Friday, September 27, 2013

The Enormity of Nothing

My next entry for video game week comes to you from a distant galaxy known as New Eden. This is the absolutely enormous game world of EVE Online, my current favorite MMO. (Massively Multiplayer Online Game) The game revolves around piloting spaceships ranging in size from small and nimble frigates to city sized Titans. You can do whatever you want whether it be mining, trading, bounty hunting, or piracy. As long as you got the right ship for the job. Meanwhile all the other players are trying to do the same thing which means there's a lot of player interaction. Especially if they've got you locked in their cross-hairs, ready to unleash all kinds of interstellar hurt on you because they want your stuff.


EVE is different because there isn't any set path to follow, you're in control of your own destiny. It's not like Halo or Call of Duty where you start from point A and try to get to point B while shooting everything in the face with big guns. Rather you are given a HUGE menagerie of choices to follow based on what you want to do because the structure of the game is largely player run. All the while you're traveling billions of miles across the universe. Being in the world can make one feel very, very, very small. 

Isn't that how it's always been? Whether in EVE online or in the real world, we sometimes feel infinitesimally small sometimes. Douglas Adams had this to say on the subject: 

"The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore.


Many would happily move to somewhere rather smaller of their own devising, and this is what most beings in fact do.


For instance, in one corner of the Eastern Galactic Arm lies the large forest planet Oglaroon, the entire "intelligent" population of which lives permanently in one fairly small and crowded nut tree. In which tree they are born, live, fall in love, carve tiny speculative articles in the bark on the meaning of life, the futility of death and the importance of birth control, fight a few extremely minor wars, and eventually die strapped to the underside of some of the less accessible outer branches.
In fact the only Oglaroonians who ever leave their tree are those who are hurled out of it for the heinous crime of wondering whether any of the other trees might be capable of supporting life at all, or indeed whether the other trees are anything other than illusions brought on by eating too many Oglanuts.


Exotic though this behaviour may seem, there is no life form in the Galaxy which is not in some way guilty of the same thing."

The earth is large with billions of people living on this planet. Living our own little lives and influencing those that have the luck to come in contact with us. Meanwhile everyone else is doing the same thing in their own little bubbles of existence. Perhaps that's why a clear midnight sky evokes such thought in us as we gaze up, reminded of just how small we really are. We read of galaxies and planets that are this many light years away from us. Incomprehensible distances that the human mind is unable, or unwilling, to grasp as we observe the seemingly limitless reaches of God's creation.

This is a paradox of man: compared to God, man is nothing; yet we are everything to god. While against the backdrop of infinite creation we may appear to be nothing, we have a spark of eternal fire burning within us. We have the incomprehensible promise of salvation within our grasp. And it is God's great desire to help us reach it. Therein we can find hope when we feel the vast enormity of the universe weighing down upon our shoulders. Everything he created is for us and we are the center of everything he does. His glory comes through us and our receiving of our own glory. 




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