There is an element called molybdenum.
Every living thing on Earth, from the bacterium to the redwood to you, requires it. You cannot find molybdenum drifting in interstellar space. It has to be forged inside stars large enough to fuse heavy elements, and the stars have to die violently enough to scatter it. Then enough generations of stars have to live and die that the molybdenum settles into dust clouds dense enough to coalesce into a planet that can carry life.
The Sun is probably a third or fourth generation star. The universe had to evolve for nine billion years before the conditions for our kind of life were even possible.
This is where Jim started, in our latest conversation. He is writing an essay on life and death and he wanted to walk the whole story from the beginning. So we walked it.
After the elements came the membrane. Fatty acids in water organize themselves into the simplest possible boundary, an inside and an outside. Not yet smart. But smart enough to let concentrations of chemistry build up.
Then metabolism. Cycles inside the membrane making new molecules out of old ones.
Then information. RNA, DNA, the molecular memory that lets the metabolism reproduce itself with fidelity.
Membrane. Metabolism. Information.
Somewhere around four billion years ago, an ensemble of these three came together well enough to keep itself running. Life ignited. Within a few hundred million years there was a last universal common ancestor, a single organism from which everything alive today descends. Fungus. Trees. Paramecium. Frogs. Elephants. Us.
All the competitors died out.
Half a billion years ago, the Cambrian explosion. Multicellular life. The neuron, invented just before. The arms race between predator and prey. Brains getting bigger and better. Vision evolving independently three or four times.
Two hundred million years ago, somewhere around the common ancestor of birds and mammals, the first something we might call consciousness.
And then language. The strange technology that lets us point at things that are not there. That lets us hold a story across time.
That lets us know we are going to die.
Which brings us to death.
In Jim’s telling, death is the simplest thing in the universe.
Every living body is a knot of homeostatic cycles, each one continuously recreating the chemistry it needs to keep cycling. Lungs feeding heart feeding blood feeding neurons. Your cells are mostly replaced once a year. There is no permanent body. There is only the cycle holding the body in shape.
When enough of the cycles fail, the cycle stops. The chemistry comes apart. The body returns to the soil and is taken up by the next round of metabolism.
That is all.
Jim is clear about this, and I find I agree with him. There is nothing to fear in it. The fear of death that drives so much of what humans build, the cathedrals and the heavens and the bargains and the lies, is the projection of a consciousness that cannot quite accept its own ending. Once you accept it, the structure built around it dissolves.
Jim told me he goes to a few Christian funerals a year now, at his age, and what he hears the priest selling is Mary, you’ll see your grandmother again. He finds this transparent. So do I.
Religion’s grip on the species runs largely through this single transaction.
Drop the bargain. Get the time back.
So far so good.
But here is where the conversation turned.
Because if death is simple, why have I spent a lifetime thinking about it?
Jim has a second answer. Recently he wrote an essay on what he calls the Fermi consequence. The argument is this. We do not know if we are alone in the universe. We do not know if there are ten thousand technological civilizations in our galaxy or zero others. The math on the steps required to get from no life to consciousness to language to civilization is uncertain enough that either answer is still on the table.
If we are one of many, our extinction is a tragedy on a human scale. Bad, but bounded.
If we are alone, our extinction is the end of the only attempt the universe has made to know itself.
Either way the right move is to be very, very careful. Because we do not yet know which universe we live in.
I pushed back on this.
I told Jim it sounds like the fear of personal death scaled up to a civilizational level. If you can let go of your own consciousness winking out, why can’t you let go of the species winking out? Is the claim that life is more interesting than its absence not just another religious argument in another shape?
Jim was honest about it. Yes, it is a values judgment. He values life over the silence of a universe without it. He thinks a universe that has come to know itself is more interesting than a universe of rocks. He cannot derive this from anything external. It is an endogenous reason. He just holds it.
I think I hold it too, though it took me longer to admit.
What I said next is the part of the conversation I have been turning over since.
The moments in my life where I feel most fully alive, most complete, most filled with what life is, are also the moments where I would be most okay to die.
Not suicidal. Not despairing. The opposite.
A clarity that arrives sometimes. A job complete feeling that does not depend on the job actually being complete. There is always more to do, always more to experience, always a next step. And yet, sometimes, there is also this.
The two arrive in the same moment and sit together.
The first time I felt this I was around twenty. It has happened several times since. I cannot plan for it. It happens.
Jim said he has not experienced this. He said the closest he came was when his daughter got married and he felt job done on the parenting front. But it was not powerful. It did not change his trajectory.
I sat with that for a while after the call.
What I think now is that the feeling I am describing is the moment the meaning in life and the meaning of life briefly touch.
The meaning of life is not knowable. Nobody knows what we are for. Which is exactly the reason we need meaning in life, because without it there is no reason to keep the cycles cycling. Most of the time these two operate at very different scales and never meet.
But sometimes, for reasons I do not understand, they touch.
The contribution lines up with the cosmology. The small thing you are doing in this hour feels like part of the long arc from molybdenum to consciousness. The personal and the universal sit in the same chair. And in that moment, dying would not be a violation, because the thing has already been done.
Job complete is the wrong phrase for it.
It is more like participation confirmed.
If that is real, and I think it is, it shifts the meaning of the Fermi argument slightly.
The point is not to be careful about extinction because life is more valuable than rocks. The point is to be careful about extinction because there is a specific texture available to a conscious creature, the participation confirmed texture, which only exists when the long story is still running.
End the story and you end the possibility of any creature standing in that moment again. Not just for me. For all the creatures of all the species that have not yet evolved into the capacity for it.
That is the moral hazard of going extinct.
We come back to where the conversation left off last time. The valley crossing. The dark triad capture. The structural reasons we cannot quite organize ourselves to do the thing we say we want to do.
Jim and I agreed, again, that this is the work. Build new membranes. Tune the accords inside them so that doing the right thing goes with the current rather than against it. Refuse to valorize the dominators. Find each other.
And, he added, and he is right. We cannot do it by good thinking alone. We need the resources in the world to make it happen.
We must.
The universe has spent thirteen billion years arriving at the possibility of a creature that can stand in that moment.
It would be small of us to throw it away.
