It's my belief that just as everything living has its time to live, and it's time to pass on, so I believe that the human race only has so many years to flourish in the universe.
I don't believe we are destined to expand forever, living in other solar systems, spreading throughout the universe forever. We know, to the best of scientific opinion, that the sun will burn out in around 5 billion years - and even if the human race could escape that, there is the eventual collapse of the universe back into its pre-big bang state, or some other form not compatible to the delicate conditions we need to survive.
If that doesn't convince you, consider that humans have been around for about 5 million years, or 5,000 millennia. Within the last 10th of the last one millennium out of those 5,000 millennia, we have harnessed electricity and traveled to other planets, created the atomic bomb, threatened our atmosphere and our water supplies. We have created enough nuclear materials to wipe out all life on the earth thousands of times over, and have created chemical weapons potent enough for a thimble full to wipe out a nation. Yet it is fairly obvious that human nature has not evolved as quickly as our technology - we easily fall into believing the much of the human race must be destroyed, and we are often willing to destroy ourselves as well rather than let our enemy survive. Humans do not seem a likely candidate to handle the powers that science have put in our hands. What are our realistic chances of making it through the next 1,000 years, let alone a few million?
And if I believe the human race will end some day, whether near or far, for me it changes everything. When we as individuals reach an age where we understand on a deep level that we will die, and we only have so many years to live, our focus shifts from merely staying alive, to figuring out what to do with the precious amount of time we have left. It is not a matter of doing the most we can; it is a matter of finding some meaning to our lives, some meaning for having wandered around on this earth for so many years during this brief flash of glory, whether long or short, before we lie down with the rest of the people and animals and quietly decompose beneath the earth.
So what of the human race? If it is not our destiny to forever expand and grow in power and glory, if some day the planets will be quiet and cold, and nothing stir except the grinding of platonic slates under gravitational pull, then what is our purpose? Imagine we are sitting somewhere, looking back on the still universe, asking ourselves, what was that all about anyway? What was the purpose of our brief 5 million years, scurrying around like it really matters whether a certain president gets elected or if we land that new job? Going back to the first bit of life in the primordial soup, what was this strange journey of carbon-based life forms, multiplying until it reaches an awareness and intelligence capable of destroying the planet that gave it birth? What was it all about?
I believe it was Charlie Chapman who, when told there was no life on other planets, said, "I feel lonely." When I contemplate our mortality, I feel sad, even though I will probably live another 30 years and experience many wonderful things in life. For some reason, we humans are not happy without a purpose, without something to make sense of it all. And that is our glory as humans as well as our burden - the animals are not awake enough to feel the angst we feel.
Our looming death forces us to seek deeper, to stretch our inner powers to the max, to seek a relationship with the universe, before it is gone from us, and we from it. This is where spirituality steps in - to answer the despair left to us by science and reason, to create purpose where there is none, to let us find our home at last - a journey I have personally only begun to take.
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