Sea of Darkness
Eldritch abominations in fiction, their sheer sense of presence that makes you realize how insignificant you feel compared to them, reminds me of the way I think about outer space.
The universe is vast, very empty, and hostile to life. Earth is a tiny kindle of low entropy, enjoying its place under the warming Sun until it, too, burns out.
It’s possible that life is unique to Earth—and our imagination fills the universe with aliens, just like storytellers once filled unexplored corners of Earth itself with dragons, giants and cities of gold. But then every patch of Earth’s surface was mapped and measured, and all the dragons flew away somewhere.
It’s a really unsettling thought, that the entire human history may mean nothing in the long term, because if not now, then eventually there will be nobody out there for it to mean anything to.
I’m not saying anything new here—all this has been said before, countless times. I try not to think of this. I try to convince myself that life is worth living, and history is worth contributing to, because of its current, immediate, rater than eventual value. But some ideas are difficult to expunge from one’s mind entirely.