What is the meaning of life?

What is the meaning of life?  Where did we come from?  Where did the earth come from?  How do we measure our lives?  What's makes our lives valuable?  We all think about life and death occasionally.  The adventurer, hero, mountain climber George Mallory wrote, "What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy.  And joy is, after all, the end of life.  We do not live to eat and make money."  And Hunter S. Thompson wrote, "Life has improved immeasurably since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously." Many many poems have been written about life and death.  The poet and playwright Robert Browning wrote, "I shall be found by the fire, suppose/O'er a great wise book as beseemeth age,/While the shutters flap as the cross-wind blows/And I turn the page, and I turn the page."

Do you know the word "thanatopsis?"   It is a view or contemplation of death.  Thanatopsis is of Greek origin (thanato- meaning death and -opsis meaning likeness or idea) and it was first used in English by the poet William Cullen Bryant in his 1817 poem of the same name.  Nice poem about death.?   It states that we are all going to die someday just as all have died before us (kings and the powerful included).