Life on Planet Basketball
Humor me, for just a second, there is life, civilized life, on a basketball. The inhabitants have their own desires, goals, hardships, even politics and religion, and social media calling the other side immoral. In all regards, one could say, their civilization is exactly like ours here on earth. They are even capable of visiting other basketballs and sending out radio frequencies and ships trying to contact other potential basketball dwelling civilizations. This is planet basketball.
Only a few caveats however, firstly that time for them is incredibly fast on our scale, every earth minute is but an entire lifetime. They are born, are brought up, try to make something of themselves, fall in love, have a family, get mad about the state of society, grow old, and reflect on their lives before finally dying, all in the span of one single earth minute. The second is that their civilization isn’t detectible at all to us humans. None of the signals from this civilization will ever reach us, their radio waves or ships are simply too tiny for us to even fathom attempting to receive. There is absolutely no way we can be sure, or unsure for that matter, that anything lives on any basketball, let alone detect the beings on planet basketball. And lastly, it is one single basketball. There is no way to tell which basketball is just a basketball and which basketball is planet basketball.
Now having said this, what questions remain? The main goal of this essay is to look at the meaning of these beings lives. Do their lives matter? Or for that matter, should we as humans stop playing basketball because who knows what basketball they actually live on in the first place, might we kill them? We will be looking at some of the major theories of meaning and trying to discern these questions.
Nihilism
Nihilism isn’t necessarily as bad as people will assume if they have ever seen the movie “The Big Lebowski,” and its proponents are often misunderstood mainly due to the way they connotate what it actually means for us. One of these thinkers was Fredrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche famously described what he thought the current state of man was in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” he said “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the superman — a rope over an abyss.” Stating this was his way of saying we are essentially in a state of nothingness. In other words, Nietzsche felt nothing mattered. Not any God(s) or morality. He said these things hold us back from jumping in mud puddles after the rain because we were worried about the social judgment we would receive. Even if any God(s) existed, Nietzsche thought, they no longer served us, nor did the things we commonly associate with God(s) such as morality or the meaning of life. If we were to overcome this nothingness, we needed to become the “ubermench” or “superman.” This is what he meant when he exclaimed “God is dead, and we have killed him.” He was trying to help us become the ubermench. Sure, however, this means that if nothing matters, there is no meaning to any life, not even the lives on planet basketball, get over it, lets go shoot some hoops.
Epicureanism and Hedonism
A keen eye in the audience will notice that Epicureanism and Hedonism are not the same. Especially for those who are particularly fond of Epicurus. Relax. I am not here to say that they are in fact the same thing and intend on separating the two. However, the two are cut from the same cloth and as such I put them under the same umbrella herein.
Both Epicureanism and Hedonism are built on one single foundational meaning to life: happiness. They believe that happiness is the entirety of the meaning of life. The goal for each and every person is happiness in the end. These thoughts are even mentioned as a foundation for the United States in the Declaration of Independence with its “…Pursuit of happiness.” However, happiness itself is a little, ambiguous. Both Epicureanism and Hedonism prove this by having two completely separate and dichotomic views of happiness. While Hedonism says that the goal is to always get as much pleasure as possible (most certainly sense pleasure, as it’s the easiest pleasure to gain) Epicurus thought that wasn’t really a fulfilling happiness. Epicurus thought that happiness really came in the form of mental pleasures. Things such as friendships, knowledge, a temperate life, with freedom from fear and pain.
For these two ideas, Epicureanism and Hedonism, their lives would matter, so long as they were happy. This is in contrast with Nihilism in that the Nihilist could still play basketball. But, this still has us questioning, would our playing basketball destroy that happiness? If so, should we in fact stop playing basketball altogether? Maybe the Epicurean or Hedonist would have to stop playing basketball for the sake of the happiness of the beings on planet basketball. But also, maybe the Hedonist (and not the Epicurean) would still play basketball, as the only happiness they really need to worry about is their own in the short term. While the Epicurean might notice that the end result of destroying a civilization will bring them more pain than having left the ball alone. More modern ethical interpretations come from the likes of Jeremy Bentham who said “the greatest happiness for the greatest number" which means that we would want to know how many people lived on planet basketball and how much of their suffering and our joy of basketball would be created by, and without it. If the overall happiness would be more playing basketball, then the one who sees happiness as the greatest good would be okay with playing basketball. But their lives mattered regardless according to these two theories.
Sartre
Sartre starts with, essentially, the idea that there is no inherent purpose or meaning to life. The key word here is inherent. The argument essentially goes that if there is no inherent meaning to life, then we are free to (or have to) create meaning for ourselves. As explained, Sartre believed there is no inherent meaning to life. So, therefore, we are free to (or have to) create meaning for ourselves. He famously wrote “existence precedes essence” and further explains what he means by this by saying “First of all man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and only afterwards defines himself.” What he is saying here is that in order for our life to have any meaning, we must create it. He further exemplifies this by saying “As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.” Of course, a major problem of this is that those with the least amount of meaning are those who haven’t created one themselves. Babies and the youngest are the least likely to have created any meaning for themselves. Therefore, the young and babies are those with the least meaning, in Sartres’ eyes.
So what does this mean for planet basketball? Well, assuming they are just like us in every way, they have surely reached the same conclusions as Sartre has at some point. This means that there are plenty of beings out on planet basketball right now with a lot of self made meaning. There are also many who are coming into their meaning. According to this, just because they are for all tense and purposes invisible, and we can never verify their existence, doesn’t mean their existence is meaningless.
Conclusions
Obviously this thought experiment is hypothetical. However, it raises questions about our own society. What if we are in fact the basketball in which we are talking about here? Does that change any of our answers? Well, there are other views still out there, and I urge you to seek them out. Primarily, that of Stoicism. The argument being based on determinism (no free will) so if we cant change anything, then we accept whatever happens. However, I did not include them in this essay as the Philosophy category on Medium is already absolutely chalked full of work on Stoicism much better than I can prepare here for you. If that is something that speaks to you, the Stoics would maybe tell us that we are going to play basketball anyways, so while their lives mattered, all they can do is accept their eventual fate. I think this raises a good point, however, if we were all conscious of the life of planet basketball, this doesn’t say much of if we should play basketball or not. Still, I digress. It seems to me anyways that combining the views we went over today may have problems, bit it does have a feasible answer for us. In that, meaning is derived from our becoming who we are, though there’s not really any objective meaning, and that our seeking of pleasure and avoidance of pain are of the importance for meaning. So, if we, the players of basketball, don’t see the inhabitants of planet basketball as ‘someone’ to us, then their lives don’t matter to us. Thus, we play basketball for the sake of our happiness with no pain. A bit like when we are running and, well, we accidentally destroy an anthill, but never end up realizing it anyways. This doesn’t mean the lives of the ants don’t matter just that it doesn’t affect us if we never knew it in the first place. This still raises the larger question of ourselves. Could there be a civilization above us with the same exact question playing basketball with the solar system, who one day picks us up and ponders our existence? Of course, we would surely care if they played basketball with the earth, so does this mean we should try a larger effort to contact the would be players? Should ants make it more clear of their existence to us for them to matter (if they had the intelligence/ability to)?
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