Domination makes the universe go round

Domination! That’s a dirty word, evoking unpleasant memories of grade-school bullying, military training and a shooting war. But if truth be told, it’s why we’re here. 

I have a boring job selling life insurance, and I’d go clean out of my mind if it weren’t for Monday bowling, Wednesday poker and weekend football. But note that these are all competitive activities, zero-sum events where someone has to come out on top. And competition crops up just about everywhere you look, in work, in play, and especially in love, where only the fittest gets the girl.

Which reminds me that the hen is only the egg’s way of creating another egg, meaning that we are all merely expedients for furthering the designs of the original Egg. To put it more concretely, the vast succession of living forms we know of: the virus, the bacterium, the slime molds, the blue-green algae, the fish, the reptiles, the wooly mammoth and finally us, are merely temporary lodgings in the Egg’s ceaseless quest for domination of the Universe.

There may be still a few attempts to improve on Homo the Sap: an improved memory, a longer period of egg production or a better understanding of the Cosmos, but even if we happen to be the most successful vehicle to date, we must always remember those unfortunate forms which have been abandoned along the way as unsatisfactory. We have pretty well fulfilled the Egg’s plan to dominate Earth, and are on the way to dominating the solar system, but conquest of the local galaxy and still less of deep space is beyond our scope, because we have never learned to travel faster than light, and the universe is a big place. So we must unavoidably go the way of the dinosaur and the pterodactyl as a failed species.

The far-seeing Egg will doubtless favor the development of teleportation, though even that will not get us to the nearest star, a laughable attempt at cosmic domination, so our successors will have to investigate the feasibility of wormholes or other means of being in two different places at the same time. Then we, or rather they, will be in a position to break into the parallel universes which share our space but remain invisible and unattainable to us ignorant yokels.

But there I must stop, to avoid being accused of exaggeration. Even so, I must assure you that there will never be a limit to the Egg’s destiny of total domination, and we should be grateful for this brief opportunity we have been allowed to assist it on its way.

Jack O’Brien has been writing the Someone Said column for more than a decade.