Contemplation of Silly Thoughts at Unsuitable Times

Often, when i'm so caught up in the rush of things that I start to suffocate, I get this thought: What am I about? Is my whole life just about me, with everyone and everything revolving around me like some kind of individual simulation, or am I just a little blip in the grander scheme of things? Do you ever think of that? Like when someone enters your life for a brief moment, makes an extra-ordinary impact and then disappears, doesn't it feel like the person was put there just for you? That's a pretty romantic notion, but it carries that scary thought, which is that I (or the individual being) am alone in this universe. The only real thing. Of course, these thoughts are on pretty extreme paradimes. Could it not be that we all exist, but our paths are being controlled by an unknown force, as if we were little metal cars on a table, dragged along invisible paths by horseshoe magnets underneath?

But then often too, I stop and assure myself that we are all God's children, put here on the Earth to live our lives out before that next big stage; that we have free will; that the Earth, and all the chance occurences in our lives are but mindless variables that we have to work our lives around, being often too little to make any decisive changes in the stubborn course of things; that everyone is real and everyone is an individual, but at the same time we're all supporting characters or extras in the life of someone else.

I also wonder sometimes, with all these intermarriages going on, whether we'll all look alike one day. Not alike as in ALIKE, but you know, having the same skin tones, the same general facial contours and all. I guess so lah, since the distinctions between races was probably brought about during the great continental break up during the Triassic(?) period where the supercontinent Pangaea ruptured, tearing North America apart from Europe (among other things). Even when human beings started migrating again, societal pressures continued to keep the races (and colours especially) segregated. Now of course, with people relocating on every part of the world with the help of modern transportation, and with mixed offspring often looking more beautiful than purebloods, we are finally mixing like nobody's business.

But why, say, were Africans and other equatorial races so dark? Was it extra melanin to cope with the brilliant sunlight? Or was it just random mutations that are propogated by cultural preferences? The Europeans went into the pale fad, while the Africans decided that the richer your colour, the more mate worthy you are?

I think also that the advance of medicine now makes human evolution a tricky business. Of course, the survival of the fittest still occurs at different levels, but people with defective genes still reach child bearing age and prolong the lifespan of their DNA. To many, this process keeps the defective genes alive through generations, and may well be the cause of the rising cancer incidence, since cancer is often an inherited curse. However, I now believe that what medicine does is to keep alive the vary varied gene pool we now must have due to the lack of natural selection. This prevents us from being so specialized for survival in our environments that we might one day be totally wiped out by some rare disease (like Aids and other stuff). Having an abundant (even if not particularly pretty) gene pool would give us a better fighting chance against such rare occurances, so that there will always be survivors no matter what.

I wonder if we will still know what goes on on Earth after we die....