0#
Loneliness has levels.
Eating alone.
Watching a movie alone.
Traveling alone.
You see magnificent scenery, capture decisive moments, the sunlight and children's laughter are just right, and you repeatedly examine them on the camera screen, unable to let go. You don't know who to send them to.
But actually, these things don't matter.
1#
The frequency of whale calls is between 10 and 40Hz. They have their own language and communities. They even whisper to each other behind their companions' backs. In short, whales are very intelligent creatures.
In 1989, American scientists captured the sound of a whale. Her name was Alice, and her frequency was 52Hz. Scientists tracked and observed her for 12 years and found that Alice had never received a response from any other whale.
Her voice was too high for other whales to hear.
2#
A plesiosaur unexpectedly survived. It had been sleeping in the abyss for who knows how long, and finally woke up and arrived in the present. Its kind had long been extinct, and the Earth was no longer the same Earth. Primates ruled the land, invented ships, built countless ports, and lighthouses around the ports.
The plesiosaur was attracted by the sound of a lighthouse's horn, which sounded just like its former companions. The lighthouse blew its horn regularly, and the plesiosaur called out from the abyss, joyfully responding to its companions. It surfaced time and time again, but never received a response, which made it frustrated and annoyed, wondering what it had done to offend its companion and be completely ignored.
Finally, it painfully realized the truth. It crashed into the lighthouse, sank into the abyss, and never returned.
3#
Humans decay quickly.
A human's life is only a few decades, filled with birth, aging, illness, and death, seemingly an inescapable curse.
But decay is actually liberation. Just imagine, if you obtained eternal life, you would be born on the same day as history, witness the construction of the pyramids, witness the warlords' battles, witness enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, Jesus' crucifixion, the prophet's night journey, the conquest of Jerusalem, the fall of Constantinople, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, the two World Wars, and the explosion of nuclear bombs...
And you would continue to live.
You would experience too much, but no one would understand you.
You would call out to the entire universe and receive no response.
4#
Regarding life and death, I like the system of the Mexican Day of the Dead.
After a person dies, they go to another world. Even though you have died, you are still remembered by the living. They think of you, tell you about what is happening in the world, and burn paper iPhones for you.
As long as someone remembers you, you are alive; when everyone forgets you, you cease to exist forever.
This perfectly fixes the bug of heaven being too crowded.
5#
What is consciousness? Does the soul exist?
I think every one of our thoughts creates ripples in the universe, perhaps very weak, but they still exist, and those who pay attention can hear them.
The world is the accumulation of all consciousness ripples.
All the so-called "values" in human society ultimately exist in human consciousness.
When the physical body dies and consciousness leaves the host, it can no longer create new ripples.
But the ripples created in the past still exist, spreading layer by layer in the universe, overlapping with each other.
I think at this time, new ripples can still be received.
After that, the past ripples become increasingly faint, eventually fading away into the void.
6#
I have always been impressed by the story of the Tower of Babel.
It is a story in the "Old Testament," which says that in the beginning, all people in the world spoke the same language. One day, humans decided to build a tower that could reach the heavens. Seeing this, God confused their language, making it so they could no longer understand each other, and scattered them all over the world. Since then, humans have been unable to build a tower to reach the heavens.
One day, I suddenly realized that the story of the Tower of Babel is actually a great metaphor.
We now have Google Translate, various fancy machine learning and NLP technologies, and language is no longer a barrier. But humans are busy fighting each other, deceiving each other, and still unable to build a tower to reach the heavens.
Is language the obstacle? Obviously, it is not.
We communicate through language and writing, but what we say is not exactly what we think, and what others hear is not exactly what we say. With each layer of loss, information changes, misunderstandings and deception arise, and you can never be understood 100%.
You are always alone.
7#
"I visited a planet where a red-faced gentleman lived. He had never smelled a flower. He had never seen a star. He had never loved anyone. Besides doing calculations, he had never done anything. He kept saying all day long, just like you: 'I have important things to do, I am a serious person.' This made him very proud. He simply didn't look like a person, he was a mushroom."
"What is he?"
"He is a mushroom!"
8#
We all know that the universe is composed of elementary particles, atoms, electrons, and so on.
You often marvel at how there can be such a beautiful creation as Yui Aragaki in the world. God must have put a lot of effort into creating her.
But Yui Aragaki and your female colleague sitting across from you are actually made up of exactly the same particles. In this sense, they are no different.
Although they are very different, the electrons that make them up are exactly the same.
So, bored physicists proposed the "Single Electron Universe Hypothesis":
The entire universe actually consists of only one electron. It runs tirelessly along the timeline, appearing in every corner of space, making it seem like there are many identical electrons. It is tireless, it created the universe, the galaxy, the solar system, the Earth. It forms all matter on Earth, it forms all humans, men and women, black, white, yellow, tall, short, fat, thin, flat-chested, and D-cup.
Everything that happens in the universe is all orchestrated by this electron. You cry to death because the girl in the next class rejected you, but you and her are actually the same electron, you are her, she is you, you just rejected yourself.
We are trapped within this system, unable to observe ourselves from outside the system. The "Single Electron Universe Hypothesis" cannot be falsified, just like how you can never prove that you are not a brain with electrodes immersed in a nutrient tank.
I don't want to disprove this theory, I just want to sigh, this electron is too damn lonely.
Andy Weir's novel "The Egg" has a similar idea.
The gist is that a person dies and discovers that they will be reborn as a peasant girl in China in the year 540 AD.
Yes, they are reincarnated into the past, where time has no meaning.
This cycle will repeat countless times, and everyone who has ever existed on Earth is their past or future self.
You are me, I am you.
9#
Finally, let's talk about a romantic theory.
Light travels along the shortest path, but light doesn't have a brain, so how does it know which path is the shortest?
Light travels all possible routes. In order to reach you, it traverses every possible path, and the so-called shortest path is the superposition of waves emitted by all paths, the resonance created by countless ripples, which is the shortest path.
It travels through the entire universe just to reach you.