Dad, what's the secret to life?
Specifically, let's start with LIFE Nature or Tao.
Epicurus would ask you to explore nature with a scientific enquiry and probabilistic thinking to reduce your anxiety about the future… Stars are born and die but it takes a long time. (If all the people alive right now instead lived one at a time to 100 years each it would not be enough time to watch a star be born and die. Not even a really small one). Planets are born with stars and take a while to get sorted. If the temperature and makeup are right we think life could happen on other planets, but we have not found life anywhere else. Here on earth, Iron has to help protect us from the Sun’s energy and water to help store some of that energy as heat helps make a good place for life.
Life has changed the planet destroying itself most of the time it has made great changes often by poisoning life. Those explosions of life have changed the earth’s ground and made elements like copper we use for electrical wires abundant in rock layers. The strange change that wasn’t from life poisoning itself is when the dinosaurs were wiped out by a big asteroid that hit just off Mexico and smashed so much earth and debris into the sky that it all came back down as tiny meteorites and cooked the planet small life our ancestors probably came around after that. We can dig up the earth to the K2 line which is the bright right line of meteorites in the rock record and below the K2 line dinosaurs above it none (just the tuatara, crocodiles and birds are around from the dinosaur line).
First came simple life which learned to either make energy from the sun they developed to become plants. Along with those creatures came the life that used energy from things rotting or dead. Even later came the life that tried to actively eat other life and move around to do it those became the animals which is what we are. Some of those small simple life forms survive today but probably are much different than the first ones. We are not as successful as the simpler types of life there are more bacteria in your poo than there are people on the planet. We did develop some crazy abilities to change the world which we will explore in these stories.
We humans are living animals we eat other living things made up of vegetables, fungi and animals. Why do we eat? It is what all animals do for energy to move around that comes from the stuff we eat. For most of our history, we did not have enough to eat and some people still do not. Plenty is only a very modern problem that we have enough, the wrong foods or too much to eat and have become obese which can hurt us and shorten our lives.
Like other animals, we find another human born of the opposite sex and we mate with them making more babies, What happens is a penis and a vagina get together and exchange gametes (sperm and egg which are special tiny bits of us that can combine and make another human) and the ones with wombs grow another human. You may know what a hen gamete looks like they come in a hard shell and are really big because chickens don’t have wombs like humans.
Like the other animals we sing, and talk to our families like killer whales we have languages. So what?
What is the meaning of life? It is simple to survive and make other humans just like all the other animals just survive that’s how we got here. That however is not what makes life meaningful. What makes life meaningful means getting to know about our superpower.