Mumbai’s beleaguered rail system is the most overcrowded on the planet, handling 7.5 million constricted commuters each day. Passenger cars designed for 200 people now cram in over 500 and local railway officials had to invent a new term called super-dense crushload to describe what fourteen people per square meter looks like.
Everyday also sees about nine train-related fatalities as people are electrocuted while riding on the roof, fall out of open doors or pulverized while crossing the tracks. So routine are these accidents that the trains often no longer stop to retrieve the maimed or the dead. A TV reporter once broadcast a two-hour live report of an injured man lying between the tracks as twenty trains, dutifully keeping schedule rattled over him before he was finally rescued.
There are now more people on the planet now than almost every other animal that doesn’t have six legs. The only bigger-than-bug-sized critters that outnumber us are mice, brown rats and chickens. The single mammal that collectively out-weighs humanity is cattle. Obviously we are something special since we so dominate almost every other species on the planet but it certainly doesn’t seem that way in our ubiquitous teeming mass. Orbiting high above our planet, Rusty Schweickart had soul-rattling realization of how cosmically important is our vantage on creation. Lying on the tracks in a Mumbai train station, one unfortunate commuter was merely rattled.
Existential crisis is seen by experts as a leading and growing cause of suicide, which itself has grown 25 percent since 1999 in spite of better access to treatment. In 2016 almost 45,000 people ended their own lives in the US, and about twelve times that number of desperate souls made the attempt. Suicide now results in more lost years of life than any other ailment except cancer and heart disease.
We find ourselves in the midst of an existential emergency - a five alarm philosophical fire perhaps more spiritually unnerving than any in the long annals of personal angst. Large portions of humanity for the first time are un-swaddled by a comforting blanket of common spiritual belief; newly lost souls in their millions trudge out of the proverbial garden, shivering naked beneath a grey agnostic sky.
Should we blame science? In a few short decades ancient spiritual frameworks have been displaced by the ponderous progress of rational thought that has scraped clean the lovingly tended garden of the faithful. The practitioners of this new church of reason are hardy as adept at providing spiritual comfort, giving the impression that in comparison to the cosmos we are insignificant, transient and random.
In the cold mathematical language of science we seem nothing particularly special – as beguiling as being told by your lover that, "yes your ass does look fat, however your legs seem adequate and functional."
Can we instead unearth rational evidence for humility, compassion and purpose that might also be self evident to an alien intelligence? Ensuring the spiritual health of a super intelligent AI is obviously important, but ours could use an overhaul as well. Not only could this ontological inquiry go a long way in aligning values with an AI - it might also help bind our own spiritual wounds.
I have so far spent time unpacking our own umwelt so we might be better prepared for the rest of our philosophical journey. We are just getting to the challenging work of translating science into something more spiritually inspiring than most professional practitioners are allowed.