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Among the lives for me to live, the best
Is this one: it’s without competitors.
How can it really matter to us whether,
Millennia before the Pyramids,
Rose towers of a culture now quite lost
Not ancestors of our antiquity,
On land now sunk beneath Atlantic waves?
And yet it does. I love those people whether
Their cities ever flourished there or not.
How can it really make a difference whether,
Before Archaea had invented life,
A different life here, killed by ice, bequeathed
Some remnants of its different way to live
Which our life uses still—adenine, say?
And yet it does. I love that legacy whether
It ever happened on this world or not.
It could be someone’s looking at our world
From distant worlds moving at near-light speed,
But is it meaningful to feel akin to them
When we couldn’t invariantly distinguish whether
Their life is far in our future or our past?
And yet I hope they watch and wonder, whether
They think contemporaneously or not.
If nothing in the cosmos tells us whether
It opens out forever in space and time
Or curls upon itself in space and time
So that geodesics long enough are closed,
How could it ever be conceived of whole?
And yet I fondly love it whole, whether
My concept of it has some truth or not.
Though many worlds are out there, endlessly many,
You can’t infer all possible worlds exist.
Enough. This verse, unlike the universe,
Was due to end; and now its end has come.
2021
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Davis, C. Whether. Math Intelligencer 44, 161 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00283-021-10166-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00283-021-10166-7