If everyone looked at the stars each night we would live a lot differently. When you stare into infinity you start to realise there are more important things to care about than what we do all day. You realise your place in the universe, in the world, in this life. So for this week’s science meets philosophy column, I’ve borrowed lyrics written by Tom Scott from the song ‘Nothing’ on @Peace’s eponymous debut release. It’s a beautifully constructed piece of spoken word/prose pondering metaphysics, existentialism, cosmology and… nothing.
Yeah, nothing… Just something called nothing… Yeah...
On the rock, in the dark, in the middle of nothing. Just dust, intelligent dust, life-creating self-afflicting, civilized, irrelevant dust. Infinite dust. Dust that contributes to society; a society of dust,
that kills itself over dust, seeks out other societies of dust to kill them over dust. Warring over a God that was made from dust, that they say made us from dust. Believing that it wasn’t, when it was just nothing, just matter, that doesn’t, just space with no space for something, because it’s all full of nothing.
Extra-terrestrial nothing, parallel universes of nothing, a big bang that came from nothing,
caused by nothing, causing nothing. A nothing we call life, a nothing that nothing is better than,
but something is better than nothing, but nothing is better than everything, but everything is just nothing, past tense, present tense, existence, essence, nonsense; nothing, nothing more, nothing less, nothing much, but nothingness, just “is”, now.
So why we’re here, we’d just like to take this time to thank you, you know? For contributing to this dust ball, you know? Thanks... for nothing… because it’s just another day. Another meaningless, beautiful, ugly significantly insignificant, timeless waste of time traveling around this breathtaking, burning ball of gas. On this rock, in the dark, in the middle of nothing.