The Parasitic Conundrum

I had witnessed one of the most surreal views during my trek to the Himalaya. The night sky. The first time I looked up to the sky from an altitude of 18000 feet+, I gasped and couldn’t breathe for a second. The view was such, with countless stars and the entire milkyway galaxy in view.

Took this picture from the internet as normal cameras such as mine could not capture this view. But this was absolutely how the sky looked. 

I just lay there listening to songs and gazing at the sky trying to fathom what I was witnessing. Just then the song 'One more light' by Linkin Park started to play in which the lyric goes:

"Who cares if one more light goes out in the sky of a million stars? It flickers, flickers.

Who cares if someone's time runs out if a moment is all we are? Or quicker, quicker."

The above lines resonated instantly with me and I started to dive deep. In the astrophysics context of time, our entire existence is indeed nothing more than a blink of an eye. I wondered if the gross population - the population that ever lived on Earth - can ever match the number of stars in this "moment". Everything in nature has a start point and an end point. What if the stars and planets are all living creatures too? They live, breathe and die just like we do.

A video of the Earth potentially breathing. The same must be happening for every planet/star. 

In this scenario, given our almost non-existential life span in comparison to the life span of the Earth, we might as well be an infectious disease that slowly spread itself throughout the planet, multiplying in numbers just as bacteria does on our body. 

Thinking deeper, I reasoned that our behaviour is similar to that of a parasite, an organism which lives in or on another organism (its host) and benefits by deriving nutrients at the host's expense. Earth was the first to be infected by “our” disease. Just think about it, we/all-living-beings fall sick whenever foreign bodies enter, grow and spread itself as a disease in our body causing a rise in our body temperatures. The same way for Earth - we entered, derived our food from the Earth, spread ourselves throughout while causing a rise in the Earth’s temperature. As time is relative, a hundred years for us might just be a 100 seconds for the Earth. Just as a parasite moves from one host to another, we are spreading ourselves, slowly but hopefully, from Earth to Mars.

Are we nothing but an infection in the grand scheme of things? A sophisticated parasite that lives by values, traditions, principles, and that divides itself on race, class, religion and nationality. 

However ridiculous this theory(thought) might sound, the nature is far too oblivious for us to disregard anything.