What makes life last

4. The search for life in the universe

Solutions to what makes life last

lie in the future, not the past.

 

Darkness

One day in the slow lens of entropy,

when we come to upend the reason why

believers must save souls and prove myths true,

forgiveness may become our province too.

The powerless may need to trust salvation,

but what redeems the men of education?

– those who impoverish philosophy

with god, emaciate our history,

mistrust ideas like superstitious serfs,

make sex and all they can’t control a curse,

and passively at best accommodate

the science and discoveries they hate.

Their sole and limpet talent is to scour

society for influence and power.

We hope – not pray – they’ll some day light a spark,

that blasts their mutant magic off the park.

 

Distractions

Now even still desert stones can be traced

on pixels captured in the dark of space.

Down here rabbits, voles know which way to crash,

bees dance, ravens croak a route to the trash;

we struggle to follow sheep runs on hills,

yet roads would chase us were we slugs and snails

and, next day, at least we’d know where we’d been.

But there’s no road map, not even a line

to join up ideas on the so-called net.

The pathways of a species’ thoughts are as yet

as shapeless as water running in sand,

as closed as capillaries holding my hand.

Though navigation’s what we do with tracks

there’s still no link from opinions to facts:

sure, there’s always someone to tell us where,

but who rides the hyperlinks? and who cares?

 

The discovery of life

Earth

is the one place we know of death and birth.

So forget the stories, toss out the maps

of roads in forests, lost paths and broken tracks;

make memories, instead, with trunks and rocks,

find sites that poetry is yet to trap.

Snapped branches flag a new way through the weave:

beneath their cardboard and corroded bark

are a billion mirrors of my cells at work

that replicate themselves from air we breathe.

Swifts and midges skit; stitchworts cloud lanes white,

then heaths drip gold with gorse and broom,

lakes paint themselves with blue-green algae bloom

and every slime-smeared surface comes alight.

Moving closer our glass would discover

all sex is wet and flimsy for the ferns;

air and earth are fungi’s main concerns,

all five kingdoms train their fire on others.

 

Life fills the planet, finds footholds discreet

for each landscape zone and every species,

breeding for brutalities and beauties

with animal experiments and secret

GM trials that sneak in jealousy and lust.

We can’t possibly know what happens when

this macrocosm interacts with man

and frightened toxic sprays kill weeds and trust;

we’re all too busy felling dying trees

or splashing daffodils down urban roads

to notice wolves that circle in the wood

and doctors losing catch-up with disease.

Maybe we’re due for coral and fungi

to evolve powers of independent thought or

for plankton cells to hydrolyse water:

all things alive aspire to reach the sky.

 

Time shifts and shades the graph that plots the line

that life might take. Its plentiful supply

implies design’s not in the speed of light

but in the trails of mist it leaves behind.

 

Blind speculation

Let’s speculate that life’s direction, drive,

is to discover life. So were we flung out wide

and distant from home to this blue backwater?

Challenged? or abandoned to self-slaughter?

Is it the mission of our fumbling myths

(McCartney, Moses, and Odysseus)

to help us to wind our way back homeward

to somewhere lost – not an escape but an end?

Was this blind imperative planted, then

crystallised, borne in some comet’s icy core,

an accident of art, or angel-wise?

Is this what Oedipus saw, gouging his eyes?

Oh ye gods, could it be we’ve been here before?

 

First light

I once thought that we were divining for Truth,

with Shakespeare, Einstein, Mandela, Camus.

But that’s not it. We’re winnowing for life.

The truth can’t save worlds governed by grief,

while God gives instructions to think it right,

or unmask fumbling priests who snuffed the lights,

when loves and longings were all oiled by lies,

and Redemption arrived wielding a scythe.

Even now the shamans smuggle this lonely stub

of space-borne rubble stuck out at the nub-

end of our galaxy – and with it Sin –

to stand it heartless at the heart of things. 

So here with Hubble and SETI we’re stayed

sweeping exo-worlds for new DNA.

 

And meanwhile …

 

Dawn

Dawn is like being born each day

cries suddenly bursts free

dawn is like your first few steps

above your tiny fenced-in space

you can see trees and clouds and sky

dawn comes in like words and speech

all you see takes adjectives and names

formless chaos comes within reach

dawn is like getting the point of Donne

complexity falls into place

you stand and wonder at the firmament

dawn is like sex

colours flood the monochrome

make the solid ground flex.

But dawn’s a lesson for everyone:

the moment it arrives it’s gone.

 

Mars

leaving Earth we feel small now,

brilliant, superior, infinitely curious,

but weak, dependent, divided,

inconsolably solitary.

there’s no wonder so many human hopes

are pinned on finding life beyond our home;

it could help make sense of the way we are,

help us to feel

a part of something, and also less apart.

the first step is to take our search to Mars

live in real time with human eyes.

and if, when we get there, what we find –

despite the worm in the meteorite

despite the aquifers and CO2

despite a surface sometimes at twenty degrees –

what we find is nothing,

we will still know this is a slight first step

and we will always be capable of more.

then when we finally establish to our satisfaction

that there never was life (apart from ours)

in this chilling desolate outpost

where the sun is a pale watery disc

half the size we see on Earth,

and that, probably, it never existed

elsewhere in the solar system,

how will we feel?

after the months of travel

with only exercise and sleep to keep us sane

in a life-support capsule with paper-thin walls

padded to catch the radiation

what could we possibly feel?

early travellers are not expected to return;

they will stay to fabricate

airtight caves with artificial twilight,

to grow plants for food and oxygen

and recreate the weather;

they will stay to terraform the land,

making soil and atmosphere from rocks and water;

they will learn what it means to conserve,

that nothing must ever escape or be destroyed.

that’s how Earth people will come to stand

in the observatory at the mouth of their cave

or gazing in awe as new world explorers

at the unmeasured edge of Valles Marineris,

contained by dust and that insipid pink sky

but freed by distance and technology to imagine more.

They will be looking out on a vast uninterrupted horizon,

and looking out for life, 

powered by knowledge and the understanding

that they are utterly indescribably incalculably alone

and that they must be the next to make life last.

 

 

 

What kind of answer is that? she asked. 

“A very carefully considered one,” I said, honestly thinking I’d given a tough assignment a fair shot. 

“But it doesn’t answer the question. It doesn’t answer any question.” she protested.