I’m simply questioning my childish assumption that catastrophic mega events are relegated to the past. The assumption is based on the scopes of the existence of complex extant life and the relative calm of the present Holocene. I grew into the perception that mega events were of a bygone era because geologic time is not intuitive to children, and until recently I have not had the casual curiosity to expand my awareness and question said assumptions.

The existence of protohumans up to the present seemed grounded in some underlying truth of ongoing stability that now seems totally at odds with geological reality and timescales. The question here is grasping at straws in a way; hoping that perhaps this connection is wrong as I realize the finite potential of complex life as it exists presently.

I mean in all likelihood we have tens of millions of years and an ice age or two before a true mega event pushes life into much simpler forms from the immense pressure of planetary cataclysm. If we manage to master biology as an engineering field, we may escape such a planetary bound fate in the distant future, but as long as we are trapped in this planetary gravity prison, we are perpetually sentenced to death row by the judge of geologic time.

In other words I’m realizing the full extent of geology as a study of the future where no event present is relegated to the past. My mind then races to questions of what it would be like and the building signs of eminent cataclysm. I do not mean this like the emotional hype doomsday psychosis nonsense in clickbait media or the discovery channel. I mean more like from a hard science fiction (extremely amateur hobbyist) writers perspective. Even if most of humanity migrates to cislunar space or elsewhere, there will likely be a large population present on the planet. How that plays out across generations and how diversity of life is valued becomes interesting to me under the premise of biology as a fully mastered engineering field.

Of course it is mostly speculative within my interests and curiosities. Still I think there are a lot of people that share the assumption that the geologic past is not the future; that something fundamentally has changed; that we are masters of our own fate where we are the greatest and only risk to ourselves in perpetuity, perhaps only short of an astroid impact of sufficient magnitude.