We don't belong here.

Without food, a person will die in a week. Without water, three days. Without air, several minutes. Why? Because we exist in defiance of nature.

Since early civilization, when our ancestors discovered that broken jars cannot be restored, withered leaves cannot be rejuvenated, and dead mothers cannot be revived, we have known that some procedures cannot be reversed. Gradually, we came to know that valleys rise, peaks erode, rivers drain, oceans evaporate, and even the sun, forever burning in the sky, has a day of depletion. Physicists call this indifferent degeneration “the increase of entropy”. Those irreversible processes are macroscopic expressions of increasing chaos in molecular scale, that the fate of any stable structure is inevitably to dissolve into chaos. The universe is destined to end in a silent and uniform death.

However, life is the challenge to struggle against the law of entropy. Metabolism, arguably the definition of life, is the endeavor to absorb and exhaust the surrounding energy, to create order out of ever-increasing, overwhelming chaos, to add complexity to a world constantly becoming simpler. A cell, the basic component of life, is destined to do one thing: to pump the excessive water out of the membrane. If it stops, according to thermodynamic diffusion, the hypotonic fluid outside will immediately flood in and burst the cell. Moreover, different cells work together cohesively to achieve something on a larger scale: to build a small world called “organism” where everything becomes stable and ordered, where the law of thermodynamics no longer applies. It is those small paradises that enable life to survive, reproduce, evolve, and even develop into a unique form named “human” that can perceive and reason. We exploit the laws of nature because we, as life forms, want to survive every possible moment.

Although the universe is immense and chaotic, we still never cease to discover and comprehend the laws of nature because we always wants to know more. From the ancient Greek Four Elements to the Standard Model with sixty-two elementary subatomic particles, we continue using our intelligence to construct more elaborate models to describe the world. From Galileo’s water timer to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, we build more expensive and sophisticated apparatuses to test our models, all for posing an inquiry on the most fundamental question: “What is matter”. However, errors are no more impermanent than chaos. Though striving for our purest interest to reveal and understand the rule of nature, we shall never find the answer in a world inherently chaotic.

At the same time, we have created “tragedy” as a rebuttal to life, acknowledging that our existence is an error. In the realm of the mind, from Oedipus’ agonizing realization of his identity and his crime, to the town Macondo obliterated by wind, we have been using the humanities to fight against what has been called “fate”. We record our struggles in histories, carve them on stones, write them in books, chant them in poems, depict them in paintings, compose them in music, save them in hard disks, and finally, just wait for them to be eradicated by the laws of nature. Humans love tragedy for they admire the sheer courage of failing against the impossible.

However, human beings are not just tragic, they are heroic. We are doomed to be destroyed, but we are still fighting for survival; we are doomed to be ignorant, but we are still craving for knowledge; we are doomed to be thrown into oblivion, but we are still endeavoring for remembrance.

We don’t belong here, but we are here and not in somewhere else.