We are currently in a renaissance. Much harm is possible but the sheer amount of progress we face is indeed daunting. "Beware the bearers of false gifts and promises" - and so it goes with the famous crop circle. I don't think belief is what we're missing. I remember well hearing that 'do or do not, there is no try'.
Cataclysmology is a wacky term for, let's say, doomsday cults. It has to be admired that the chosen few have repeatedly drawn a checkmark on the calendar and continues to move it back and back and back. And as much as I admire the story of the so-called study of this term and it's many facts and figures, space is still a question mark for our modern eyes and ears. The moon, for example, is established science by some but so oddly specific it has to make you wonder.
The birth of Venus, for example, is said to have been a wonderous moment in our galactic history, wherein the destroyed planet of Tiamat had such a sensational impact on the Earth's orbit that the only mechanism by which this could be solved would be the entry of a new planet into orbit around the sun. I have no fucking idea if this happened either.
Entropy yes, ascension no? We're so limited by our human experience of life, maturation, and ultimately our mortality that we're not being able to see something that stands out so clearly to some of us. The finality of life gives rise to this existential fervor and unrelenting restless anxiety that drives us forward, making the unthinkable possible and the rather thinkable hard to accomplish. Live, die, rinse, repeat.
I think a sort of stasis arrives to any sort of planet like ours - not to get too far out. There is a divine structure to the cosmos, even if it lay mostly empty, barren, and cold. Stars like ours are so significant that we marvel at the possibility of life on Proxima Centauri, which would be planets orbiting a red dwarf and so we change our eye color and plant photosynthesis if our proposed journey is ever to have kicked off.
I could go on and on about the future and the past and whether our destiny is sealed. I don't know if that's even the main focus. The main point I'd like to get across is that you, I, we she them that well all MATTER. You could be looking 500 years into the future as some of us do or be stately and measured in the here and now. Hell, even Thomas Jefferson thought the Louisiana purchase may contain dinosaurs.
Out of a spiteful defiance and denial, what we do indeed echoes throughout history, and is never really lost but simply relocated. What happens inside of a black hole? Again, not sure, but do we really know what a billion year-old society is capable of? I can't chalk it up to simply, "that's the way it is, circle of life" kind of thinking.
The phrase 'in order to create a more perfect Union' gets mixed up with something about 'under God' which is funny to me. The snap to attention of everyone experiencing something that's incredibly larger then themselves is another. Why can't we have that always? We should literally always be humble, deferential, and grateful to whatever web has been sown. I find the more you take some of those layers away, the more we seem like rippling mirrors of one another,.. concerned only enough to take a quick look and shy away from our own reflection, or really what makes us us.
Apathy will take you *this* far and you can bet it's a tried and true form of denial. Pronoia can take you a lot further but beware of always seeing the lights as shining forms of warmth. When you break it down, I'm not even sure times like that even exist. Things shift and drift, and history marches on again.