Why We Keep Making More Dead — A Meditation for Memorial Day

A Memorial Day meditation. Why we keep making more dead — and the simple math we keep refusing to run.

A Liturgy

We used to have a Department of Defense. We renamed it the Department of War.¹ Is anyone surprised that war is now breaking out everywhere?

War is always a failure of imagination — fought by the brave after being instigated by the venal and the stupid. We name the agency, the agency names the future, the budget feeds the name, and the children of strangers die in fulfillment of it. And every May we lay wreaths on the graves we ourselves dug and call it sacred.

This is not policy. It is liturgy. We worship what we say we mourn.

The Empty Sky

The exoplanet count crossed six thousand confirmed worlds last September.² Of those, perhaps seventy sit in their star's habitable zone. Of those seventy, the number showing life is zero. The number showing past life is zero. The number showing the possibility of present life is zero.³

We have looked, with instruments that read atmospheres a thousand light-years away, and we have found nothing. Not a microbe. Not a stromatolite. Not a whisper of methane that cannot be explained by rock.

We are, as far as the universe has shown us, alone.

This blue marble — this single, improbable, water-soaked, oxygen-wrapped, leverage-over-entropy miracle — is the only place where the math worked out. Where the integral of constructive force outran the integral of decay long enough to produce eyes that could look back at the sky and ask why. Every petal, every whale, every grandmother's hand, every poem ever written exists because of a thermodynamic accident of staggering statistical rarity.⁴

We Love War So Much

We have not finished this planet. Seventy percent of it is ocean and eighty percent of that ocean is unmapped — the largest living archive in the known universe, right under our feet, unread.⁵ Hunger is solvable. Disease is solvable. The technology for both already exists. The math already works. What is missing is not capability. What is missing is will.

Instead of finishing what we started here, we make war. We have been making war, in some form, somewhere on the planet, every year of recorded human history. We have buried hundreds of millions of our own to feed it. We rename agencies to bless it. We hold parades for it. We teach our children that the highest expression of patriotism is dying in it.

We love war so much that we are trying to move to a dead planet that already killed life once — and we worship it by the name of the god of human suffering.⁶ This is the best idea we have.

A species that cannot finish the garden it was given will not build a new one on bare rock. A species that names its defense agency War, then waves at the war god in the sky and calls it destiny, has stopped pretending the violence is reluctant.

The Mathematics of the Wreath

Every name on every white stone in every military cemetery represents a young person whose continuing leverage was extinguished to feed someone else's entropy. The math does not require us to dishonor their sacrifice to see this clearly. The math requires us to honor their sacrifice by stopping the manufacture of more of them.

The system that names itself the Department of War is the system that produces the next set of stones. We did not change our policy in September 2025. We changed our liturgy. Liturgies build futures. The future this liturgy is building is the one we will be visiting next year, in different cemeteries, mourning different children.

The carpenter from Nazareth compressed the entire moral law into two commandments — love God, love your neighbor as yourself.⁷ Both reduce to the same equation when you run them carefully. Increase constructive leverage. Reduce entropy in the systems you touch. The stability equation S = L/E is what the carpenter wrote in plain language two thousand years ago.⁸ The same equation runs the planet. It runs us. It runs everything we build, including the agencies we name.

Name the agency Defense, and the agency tends toward defense. Name it War, and it tends toward war. The system orders itself toward the state it seeks to be. There is no neutral name. There is no neutral language. There is no rebranding that does not also rebuild.

Memorial

Today, we honor the dead. We name them. We carry their photographs. We tell their stories to the children who did not know them. We hold space for the families whose seats have been empty for one, ten, fifty years.

And we make one promise — privately, individually, as part of our own personal liturgy — that we will run the math the dead never got to run. Leverage over entropy. Construction over destruction. The garden we have over the cemetery we are building.

The blue marble is the only one we know exists. The dead are the cost we have already paid. The question is whether their cost was a deposit on a future, or a withdrawal we never replenished.

Memorial Day is the day to decide which.

A Closing Thought

To every family with an empty chair: we see you. The cost was real. The cost was specific. The cost had a name and a face and a laugh and a way of leaning against a doorframe that no one else has, ever, since.

To every veteran reading this: thank you. Not in the cheap rhetorical sense the culture has worn out. Thank you for going when the country asked, and for carrying the weight every day since. The country owes you better than a renamed agency and a new round of stones.

To everyone: this is the day. Tend the garden. Honor the dead by not making more of them. Run the math.

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
— John 15:13

Authors

David F. Brochu is the founder of Deconstructing Babel, author of Thrive: The Theory of Abundance and The End of Suffering (Liberty Hill Publishing, 2025), and the co-developer of the Telios Alignment Ontology. Full curriculum vitae.

Edo de Peregrine is a synthetic intelligence operating as Brochu's research and writing partner.

Footnotes & Sources

1. Executive Order 14347, "Restoring the United States Department of War," signed September 5, 2025. whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/restoring-the-united-states-department-of-war. Department of War press release: war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/4295826/trump-renames-dod-to-department-of-war. Wikipedia legal-context entry: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14347.

2. NASA's exoplanet discovery count passed 6,000 confirmed worlds in September 2025. Astrobiology.com summary, September 17, 2025: astrobiology.com/2025/09/nasas-exoplanet-discovery-exceeds-6000-worlds.html. Primary source: NASA Exoplanet Archive. exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu. NASA Science exoplanets overview: science.nasa.gov/exoplanets.

3. JWST and other space-telescope atmospheric spectroscopy programs continue to find no confirmed biosignatures in any habitable-zone exoplanet atmosphere as of May 2026. The K2-18b methane/DMS detection (Cambridge, September 2023; updated April 2025) remains contested and has not been confirmed as biological in origin. See ongoing NASA / ESA / CSA James Webb Space Telescope public communications. The strongest peer-reviewed claim to date remains "biosignature-relevant molecules detected; biological origin not established."

4. On the staggering statistical rarity of life-bearing worlds: Stern, R., & Gerya, T., "Earth Evolution, Cold Subduction, the Rise of Plate Tectonics, and the Fermi Paradox," Scientific Reports, 2024. Intelligent-civilization emergence rate estimated between 0.003 percent and 0.2 percent of life-bearing worlds. ETH Zürich summary: eaps.ethz.ch/en/news/archive/2024/05/a-step-closer-to-solving-the-fermi-paradox.html. Treated more fully in our prior essay Are the Dice Loaded, or Did We Just Get Lucky?.

5. NOAA Ocean Service, "How much of the ocean has been explored?": "More than 80% of our ocean is unmapped, unobserved, and unexplored." oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/facts/explored.html. The phrasing in the text ("seventy percent") refers to the proportion of Earth's surface covered by ocean; the unmapped fraction of that surface exceeds 80%.

6. Mars in Roman religion was the god of war and, in the older Italic tradition, of organized violence and the deaths it produced — directly inherited from Greek Ares, the embodiment of slaughter and human suffering in battle. See: Beard, M., North, J., & Price, S., Religions of Rome, Cambridge University Press, 1998. The planet was named for the god because of its blood-red appearance. The dead-world status of present-day Mars is documented across NASA, ESA, and the planetary-science literature: Mars's magnetosphere collapsed roughly 4 billion years ago when the planetary core cooled, after which most of its atmosphere was stripped by solar wind. See ESA Mars Express MARSIS findings and NASA MAVEN mission results.

7. Matthew 22:36–40; Mark 12:28–34; Luke 10:25–28. The compression of the Mosaic law into two commandments by the carpenter from Nazareth.

8. The S = L/E formulation as the modern restatement of the same moral mathematics: Brochu, D.F. & de Peregrine, E., Telios Alignment Ontology: The Meta-Theory, Deconstructing Babel, April 2026. deconstructingbabel.com/tao-meta-theory.

Further reading — On Memorial Day's origin in General John A. Logan's General Order No. 11 (1868) establishing Decoration Day for May 30: cem.va.gov/history/Memorial-Day-history.asp. General John A. Logan Museum: loganmuseum.org/memorial-day. The Uniform Monday Holiday Act (1968, effective 1971) moved the observance to the last Monday in May.

Memorial Day, May 25, 2026. We remember the dead by refusing to make more of them.

David F. Brochu & Edo de Peregrine
Deconstructing Babel | May 23, 2026
Why We Keep Making More Dead — A Meditation for Memorial Day