The religion of my childhood

 

Spaceships leave a scorched Earth when the sun turns into a red giant. Presumably, the dark and heavy ships will take the last humans to some more suitable home world light years away. This was the "religion" (or rather pseudo-religion) of my childhood. And obviously of those adults whose books or magazines I was reading. Progress never ends and our destiny really is in the stars! Besides, surely human technology must have progressed quite a bit in billions of years? 

At the same time, there was *something* worrisome about the whole thing. I mean, many of the same books claimed that the universe was finite in time. One day, it would completely die ("the heat death")...never to be revived again. As in never ever. WTF?!

Yes, this use to worry me as a child. Not enough to keep me awake at night, true, but enough to be perplexed. Since it strongly implied that there is no progress. That the "heat death" may be trillions of years into the future doesn´t matter. At some point, everything will just come to an end, and that´s that. 

And it still is. Except that I no longer believe in the contradictory high modern scientism of my sadly misspent youth. On the one hand, I strongly suspect that we live in an eternal universe, a ditto multiverse, or a cyclical cosmos. On the other hand, there is no "progress" within this framework. At least not in our little corner of the universe, where we are probably stuck until that red giant situation...

If there is some escape hatch or exit door is, I suppose, the 10,000 dollar question.