The Big Bang, Humility and Us

It has been 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang
when the universe burst open the emptiness of space
Now the void that was is a mind-bending
array of gasses, stars, planets and more--
moving and changing in predictable and in
unpredictable ways in all directions.
It is a wonder to behold the
magnificence of it all and too difficult to
comprehend forces at work that are always
Beyond our grasp and control.

We know with enough certainty that our lease
on this planet we call home will end in about
four billion years when those who remain will all die in a
holocaust of fire and debris when our sun
exhausts its fuel explodes and makes our
space uninhabitable or just gone.
Perhaps we will die sooner if a wayward chunk of matter
comes along during an unstoppable journey.

We are compelled to think to plan and to execute
a way to keep ourselves alive knowing in
advance that travel to another galaxy is
an unreachable goal.
Every pathway outward is cluttered with death traps
that await us or
we will encounter forces of such immensity that we
are powerless to overcome them.

Astrophysicists insist that finding intelligent life
elsewhere would be our grandest achievement
since climbing out of the primordial stew.
I think not.
Learning to live with ourselves would easily
surpass such a finding.

Pagan beliefs hinder us.
False gods deceive us.
Conviscating wealth demeans us.
Wars reveal our inhumanity.
Obstructing justice insults us.
Greed and ideologies motivate us to
Kill one another
Until there is nothing left
of us.

If the universe is but a testing ground
We are failing and are
Well on our way out.