A number of decades ago, a human, probably without realizing it, posed an interesting question to me. The details of the context had since been eroded away by the sands of time, however his accusation cuts clearly through the haze of memory. “If you really have been alive that long, you probably figured out the meaning of life, so what is it?”. My authority thus challenged, I knew I had to think of an answer quick enough make it seem as though I had known it all along.

    The origins and inner workings of life are the hardest question humans are trying to answer. So complex, that for many centuries, humans believed that there was a magical force, or vitality energy that made living things live. However, we have found them to be wrong. The structure and function of just a single protein of thousands that make up a typical living thing can take years to decode, let alone the functions of the entire organism. Scientists have a vague understanding of how life was originally formed, in a boiling sea smelling of rotten eggs, lit by crackling arcs of electricity, but have yet to figure out by which exact process it forms.

    However, life has branched out in a myriad of ways since its humble beginnings as little bubbles. Although we may not understand how life works, I can fairly easily discern why life works. For simpler life forms, like birds, trees or the typical human, their only purpose in life is to make more of their respective species; birds chirp to attract other birds, trees grow to make seeds, which make more trees, and simple humans basically devote their life to attracting other humans to make screaming, little poop factories with.

    What separates humanity as a whole from the rest of the animals? Incorrect explanations could be things like, an awareness of time, usage of tools, or social interaction, because all of those have been found in other animals. What does separate humans from other animals, is simply that they can create ideas or things, and pass them down across generations. And from the building of one generation upon another has humanity accomplished so much in the quite insignificant amount of time they have been around.

    Therefore, it is possible to split all life into two groups, one whose purpose is to simply go through all the motions of living, without accomplishing anything of real value, before creating some new life, then passing on, and quickly forgotten by all within a couple generations. Then, there are those whose accomplishments propel the species as a whole toward new heights, and whose impact is still monumental even today. Finally, as one of such people, Nikola Tesla once said, “I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men.”

    Having assembled all that within the second I had, I condensed it down to, “The meaning of life is to learn what humans before you had created, and use that to create something more in order to advance humanity forward”. Upon hearing that, the human’s face shifted from a smug look of superiority to look of shocked surprise. He then muttered an expletive, and melted back into my memories.