseous bodies or even to the stars, where life is impossible. Every antelope whose throat is cut by a predator unconsciously envies the surface of the Sun, which burns at 5,500 degrees Celsius. There, in that hell, none of this is possible, nor are the joys and pleasures of life possible, it is true. But, as Schopenhauer wrote in his Parerga and Paralipomena, paraphrasing: whenever we ask ourselves whether pleasures are greater than or at least equivalent to the pains of the world, let us imagine the sensation that a prey has when being devoured alive by a predator, and compare this sensation with that of the predator that devours it.

In the same work, Schopenhauer exposes the feelings of those who are most moved by seeing all this carnage:

If we picture to ourselves roughly as far as we can the sum total of misery, pain, and suffering of every kind on which the sun shines in its course, we shall admit that it would have been much better if it had been just as impossible for the sun to produce the phenomenon of life on earth as on the moon, and the surface of the earth, like that of the moon, had still been in a crystalline state.

Perhaps humanity would only wake up if one day another species technologically superior to ours landed here coming from a distant world and turned us all into livestock for consumption. It would be too late, yes, but who knows, maybe then we would finally understand the cruel and cold calculation of nature as an expression of the blind will that permeates the entire cosmos. What there is, is pure manifestation, with human reason being one among many expressions of will. In the same way that today we delight in delicious barbecues, tomorrow we could be part of the diet of another species ahead of us on the technological scale. It already happens, here and there, that we are devoured by animals such as sharks, bears and big cats, but we consider these as isolated fatalities, since we imagine ourselves at the top of the food chain, and this temporary dominance gives us a false sense of unbeatable superiority.

For the individual who is devoured by a shark on a beach or in the open sea, any notion of human superiority is dispelled in a single instant. We are all as ephemeral as a single ladybug that lived 50 million years ago. Worse, no ladybug has ever had the knowledge that even the most imbecile of humans had about their own pain and finitude. Therefore, we are not only ephemeral, but ephemeral and deeply aware of our situation. This is where the need to create illusions and change the world through work and technical development arises. When we stop to think too much, we are on the verge of madness. We are, in other words, screwed. The choice left to us is to fall into the abyss dancing and creating new wretches, or to fall into the abyss trying to alleviate the misery of our fellow sufferers, as well as our own, even if only a little.

The idea that we do not inhabit a biosphere, but a thanatosphere, is somewhat repugnant. However, one is the mirror of the other. There is no biosphere without a thanatosphere. They are two sides of the same coin. The so-called dead planets, even if they once had life and death, today have nothing, so they are neither biosphere nor thanatosphere. Our mother Gaia, however, is both generator and taker, she gives birth and executes, without mercy or pity. And to hell with your dreams. Mine too. But none of this is Gaia's fault. She does not exist. Earth is just a victim of circumstances, like us. Our mother Earth is just a gigantic rocky sphere that was the right size, had the right chemical compounds and orbited at a more or less right distance from a star of relatively ideal size for the emergence and maintenance of life.

The rest is history. And here we are. Floating in space around the Sun, while the entire solar system floats around the Milky Way, our galaxy. We look up at the stars, dreaming of not being alone. We want to share in the miracle of being conscious of the universe, of being the universe looking at itself. We really want to not be alone here. There is a desperation in this desire for company. It is almost as if we want to have someone to share our pain with. It is impossible, we think, that we are so unlucky and that we are the only ones in this stellar outhouse. It seems that we need comrades in misfortune. It is not enough that there are others like us, we want other consciousnesses that emerged on other floating space rocks, other thanatospheres. We want these other unlucky ones to tell us how hard their path was throughout history, just as it was for man.

This is also where the desire to create an artificial consciousness comes from. We are tired of the same boring human company, even when it is brilliant and shares our dullness and despair at the emptiness of existence and the pains that make life malignantly useless. We need to discover intelligent aliens or create new minds. We naively believe that these other intelligent beings can give us some answers, a different perspective on the problem of being born and falling into time. Again, we do not want to waste away only in the company of others like us. We are tired of suffering only with other people who look like us, who share the same family tree that goes back 4 billion years.

Pain and death need life to exist. Today, a species of living beings is even capable of cataloging millions of asteroids orbiting the solar system with the explicit goal of detecting possible impacts on its planet in advance and even developing strategies to defend it. In 2022, NASA's DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission collided a spacecraft with the asteroid Dimorphos. This slightly altered its trajectory around the Sun, which proved that, given enough time, humanity is capable of saving itself from these stellar threats. H. sapiens has existed for about 300,000 years according to the fossil record, and in that time we have managed to do what the dinosaurs were never able to do in 165 million years: save ourselves from extinction due to a catastrophic impact.

However, by saving life, we also save pain and death. Pain and death are not only parasites of life, they are its sisters. The foolish idea of ​​contemporary philosophers like Nick Bostrom, that death is like a dragon that we can one day defeat through techno-science, is as pathetic as it is childish. This is because even if we could make ourselves incapable of aging, we would still be exposed to other existential frictions capable of incapacitating or killing us. Wars, accidents and catastrophes would still exist. Entropy would continue to increase in the universe. Even if it were possible to transfer our consciousness to the digital world, friction would continue. The digital world needs physical support somewhere and this degrades over time.

These observations are not the observations of immature youngsters who intend to shock others, but of sober people who understand that everything we do and build, every family, every love, every city, nation, empire, religion: everything is ephemeral and will die one day, and its death will not be painless, but traumatic, leaving only silence behind. What is immature and intended to shock is the attitude that we can and should continue and persevere forever, that we have been endowed by God or by nature — which amounts to the same thing — with minds brilliant enough to cheat the inevitable and painful end.

by Fernando Olszewski