What a difference a few billion years make!
The Earth was a hot lump of spinning mass made of dust, land, water, lava and a bunch of toxic gases. Volcanoes spewed angry heat, the skies rained on a land mass that shifted and redefined itself, and the seas undulated to the rhythem of day and night. There were countless millenia of turmoil and other countless millenia of quiet period where nothing happened out of ordinary. Chaos reigned. In the chaos too, there was beauty - but no eyes to see it. No trees lined the distant horizons. The glorious sunsets of a younger sun went unseen, the thunderous storms unheard. It was barren and unappreciated world.
And look it now. I mean just look at it. It is filled with millions of different kind of animals, plants, fish, and of course humans. There are eyes that absorb the vista, ears that listen intently, bodies that touch the world and each other. There is life - throbbing, pulsating, warm life.
As the night of lifelessness ended and a day of living began to dawn, the blindly reproducers combined, formed colonies of cells, became more and more aware. It was like very slowly opening eyes to first let in just tiny sliver of light and then opening it some more to vaguely see outlines, and later to well defined shapes and forms. The intelligence developed from all the way to ameoba to monkeys to humans. Only recently has the sun of awareness has moved its head above the horizon, and grown from a sliver to a bright red globe. The journey was not easy.
Mankind has been around for thousands of years, fully gifted with the brains that can think and hence conclude they exist. But a vast majority were trouble by problems of existence and died before they could be bothered with existantial angst. It is only recently - in the last 100 years or so that they have begun the ascent that did justice to their mental faculties. The journey is not over yet. The sun has come up - and will become brighter. This sun is not the one that sets. On the contrary, it will become brighter and yet genter and kinder.
It was Marx's dream to free the humanity from animal suffering. The need for survival, pressure of earning tomorrow's bread, the famine, the untimely deaths - human minds are too precious for all these. Their sufferings need to be that of higher quality - the lover's sorrow, the yogi's search, the dreamer's angst.
Today there are more and more people who are close to this dream. And one day the whole world will be free of strife. We are getting there, albeit slowly. The planet that began 3 billion odd years ago as a lifeless planet, continued till the last few millenia as filled with bodies with life, will one day be teeming with minds.
The journey is going on, let's enjoy the ride.
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