Death and Taxes
When Einstein put forth his theory of relativity, it was unlikely that he foresaw that his own beliefs would be under siege by his closest supporters. And yet, this stalwart believer in the principle of a static universe—a universe that is infinite and neither expanding or contracting, something stationary, something reliable and eternal—was forced to wrestle with criticism that suggested the universe was expanding, using his own theory as ammunition. It took numerous encounters with some of the brightest astrophysicists of his time to finally convince him after over a decade that the universe was expanding, shifting, in flux, as reckonable and measurable as you or me.
Human beings live a very distinct and peculiar type of existence. We live extremely short lives. On a planet 4.54 billion years old, we’re surrounded by people who expect to live to about 80. Our writings are a few thousand years old at best. The result is that we take the realities of this existence for granted as universal. "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes," Benjamin Franklin wrote in a private letter as he discussed the impermanence of the United States’ new constitution he drafted. Instinctually, we as people feel that there are facts about reality that will always persist after we’re gone.
Of course, for the vast majority of human history, in fact, there were no taxes. Most humans that have ever lived led fairly egalitarian hunter-gatherer lives, working around five hours a day in small communities. This changed only 12,500 years ago during the Neolithic revolution. This is when we began sowing seeds, settling down, and reproducing rapidly. This is what led to large populations, cities, formalized leadership, and thus, taxes. This event was not inevitable, nor universal, nor intrinsic to being human. Plenty of hunter-gatherer peoples survive today around the world. Agriculturalism and the subsequent establishment of our modern lifestyles was not predestined or eternal–it was all but a fluke, an accident of history.
This is the way the world works, by chance incidents creating revolutions. Surely it was thought that women would always be limited by biology, but in fact female oppression as we know it today can be traced back to the rise of agriculturalism, and its fall can be ascribed to the invention of birth control. We might think racism is a timeless menace, but in fact we can pinpoint precisely where “race” was invented in the era of imperialism. Ostensibly universal realities can be traced to accessible historical origins.
War will always exist because it’s human nature, it’s said. What of our closest relatives, the bonobos, who have unlike their human and chimpanzee cousins dropped the violent instinct for war and carnage? Speaking of our relatives, if we were to meet a Neanderthal, should we put them into a zoo or into Harvard? Our particular iteration of human nature is simply another offshoot that survived incidentally, after all. We should not be so quick to make sweeping and universal judgements about human nature. The very essence of life is that every generation is modified from their predecessors, right to the very cells, until these differences accumulate into a whole other species. Nowhere in that is a promise of eternal truths.
The hydra, the American lobster, the immortal jellyfish—all of these are animals which are biologically immortal. They can be killed, but they either do not age or are capable of reversing the process. In the humble and obscure waters of the planet, our distant cousins on the family tree of earth life have harnessed the power of an infinite existence. Even human beings have immortal cells—this is what makes cancer so potent.
We aren’t entirely sure what causes aging, but it’s highly correlated with the degradation of telomeres. These are like the ends of our shoelaces. When they chip off, our shoelaces—here, our chromosomes, packages in our cells which contain our DNA—come undone. Aging tends to happen when this does. An enzyme called telomerase inhibits this process. Some scientists believe that harnessing this enzyme might be the key to stop aging. Institutes like the SENS Research Foundation and Sierra Sciences believe that human immortality is within reach. Even the one universal expectation of death, then, ought not to be taken for granted.
People ask what the worth of anthropology, sociology, history is—this is the answer. To expand our knowledge beyond the tyranny of the today. And understand that the astronomical scope of human knowledge accumulated over ages is anything but. Almost everything we know is limited to our infinitesimal solar system. It’s been well-understood for decades now that (according to the Drake equation) the notion that we are the only form of life in the universe is highly improbable. And the universe only expands. Unless we prioritize science and space exploration immediately, no one alive now will ever even get a glimpse of almost everything that exists.
And what does the future hold! If we’ve led endeavors promethean enough to poke holes in our planet’s very atmosphere, to dent our heavens—imagine what we can do now as scientific knowledge expands exponentially! What happens if there’s no need for human labour anymore as we automate our drivers and our doctors? What happens if build an artificial intelligence more competent than us in every way, that has the capacity to outsmart is in programming itself, dethroning us as the smartest beings on earth? What happens when human history shifts again, irreparably, fundamentally?
The black veil of the cosmos dividing us from most of creation and the quiet background hum of human progress as we go about our lives are odes to possibility. Possibility.
Nothing in this world is certain, or reliable, or eternal. Least of all death and taxes.
Image: The First Mourning by William-Adolphe Bouguereau