(July 20, 2024 at 7:38 pm)MR. Macabre 666 Wrote: I'm not sure where this topic would fit into this forum, so I thought I'd try it out here. Are any of us really aware of how completely and utter-ably insignificant we all are in the cosmos?
I've been a fan of the work of H.P.Lovecraft ever since discovering him in high school, and I've read his stories and poems multiple times. If you're not familiar with him, he's the E.A. Poe of the 20th century, a purveyor of horror and dread until he died of stomach cancer in 1937 at the age of 46. Just like Poe, he wasn't very well known until after his death, and lived an impoverished life.
The reason I've mentioned his work is because in his stories, he reminds us of how small and insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things. He pit's us against the OLD ONES, a race of deities or gods who have inhabited the cosmos for billions of years, and have ruled here on the earth since before we even existed.
There are secret cults that still worship and perform rituals in their honor scattered around the globe, and if/when they return, when the stars are aligned properly, will return and destroy the human race. Not because they're evil, or because we pose a threat to them, but because they're totally indifferent to our existence. We're not even a speck of dust in the history of the cosmos.
There won't be anyone/thing to remember us when the human race goes extinct, which is going to happen, it's only a matter of time.
That depends entirely on how you measure it. In terms of almost any physical metric that you can name we don't even show up as a rounding error even when only compared to our own planet. On the flip side, if our species evolves into something further up the Kardashev scale then we might reshape the entire universe.
It's a bit like looking at any given molecule and wondering at its significance. Probably pretty low unless it just happens to be the prebiotic autocatalyzing entity that gave rise to all life.
