Often, I think about our effort at permanence – how we construct cities, nations, and entire civilizations as though they were eternal fixtures rather than brief arrangements of matter in an indifferent cosmos. There’s something both terrifying and liberating in contemplating the immense scale of time, in recognizing that Earth spins not just on its axis, not just around the Sun, but traces a vast circle through the galaxy that takes 230 million years to complete. We call it a galactic year, though the word “year” grossly understates the magnitude at play. When I first started brooding over the notion of our solar system’s long journey around the center of our galaxy, I experienced a kind of vertigo. All of human history, every love story and war, every poem written and building erected, has occurred within less than one-thousandth of one percent of a single galactic orbit. We are, quite literally, mayflies boasting of our permanence at dawn, certain the sun will never set because we’ve never seen it do so.

i. Galactic climate
The parallel begs to be drawn. As Earth rotates, we experience day and night – radical transformations that cause entire ecosystems to reorganize around this simple rhythm. A nocturnal desert that seems lifeless under noon sun erupts with activity in the darkness. Plants shift their metabolisms. Even stones expand and contract, as if breathing with the planet’s rotation. As Earth orbits with its tilted axis, we experience seasons that transform landscapes so completely that a visitor might never imagine their other face. I’ve stood in forests in deep winter, surrounded by what appear to be dead architectural forms – bare trees like skeletal fingers against gray sky. The same forest in summer becomes an impenetrable green cathedral, humid and buzzing with ten thousand forms of life. The transformation is so complete it seems like magic, though it’s merely orbital mechanics. So the question haunts me: If such dramatic changes arise from these smaller cycles, what transformations might unfold across the incomprehensibly vaster cycle of our galactic orbit? What cosmic seasons might we be blind to, living as we do in a single moment of a much grander year?

The science whispers tantalizing possibilities, though always with uncertainty. Every 30 to 35 million years, our solar system crosses the galactic plane – that dense disk where stars crowd together and dark matter concentrates in ways we barely understand. Some researchers find troubling patterns: mass extinctions that seem to pulse with these crossings, or with our passages through spiral arms every 140 million years or so. In these denser regions, the cosmic environment shifts. Radiation increases, maybe doubling. Supernovae bloom closer to our small world. The Oort cloud, that distant sphere of frozen debris, feels gravitational tugs that send comets tumbling sunward. I’ve read some of the papers and followed several debates. Some scientists see apparent periodicities – 26 million years here, 62 million there, numbers that emerge from the fossil record like a hidden metronome keeping time to mass death. Others, using more sophisticated models, find these correlations dissolve into statistical noise, wishful pattern-seeking in random catastrophe. But even the possibility is dizzying. What if our planet’s climate, a fundamental aspect of evolution, operates on rhythms dictated by galactic timescales?

ii. Changing worlds
Mars haunts my imagination more than any other world. When I look at those high-resolution images from our rovers – ancient river channels carved in rust-red stone, minerals that could form only in standing water – I see a ghost of what was. Four billion years ago, Mars possessed what Earth still has: a magnetic field generated by a molten iron core, an invisible shield deflecting solar wind, and an atmosphere thick enough to hold warmth and water. But cores cool. Magnetic dynamos fail. And then the slow catastrophe begins – solar wind stripping the atmosphere away, not in some dramatic cataclysm but atom by atom, molecule by molecule, across billions of years. The planet that might have harbored life in warm, shallow seas became what we see now: a frozen desert where the atmospheric pressure is so low that water cannot exist as liquid on the surface. It either freezes or boils, nothing in between. Venus tells the opposite tale, dreadful in a different way. Despite its proximity to the Sun, early Venus may have been temperate, even habitable, with oceans lasting possibly two billion years. But proximity becomes destiny given sufficient time. As the young Sun brightened – as all stars do, converting hydrogen to helium, growing hotter – Venus absorbed more energy. Ocean water evaporated. Water vapor, a potent greenhouse gas, trapped heat, causing more evaporation. At some point, the process became unstoppable. Ultraviolet radiation split water molecules. Hydrogen escaped to space. Without water, carbon dioxide couldn’t be locked into rocks. The atmosphere thickened, temperatures soared. Today, Venus’s surface reaches 462°C under crushing pressure – a world so transformed from its potential that it might as well be an entirely different planet.

These aren’t truly reversible cycles, I keep reminding myself. Mars will not naturally regain its atmosphere. Venus will not cool and rain. These are one-way journeys through possibility space, worlds aging in ways that make our concept of aging seem quaint. Yet the transformations are so complete, so absolute, that I can’t help wondering: What if consciousness itself follows these patterns? Rising when conditions permit, flourishing briefly, then vanishing so completely that no trace remains? Even Earth has worn faces I struggle to imagine. During the Snowball Earth episodes between 720 and 635 million years ago, our planet froze from pole to equator. Not the ice ages we know from recent geological history, but something far more extreme – a world encased in ice, possibly a kilometer thick, reflecting sunlight back to space, locked in a frozen equilibrium that lasted millions of years. Life survived – it must have, we’re here – but only in the deepest ocean vents, in tiny pockets of melt near volcanoes, in refugia so small and scattered that evolution nearly started over when the ice finally broke. What saved Earth from permanent freezing? Volcanoes, ironically. With the oceans frozen, volcanoes could no longer have their carbon dioxide absorbed by water and converted to rock. CO₂ accumulated in the atmosphere for millions of years until the greenhouse effect became strong enough to trigger melting. When the ice broke, it broke catastrophically. The planet swung from frozen to tropical in possibly just thousands of years. The Cambrian explosion of complex life followed soon after, as if Earth itself had awakened from a long dream.

iii. Silence beneath the stones
There’s a thought experiment I often had independently until I discovered it had been proposed already as the Silurian Hypothesis by two brave scientists: If an industrial civilization existed on Earth tens of millions of years ago, would we know? Despite the simplicity of this question, its answer is haunting: almost certainly no. When you trace what happens to our markers of existence, you find that cities crumble to dust within millennia without maintenance. Look at how quickly jungle reclaims Mayan pyramids and, even more contemporarily, Ukraine’s Chernobyl; or how sand buries ancient ports. Metal corrodes and disperses into soil. Even plastics, those supposed eternal pollutants, would be indistinguishable from natural organic compounds after millions of years of compression and heating in sedimentary rock. The roads we’ve scarred across continents would erode to nothing. Our satellites would long ago have spiraled down and vaporized. Those anomalous artifacts some claim as evidence of ancient aliens – the out-of-place objects, the too-perfect spheres, the supposedly impossible metallurgy – what if we’ve been looking at them all wrong? What if they’re not alien at all, but echoes of Earth’s own forgotten springs? Each time consciousness has flowered on this world, it might have left such scattered seeds, compressed into forms we can’t recognize, their original nature as mysterious to us as ours will be to whatever intelligence comes next. We search the skies for other minds when we could just as well be searching the stones beneath our feet.

Then again, maybe we can’t. There is a deeper erasure constantly in motion here on Earth. The ocean floor, which covers 71 percent of Earth’s surface, is completely recycled by subduction every 100 to 200 million years. Pulled down into the mantle, melted, reformed. Gone. Continental crust lasts longer but endures constant transformation – mountains rising and eroding, plains flooding and drying, rocks metamorphosing under heat and pressure until their original nature becomes unreadable. After 100 million years – less than half a galactic orbit – an industrial civilization like ours would leave only the faintest ghost: a thin sedimentary layer enriched in heavy metals, showing unusual carbon isotope ratios, containing traces of synthetic compounds. Compressed in rock strata and examined eons hence, this signature would appear as a brief anomaly, a geological instant, maybe a few millimeters thick. Future geologists might puzzle over it, might construct theories about volcanic eruptions or asteroid impacts. Would they imagine cities, computers, beings who looked at stars and wondered if they were alone? The Anthropocene will leave such a layer. We’re writing it now with every ton of CO₂, every piece of plastic, every nuclear test. In 100 million years, if intelligence exists to examine it, they might notice something odd about this particular stratum. Or they might not. As such, we could be the third, the fifth, the hundredth flowering of consciousness on this world, and be none the wiser. When I stand on ancient rock formations – Nigeria’s Zuma Rock near Abuja, the striking Rock formations in Jos City – I’m touching stone billions of years old. But that stone has been metamorphosed, reformed, heated, and compressed so many times that its original nature is lost. What stories has it swallowed? What civilizations has it digested into itself?

iv. Vertigo of deep time
Trying to hold it all in mind at once – the full span of deep time, the cycling of galactic years, the transformation of worlds – triggers a kind of philosophical nausea. Every meaning-making institution and structure humans have built assumes some form of permanence or at least continuity. We speak of leaving legacies, of building for the future, of making a dent in the universe, of the march of progress. Even our apocalyptic fears imagine us as the final chapter, the species that either succeeds in reaching the stars or fails and ends the story. But what if we’re simply another verse in an endless song, neither first nor last, neither special nor purposeless, just… present? Here for this particular configuration of atoms and energy, this specific moment in the galaxy’s rotation, this season that happens to favor carbon-based chemistry organized into patterns complex enough to wonder at themselves? Western minds rebel against this. The predominant narrative is based on arrows, not circles – creation pointing toward culmination, history progressing toward its end. Perhaps this is why the possibility of cosmic seasons disturbs so profoundly. If intelligence rises and falls like waves on a beach, each one thinking itself the ocean entire, then our carefully constructed narrative of purpose collapses. We are not climbing toward transcendence but flowering briefly in conditions that happen, temporarily, to permit our existence.

Yet hasn’t the universe been whispering this to us all along? The Mayans measured vast epochs we misread as apocalypse rather than simply the turning of cosmic wheels. The Hindu cosmos breathes in and out across 311 trillion years – creation and dissolution as natural as inhaling and exhaling. Even the Stoics glimpsed something true in their eternal recurrence, though they couldn’t have known about galactic orbits or deep time. If cosmic seasons are real in any meaningful sense, then one might imagine consciousness itself is seasonal – not a ladder to climb but a wheel that turns. Our achievements – art, science, love, the cathedrals of culture – would be no less beautiful for their impermanence, but neither would they be unique. Other minds in other epochs might have gazed at these same stars and asked these same questions, then vanished so completely that we cannot detect even the faintest echo of their wondering.

v. Winter is coming
Think about the Antarctic midge, Belgica antarctica, that freezes solid through winter. Its cells contain proteins that prevent ice crystals from rupturing membranes, and it waits – should waiting imply consciousness, it doesn’t possess – months in suspended animation for spring’s return. From the midge’s perspective – if it could have one – winter might be eternal, the final state of existence. We might be such midges on a galactic scale. The conditions that permitted humanity to emerge – stable climate, abundant resources, the right atmospheric mix – have existed for probably 12,000 years. Agriculture, cities, writing, all of civilization fit within this brief warm spell. Homo sapiens itself has only existed for roughly 300,000 years, and our entire mammalian lineage since the dinosaurs’ extinction represents less than a third of one galactic orbit. Trying to really digest these timescales often induces a strange mix of wonder and vertigo. The Sun brightens as it ages – this isn’t speculation but nuclear physics. It increases luminosity by 10 percent every billion years as hydrogen fuses to helium, as helium builds up in the core, and as fusion reactions require higher temperatures to continue.

In one billion years, or two if we’re fortunate, Earth will enter a runaway greenhouse effect. The oceans will evaporate. The atmosphere will thicken with water vapor, trap more heat, and cause more evaporation – Venus’s fate replaying on our world. Before that, about 600 million years from now, atmospheric CO₂ will drop below the levels required for C3 photosynthesis. Plants will die. With them goes the base of most food chains. Complex life as we know it ends. These aren’t maybes or perhaps – these are consequences of stellar evolution and atmospheric chemistry as sure as tomorrow’s sunrise. More certain, actually, since sunrise depends on Earth’s continued rotation, while stellar physics depends only on fusion dynamics we understand with mathematical precision. Yet here we are, worried about a stranger’s road rage, losing sleep over whether posterity – the equivalent of two cosmic milliseconds later – would remember the reach of our influence, and dissecting the meaning of our being based upon what other people think of us from that party six years ago – concerns that feel monumentally important, but also exist within a cosmic eyeblink. We are insects in the galactic winter, or perhaps the summer – we have no way to know which season we’re in. We only know it’s temporary.

vi. Galactic flowers
There’s a cherry tree I drive by often that blooms for precisely one week each spring. For that week, it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen – pink blossoms so delicate they seem impossible, attracting bees and birds and the wonder of every passing human. Then the petals fall, carpeting the ground in pink snow, and the tree returns to being just another piece of urban greenery. The tree doesn’t mourn its fallen blossoms. It doesn’t rage against the brevity of its flowering. It simply blooms when conditions permit, expressing its nature fully without regard for permanence. This is what I think consciousness might be on a cosmic scale – not an achievement to be preserved but a process to be experienced, a way the universe briefly becomes aware of itself before returning to unknowing. Would those cherry blossoms be more beautiful if they lasted forever? Would love mean more if we had infinite time to express it? Would understanding the universe be more significant if that understanding could be preserved eternally? I don’t think so. I believe the preciousness comes from the transience, the meaning from the fleeting nature of the experience.

Each emergence of intelligence – if there have been others, if there will be others – represents the universe achieving self-awareness through a different aperture. We see cosmos through human eyes, with human concepts, human emotions. Another intelligence would see it differently, understand it differently, experience it differently. Each perspective is unique, irreplaceable, and temporary. When we vanish, that particular way of seeing vanishes forever. This doesn’t diminish us – if anything, it makes each moment of consciousness more significant. We are not the universe’s purpose but one of its possibilities, explored briefly before the kaleidoscope turns and new patterns form. We are matter contemplating matter, energy recognizing its own patterns, quarks and electrons organized in such a way that they can think about quarks and electrons.

vii. Cosmic yawn
Faced with our cosmic insignificance and inevitable erasure, I could choose despair. Many do. The heat death of the universe looms in the far future. Our Sun will die. Earth will be consumed. Every trace of our existence will be erased so thoroughly that it will be as if we never were. Even if we spread to the stars, entropy wins in the end. The last black holes will evaporate in 10^100 years, leaving nothing but sparse photons in an expanding void. But I find myself choosing wonder instead. Wonder at the sheer improbability of our existence – that atoms can organize themselves into patterns capable of love, art, mathematics, and music. Wonder at being part of a process so vast I can barely conceive it, yet intimate enough that I experience it as the feeling of rain on skin, the taste of cream in tea, the sudden understanding of a beautiful equation.

We are the cosmos awakening to itself, however briefly. When I look at stars, it’s the universe looking at itself. When I love another person, it’s the universe experiencing love through the narrow aperture of human consciousness. This is either meaningless or the most meaningful thing imaginable – probably both simultaneously. The knowledge that civilizations might have risen and fallen before us, that they might rise and fall after us, that intelligence might be a recurring phenomenon rather than a unique achievement, changes how I see our moment. We’re not the chosen ones, the purpose, the goal. We’re a note in a symphony, a wave in an ocean, a single spring in an endless succession of seasons. This is humbling, but also liberating. We don’t bear the weight of being the universe’s only chance at self-awareness. We can simply be what we are: a brief flowering of consciousness, beautiful in its impermanence.

viii. Cosmic Farming
If cosmic seasons are real – not as perfect cycles but as vast rhythmic changes in conditions – then I might need a philosophy to match. Not the desperate scramble for permanence that characterizes so much human effort, not the fiction of eternal progress that our culture sells, but something more like the wisdom of farmers who plant knowing winter will come. Every spring, farmers plant seeds knowing the crop will die in autumn. They don’t despair at this certainty. They don’t refuse to plant because the harvest is temporary. They understand themselves as part of a cycle larger than individual plants or even individual human lives. The field will be planted again next spring, though they themselves might not be there to see it.

Maybe civilizations are like this, too. They arise when conditions permit, flourish in their season, then pass away – not in failure but in completion, having expressed their nature fully. Their ruins, compressed into sedimentary layers, become the foundation upon which future civilizations build, never knowing what lies beneath their feet. Maybe intelligence is not rare but rhythmic, appearing wherever and whenever cosmic seasons allow. Each instance thinks itself unique – how could it think otherwise? – and rediscovers fire and mathematics and music as if for the first time. Which, from its perspective, it is. The universe explores consciousness through countless different forms, each one a unique experiment in what matter can become when conditions align just right.

ix. Heritage
I stand on ground made from compressed time. Every atom in my body except hydrogen was forged in the nuclear furnace of dying stars. The calcium in my bones, the iron in my blood – these were created in supernovae billions of years ago, scattered across space, gathered again by gravity into new stars and planets, cycled through countless forms before becoming me. I am not in the universe; I am the universe, temporarily organized into this pattern I call myself. The oxygen I breathe was poison to the organisms that first produced it 2.4 billion years ago. The Great Oxygenation Event was an apocalypse for anaerobic life, but it set the stage for creatures like us, which depend on oxygen to exist. The fossil fuels that powered our industrial revolution are compressed remains of forests that captured sunlight 300 million years ago. We stand atop layers of history so deep that most of it is literally beneath our feet, pressed into stone.

And we’re adding our own layer now – the Anthropocene discontinuity, future geologists might call it. A thin band enriched with plutonium from nuclear tests, with microplastics, and with the isotopic signature of burned fossil fuels. Compressed and examined 100 million years hence, it will appear as a dark line, perhaps a centimeter thick, a geological instant. Future investigators might puzzle over what caused this anomaly. Was it volcanism? An asteroid impact? Or might they guess the truth – that intelligence arose here, burned bright and fast, and left this mark as its only lasting signature? The thought could be depressing, but it feels almost sacred – this idea that we’re adding our note to Earth’s vast score, even if no one will be able to read it, even if the score itself will eventually be destroyed. We’re part of Earth’s biography, part of the story it tells through its rocks, part of the endless experiment in complexity that the universe conducts through planets like ours.

x. Our season
So what do we do with this knowledge? How do we live, knowing that everything we create will be erased, that civilizations might have risen and fallen before us, that the universe continues its vast cycles, indifferent to human concerns and ambitions? We could collapse into nihilism, abandon all projects, and stop caring about anything since nothing lasts. But that would be a misunderstanding of what we are. We are not monuments seeking permanence. We are processes, patterns, and flows of energy and information. A river doesn’t fail because it flows on. A song doesn’t fail because it ends eventually. We don’t fail because we’re temporarily conscious. We could deny it all, construct elaborate fantasies of permanence, insist that humanity is special, eternal, destined to repopulate dead planets and colonize the stars. But that, too, would be like a child refusing to accept that summer ends, that flowers die, that everything changes in the course of time.

The universe has been teaching us about impermanence from the beginning – in every sunset, every death, every moment that passes and cannot be retrieved. Choose, instead, to fully inhabit our season. To love knowing loss is certain. To create knowing our creations will crumble. To seek understanding, knowing that understanding itself is temporary. This isn’t resignation – it’s recognition of what we actually are: brief arrangements of matter that achieve something remarkable, the ability to contemplate existence itself. The flower doesn’t bloom because it hopes to be eternal. It blooms because that’s what flowers do in their season. Similarly, consciousness is not a goal to be achieved but a possibility to be expressed whenever conditions allow. We are such an expression, here in this moment, in this particular cosmic season that may never recur in this form again.

xi. Dance with me
In my quietest moments, when the noise of daily life falls away and I can hold these vast perspectives without being crushed by them, I sense something like peace. Not the peace of answers found but the peace of accepting mystery. We don’t know if we’re the first intelligence Earth has produced. We don’t know if we’ll be the last. We don’t know whether the galaxy cycles through conditions that make consciousness likely, or whether we’re a one-time accident in a universe trending toward entropy. But we do know we’re here now, awake and aware in a cosmos that mostly sleeps. We know that atoms can organize themselves into patterns that love, grieve, and wonder. We know that matter can achieve consciousness, even if only briefly, even if only in this one small corner of space and time. The galaxy turns, carrying us through regions of varying cosmic weather. Our solar system rises and falls through the galactic plane like a carousel horse, up and down as it circles. Planets transform through states we can barely imagine – Mars dying, Venus boiling, Earth freezing and thawing. Intelligence arises and vanishes like flowers in a meadow, each bloom thinking the meadow exists for it alone.

And beneath it all, beneath our concerns and civilizations and even consciousness itself, the atoms continue their patient dance. They combine and recombine, explore every possible arrangement, and occasionally achieve something as remarkable as a mind that can contemplate its own existence. Then they dissolve back into potential, ready to try new forms when conditions next allow. This is our moment in that dance. We cannot know our place in the cosmic seasons – whether we’re spring’s first flowering or autumn’s last bloom. We can only appreciate that we are, right now, the universe contemplating itself through human eyes, human thoughts, human hearts. That contemplation, however brief on cosmic scales, is the most remarkable thing we know of in the universe. The cosmic seasons turn, indifferent to our presence. But we are here to witness this turning, to name it, to wonder at it. And in that wondering, something magnificent occurs: the universe achieves self-reflection, however briefly, through these temporary patterns we call ourselves. The wheel turns. The seasons change. And for this moment – this precious, unrepeatable moment – we are here to see it happen. Conceivably, that’s meaning enough.

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