More than 31,000,000,000 seconds later, how have we grown? The great questions yawn wider and their answers grow more distant, swallowed and wallowing amidst a mass of facts, models and mechanics. Our psychology has served best to demonstrate how unfathomable we are to ourselves; our philosophy has highlighed an inability to even express and comprehend our own questions in an analysable and answerable manner.
Having detached ourselves from the rails of religion, our flounderingly secular society seeks solace in the psychic, paranormal and extra-terrestrial, evidence now of man’s Need replacing man’s Gods. Without our transcendent courtroom, we are forced to rely on and provide justice within our own ranks. the sentiments embodied before and since the Declaration of Independence are our modern-day commandments, enforced now by gunfire, not hellfire.
And our legacy? What will survive as our epitaph or the wonders of our world, and in what ways, inimical or invisible, have we left a permanent blemish? Will our kids' kids ever be able to see trees? Will our kids even have kids? Was that the right way forward? Is the world a better place? To these questions, we have no answer. Comparing the present with the past is a uniquely human ability, aided by language. To hold ourselves up against the ancient world is futile - as a race, we have not changed. As a civilisation, we have. perhaps, in a regressive dystopic tomorrow not far from yesterday, these will be seen as the ‘good old days’.
Without a Judgement Day to cap our future, we find that we are progressing and evolving eternally towards - what? Our secular religion of science would have us believe in an evolving, revolving teleology of evolution. We now are now able to walk erect, abstract and speak, and even communicate with each other occasionally. Perhaps our next step out from within the bowels of a Cave replete with technological comforts is towards a noosphere, an agglomeration of Mind. There is no reason to assume that we possess hidden depths - in fact, it goes against the teachings of a purely survival-driven Evolution - but modernity has come to represent a plundering of others and the outer, at the expense of plumbing ourselves and our inner potential. One day: a Siblinghood of Man?
Probably the logical next ‘giant leap for mankind’ will be further towards the stars and other galactic monkeys clambered down from galactic trees. There’s a bleak joke around that the reason we haven’t come into contact with an alien race yet is that any civilisation advanced enough to communicate with another would have long since destroyed itself. Indeed, this could still easily be our fate. Earth is peppered with pandora’s boxes, self-inflicted ecological time-bombs and asteroids with our name on them. The mayans employed an inexplicably exact and prescient calendar, which pencilled in the world’s end at this, the fourth age of the earth, to 23rd december 2012. Unfazed? Or simply unaware and impotent?
Crushed amidst the numberless mighty, uniform in our uniqueness, we risk atrophying from a race of individuals to a few thousand programmers and five billion monkeys on playstations. Perhaps there is a need to embrace the simple things rather than the superficial, lest our passive zombification lead to a return to idolatry, of our peers. The big bang, entropy and the eternal recurrence have replaced our sense of eternity, and neurons threaten our soul. In fluid, drowning desperation, we seek a focus for our faith in the tao, chi or love. The Millennium marks the ebb of an arbitrary wave in the slow, black sea of spacetime, in which our lines have been delivered in little more than a star-blink on the universal stage. Yet the Millennium flashes as a symbol, the watershed of a growing glowing global awareness.
The last one thousand years has been a period of unimagined upheavals. so much has been achieved - and destroyed. Our entire edifice of existence has been shaken and re-structured countless times. Having been usurped from our crow’s nest surveying from atop the chain of being at the centre of the universe, to our worm’s eye view as an ‘odious and pernicious race’ crawling on a seething mote of a planet, we find at the end of the Millennium that the human race is now back in the middle, straddling the nano and the tera of the infinite.