Consider: You’re dead.
Your life is already lived, and it took place many millions of years ago. The Earth is still here, beautiful and pristine. Condominiums and Chryslers weather out of sedimentary strata deposited during “The Age of the Dancing Monkeys.” The globe is still a super-organism of unfathomable complexity. All is in perfect harmony. All is seeking thermodynamic equilibrium. “Life” continues to dance under and through cycling matter, as a process of preferential-pattern perpetuation.
Presently, no living creature is aware that at one point, billions of monkeys spread across the globe in a vast network of footpaths and villages, highways and cities.
The dancing monkey was a peculiar creature. Unbeknownst to them, they were among the most whimsical and tragically-entertaining patterns the universe had ever brought forth. They were skilled at material re-arrangement. They experimented relentlessly with different configurations of the matter they found around them. Building nests, tools, weapons and transportation. They would dig, stack, fasten, thread, mix, heat, cool, hydrate and dry, combust, microwave and titrate whatever they found in their enviornment. The energy gradients produced by different configurations of matter varied from relatively minimal to relatively extreme.
Sometimes, monkeys found gradients that would release many billions of joules of energy over small spatial expanses. Whenever a particularly potent configuration of macroscopic or molecular matter was recognized, the Dancing Monkeys would immediately make use of it to obliterate a portion of their population. They elated in the cleaving of meat from one another’s bones, puncturing each others vital organs and detonating chemicals in close proximity to high-density monkey habitats.
Eventually, the Monkeys found an amazing way to produce food, erect structures and hurtle themselves across the surface and atmosphere at many hundreds of kilometers per hour by collecting and combusting energy from ancient sunshine. To the best of anything’s knowledge, the monkeys refereed to this fossilized sunshine as “Magic Monkey-Motion Matter, ” and they assumed the supply was inexhaustible. With it they grew in spatial extent and complexity, their activities rearranging unfathomable quantities of matter, ensnaring vast arrays of individual atoms- recognizing reactions and exploiting them where possible.
To be continued