The Fate of the Universe and the Meaning of Life

I came across a website www.askphilospher.com and I was wondering if anyone asked a question about Albert Camus and the Absurd and I found an interesting question and three answers. The question was "If every life results in death, then what is the meaning of life?" There were three replies, which were:
"Peter Lipton on November 23, 2005
The meaning of life comes from what you do in your life: your activities and achievements. These are real even though you die, and would be no more real if you lived forever (though admittedly you would have time for a lot more of them).
Alexander George on November 23, 2005
If your life now has no meaning, no value or point to it, then having a lot more of such a life isn't going to improve the situation. A whole lot of nothing doesn't amount to much.
Peter S. Fosl on December 30, 2005
This is a compelling question. I remember encountering it in a powerful way reading Albert Camus's essay, "Absurd Reasoning." Recently, a student of mine broached it during a discussion we were having about the condition the universe seems to be heading towards. It seems, I'm told, that everything in the universe will ultimately degenerate into a vast, endless, more-or-less uniform, horribly cold and dark field of low-level radiation. Some call this condition, the final destination of the universe, "entropic hell."

In light of this apparent fact, the relevant question concerning the meaning of life is this: since everything we accomplish will ultimately be destroyed and degenerate into "entropic hell," what meaning can anything have?

I think there's something misleading about his question, however, something that lurks in a hidden assumption that the question makes. The question and its force rely largely on the assumption that life has meaning only if it lasts forever. In my view, this is a dubious assumption, and indeed one that plagues a good deal of our culture's thinking about value.

Far from being a necessary condition for meaning, I think that immortality and endless existence would actually undermine the meaning of life.

Consider the issue this way: would life be as meaningful or even meaningful at all if it weren't finite? That is, if we lived forever would much or anything matter to us? Perhaps the avoidance of physical pain would still matter, but simply not being in pain seems to be a relatively meaningless affair. Don't many of our projects have meaning for us just because we know that one day we and they will come to an end?

The very fragility of things gives us reason to care what happens to them, to defend them and us against harm or diminishment. When you can just start over or always have a substitute, things don't really matter. Because, however, things are finite and we know we're going to die our actions count. We'd better get things right because we're not going to get another shot.

Consider an imaginary world I call "Plentos." In Plentos people live forever, or at least as long as they wish. There are no shortages of any kind in Plentos. Every kind of food is available in limitless supply. Land of every description is available to all. No one wants for speedy, effective medical care. Everyone is omniscient.

In Plentos, life could not be meaningful."

To piggyback on the Peter Fosl's reply I thought about another analogy as well, if life was like a book, as a book have a beginning, for it to be meaningful it must have an ending. However, if a book never ended; how could one get a meaning out of a never ending story? As Dr. Fosl brings out the finite reality of something gives it its meaning. This is why Nietzsche brings out the problem of "other worldliness" of religion especially Christianity and Islam, it devalues this life by creating the idea of an afterlife. As a result, if you are certain of an afterlife would you really value your health, loved-ones, time, the environment, blow-up yourself on a bus or in a market full of people, fly airplanes into building, etc? I think so because you're certain that you'll get a second chance or a continuance of some type of existence. However, would you do this if you knew this is the one and only life you'll ever live? Think about it...

Black Socrates

King Tut Unwrapped and need for Critical Thinking

Last week I watched the Discovery Channel King Tut Unwrapped. In the documentary, allegedly the truth about King Tut is finally revealed; however, I think it open up more questions than it answered. One important question is what is King Tut's Y-DNA and mt-DNA Haplogroups? First I think it is important to discuss what's a haplogroup, and why do geneticists concentrate on the Y-chromosome and Mitochondrial in their search for markers? For that matter, what's a marker? "Each of us carries DNA that is a combination of genes passed from both our mother and father, giving us traits that range from eye color and height to athleticism and disease susceptibility. One exception is the Y-chromosome, which is passed directly from father to son, unchanged, from generation to generation. Unchanged, that is unless a mutation-a random, naturally occurring, usually harmless change-occurs. The mutation, known as a marker, acts as a beacon; it can be mapped through generations because it will be passed down from the man in whom it occurred to his sons, their sons, and every male in his family for thousands of years. In some instances there may be more than one mutational event that defines a particular branch on the tree. What this means is that any of these markers can be used to determine your particular haplogroup, since every individual who has one of these markers also has the others. When geneticists identify such a marker, they try to figure out when it first occurred, and in which geographic region of the world. Each marker is essentially the beginning of a new lineage on the family tree of the human race. Tracking the lineages provides a picture of how small tribes of modern humans in Africa tens of thousands of years ago diversified and spread to populate the world.
A haplogroup is defined by a series of markers that are shared by other men who carry the same random mutations. The markers trace the path our ancestors took as they moved in and out of Africa. It's difficult to know how many men worldwide belong to any particular haplogroup, or even how many haplogroups there are, because scientists simply don't know.
Likewise for Mitochondrial DNA, the string of 569 letters is your mitochondrial sequence, with the letters A, C, T, and G representing the four nucleotides-the chemical building blocks of life-that make up your DNA. Here's how it works. Like I describe for the Y-DNA every once in a while a mutation-a random, natural (and usually harmless) change-occurs in the sequence of our mitochondrial DNA. Think of it as a spelling mistake: one of the "letters" in your sequence may change from a C to a T, or from an A to a G.
After one of these mutations occurs in a particular woman, she then passes it on to her daughters, and her daughters' daughters, and so on. (Mothers also pass on their mitochondrial DNA to their sons, but the sons in turn do not pass it on.)
Geneticists use these markers from people all over the world to construct one giant mitochondrial family tree. As I can imagine, the tree is very complex, but scientists can now determine both the age and geographic spread of each branch to reconstruct the prehistoric movements of our ancestors. By looking at the mutations that we carry, geneticist can trace our lineage, ancestor by ancestor, to reveal the path they traveled as they moved out of Africa." (1)
As a result, I did a search on Google "King Tut's DNA results". I found the actual results were published in the JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association) that Dr. Hawass used in the Discovery Channel's documentary and King Tut's Haplogroups information is absent, perhaps because there weren't enough data to conclude this information. However, I did another Google search "King Tut's DNA results haplogroup". I found the absent of haplogroup in the published report did not stop people from trying to speculate. Consequently, we now have an unproven speculation circulating on the World Wide Web that King Tut's haplogroup is R1b. I found the source of this speculation to be someone on RootsWeb (link: http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/GENEALOGY-DNA/2010-02/1266472989) who claimed by looking at the screen shots of the video, they were able to decipher the Y-STR markers and therefore determine King Tut's Y-DNA Haplogroup. I watched the same video and no marker numbers are evident. From this now there is a great debate that King Tut and his ancestors where R1b on Rootweb and other places on the internet (some which have become racially tinged). Nowhere was the Y-STR markers published except for 2 Y-STR here's a link to the Article: http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/short/303/7/638?home. The end result from this discussion someone published the so-called y-STR markers on Family Tree DNA's y-search.org under the ID ER7RQ. I think this should be a lesson in critical thinking; if you do not have enough data don't make it up. This led to another question; what was the motivation of the person who allegedly was able to determine King Tut's haplogroup? Quoting directly from the person who started this fiasco: "Additionally, if you look at the CODIS markers for Tutankhamen which they provide in the published study and run them in OmniPop, it indicates similarity with Europeans." In other words, did he want to know if King Tut was European? Why should King Tut's ethnicity matter? What I find fascinating is the science, that we can abstract DNA from a 3,000 year old mummy and verify his genealogy! Think about it....

Source:
Genographic project: https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/lan/en/index.html