!! WARNING: SPOILER ALERT !!
For Christmas, a good friend of mine gave me a copy of Alan Moore's Watchmen. Few narratives have captivated me more or left me more impressed with such deeply developed characters. After first opening it, i was nearly unable to set it down, even when in the company of my friends...that is, until chapter 9. It's hard for me to say this about an anarchist, but Moore seems to have been stepping outside of his creative boundaries when he explicitly tried his hand in the realm of ideas, a place he certainly doesn't belong. In chapter 9, Doc Manhattan (a character who I really loved up until this point), after learning that he's responsible for terminal cancer in his loved ones, flees to Mars, eventually bringing his wife, Laurie up with him, and sheds all concern for human affairs. He explains to Laurie what any entity with near perfect omniscience would understand as having real universal value over human life: big mountains and valleys, the bigger and badasser the more valuable. Notice it's not any idea of beauty, but some juvanile, ungraspable idea of the sublime. Instead of asking him what he thinks value actually means, Laurie tells him stories of how awful it can be to interact with people - because it wouldn't make you feel awful if they weren't valuable, right? Someone could tell me that I'm reading too far into it, that it's just supposed to be a story without profound mmeaning. But of course, if that's true and the story doesn't have any ideas or implications to the real world, then it's a much worse story than I'm giving it credit for.
Anyway, Doc Manhattan is eventually convinced that humans do matter for something when he comes up with the idea of humans as "thermodynamic miracles." The idea is that, in order for you to be sitting here reading this, the sperm cell that eventually became you needed to fulfill an event with a 1:1000 or so probability of happening. Repeat that for your parents' existence, and similar odds for their meeting in the first place, and it really starts to seem like a miracle that any of us made it here. On top of being completely disgusted at the idea that humans need a justification for their existence, I realized that the idea doesn't work on at least two levels. 1) The "Thermodynamic Miracle" idea doesn't serve the purpose of persuading Doc to come back to Earth, since the position and velocity of every particle on Mars (which Doc is able to percieve perfectly) would have an infinitely higher improbability of occuring than the creation of a person. This makes Mars still more "valuable," according to his knee-jerk "badass factor" of value, than humans. 2) There are two ways of portraying clairvoyance in science fiction. One of them (Philip K. Dick among its patrons) involves many possible outcomes, depicting events as an ever-branching tree which allots room for an individual's free will to decide one branch or another. The other is strictly deterministic, in which outcomes are unavoidable. Which one is possible has been a question in philosophy for centuries, and Doc comes down on the side of strict determinism. Other than having strange implications for punishment, this is a blatant contradiction with the "thermodynamic miracle" idea. If determinism is true, and every event was decided at the creation of the universe, then the fact that you're sitting here isn't the least bit suprising. There wasn't for a second any doubt that you wouldn't end up existing and sitting right there.
Olympus Mons isn't a standard of value to measure humans by. Value begins and ends in the individual, and it is only because humans are aware of Olympus Mons that it's even a candidate for being a thing with value.
What really makes me itch is thinking that if I had read Watchmen two years ago, when I was less sure about what makes a good idea, and less sure about my worldview, I would have taken a lot more enjoyment out of reading it. I do, however highly recommend reading it and seeing the movie; just be sure to focus on the artistic aspects, and not the philisophical aspects, if you want to get your money's worth.
