Awright! Lotta good stuff here. ;-)

The John Carter of Mars books were one of the signal joys of my youth. Too bad there weren't a few more of them written.

Bill, the meaning of life is: Whatever each person decides it is!

That is to say...it varies a great deal, depending on who you are and what you think is important. It can even vary a great deal for one single person from one day to the next in some cases...while for others it may remain pretty consistent.

Then you have those types who are so devoted to sheer mental activity for its own sake rather than for any real purpose that they decide that they are among the few smart enough to conclude what others around them are too naive or dense to...that life is meaningless! ;-) That's a notion that only an isolated mentality that's in a narcissistic love with its own imagined brilliance could ever come up with...and it leads absolutely nowhere useful, but GOSH! it sounds like quite a revelation, doesn't it? Whole schools of modern existentialist philosopyy have been built upon the empty and defeatist foundation of that outlook. Such notions, I think, arise when a civilization is in a period of decline.