What’s it worth?

If you have only $100 to your name, and you lose a $10 bill, you will surely, desperately, search for it. It’s 10% of your “wealth” and, more importantly, 10% of your chance to eat for another day. If you have $8 Billion and you lose $1 Million, you can easily laugh it off and go about your life. Basically, you still have about $8 Billion. Besides, you’ll quickly earn that money back, and more.

What about “human capital”? If you have 8 Billion people and 1 person dies, how big is the loss? What if 1 Million die? We basically still have around 8 Billion people, don’t we. Do you know that, on average, 150,000 people die every day. How many of those deaths do you notice?

What is the value of a human life? What is it worth? I mean, if we “believe the science”, the universe got along quite well without any humans for about 13.7 Billion years. This begs the question, what is the value of our entire species?

There are many, many people who will argue for the absolute value of a human life. They’ll declare that we must take all measures within our means to save each person. Really? How much of your own time and resources would you dedicate to saving another person, even someone you care about? How many people would you literally give up your own life to save? For whom would you run into a burning building?

You can bet that, in the Pentagon, discussions do occur about how many lost lives will be acceptable in a military engagement, both combatant and civilian. Likewise, in corporate boardrooms, there are discussions about how their actions will negatively affect the lives of workers and how many lives may be lost in certain endeavors. If the profits are great enough a PR machine will work diligently to mask the human cost.

Bottom line, what is the value of a human life? Think about it. Your answer to this is essential to informing your beliefs on many, almost all, issues in our world. Your perceptions of justice, freedom, “right & wrong”, “good & evil”, rights and entitlements will spring forth from your perception of the value of human life.

Those who subscribe to a religious doctrine will likely hold the view that human life is the most valuable thing in the universe, believing that we are a God’s most precious creation. Since we were specifically created by god, perhaps even in “his” own image, we are, de facto, extremely valuable and entitled to dominion over our planet, and whatever else we can colonize. We must do all we can to protect, and extend, human life, even though many of these religions tell us that there is a better place waiting for us after we die. Huh?

Are we valuable? Are we entitled to anything? Do we have rights? I submit to you that we don’t even have a “right” to be alive. We had nothing to do with our own existence. Other people took the physical actions that resulted in “us”. We just happen to be here via the rules of physics.

I’ll say it again, there is only energy and information, and we are comprised of these things. We are part of this realm, perception, simulation or whatever it is. All we can do is work to form new energy and information, to create some sort of value. Hopefully enough value that someone would run into a burning building to rescue us.