[Life notes] -October 21, 2015- *Insurance and the Mars Ex…

[Life notes]
-October 21, 2015-
*Insurance and the Mars Exploration Project
 ㅡ The world is excited about the recent news of NASA’s Mars Exploration Project and the discovery of life. Water is the source of life, and the curiosity of people around the world about whether or not there are living organisms seems to be skyrocketing. Carl Sagan, the author of Cosmos, is said to have said, “If the only planet in the universe were Earth, it would be a huge waste of space.”
This means that the organisms we see on Earth must be somewhere in the universe, but isn’t the space already wide enough? If we expand our horizons and look at the solar system while we are curious, we can view the universe from a new perspective.  In other words, if we consider the nine planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto as a family unit centered on the Sun, Earth would be the seventh and Pluto would be the first. From this perspective, if our curiosity about future resources or destiny is human curiosity, our future could be the past of another star, Mars.
It naturally leads to the question of 'what is life?' The artificial view of life that sees life as a cellular organism is too passive. Even though our field of vision is within the visible range and the sound we can hear is only within the audible range.
Everything that is captured, collected, cultivated, and provided as food for consumption is life. Also, the human body can live because of water, salt, and air, which are inanimate objects. In this respect, it is clear that living and inanimate objects are not two but one.
If we ask ourselves this question, we cannot help but say that cellular life cannot live apart from inanimate objects, and if we expand the scope of matter to the hydrosphere, atmosphere, and lithosphere, we cannot help but say that humans are nothing more than cells existing within one giant planet. In other words, just as the human body is composed of 100 trillion cells, the universe can be a gigantic living organism made up of countless stars.
In order to solve the question of what life is, we cannot help but first ask what the basis for life’s existence is. Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am,” which is understood to mean that if there is no basis for existence, it cannot exist.
The current Earth is a combination of the biosphere and the inanimate object, and the biosphere is a sustainable system with a symbiotic relationship like a pot’s pan, consisting of the plant, microbiome, and animal world.
Paradoxically, the future of Earth in the solar system could be the past of the evolved Mars. If we ask Mars about the future of Earth, we should first ask ourselves whether we have managed our past, that is, whether we have managed life on Earth well. Just as an insurance company must ask an insurance policyholder, “Are you healthy?” in order to guarantee life, Mars is likely to ask the humans of “Curiosity” who arrived on Mars this question. Are you healthy, coming from Earth?(fin)