Extinction

The utter vacuum and meaningless emptiness at the very heart of our existence is disconcerting, dissonant and it is in general the last thing that anyone wants to hear about or acknowledge. From those brief few years we may each be lucky enough to experience, we seek and weave what little meaning and purpose we can glean from the recombinatory patterns of symbols and cultural narratives we are born into. Taking our place time and space as natural and as possessing inevitability, as much due to our limited cognitive horizons as to the implicit entrainment of our various and diverse cultural contexts, we fail to perceive the sheer improbability and peculiarity of our lives. Failing to perceive the utter unlikelihood of that which is, we assert truth values to what appears to be and, even as the edges of our world and civilisation fray and dissassemble themselves in an accelerated decrepitude and under the aggregate burden of their own inevitable entropy, we march blindly into the eternal night of self-extinguishing oblivion.

Is the Cosmos littered with the empty shells of nascent civilisations that, like our own, could never quite achieve the requisite level of intelligence and maturity to solve the problem that they themselves represented? It is a wordless, formless and inconceivable horror to consider that in the small window of time amd material opportunity available to us, individually and collectively, we might fail not only ourselves but the living, learning and sentient Universe – as a whole. We are not separate from or superior to this world and it is in an endemic pathology of naked human self-interest and obscene narcissism that we might trace or project that future arc of dissolution and forgetting that is the certain fate of all arrogant futility. It is sad, it is true, but I really fear that without a radical metamorphosis of thought and behaviour, we are all on a fast-track to extinction.