But for a time there… we almost figured it out

maybe the universe

Imagine how self-important or ignorant you have to be to think this. No matter what, all life on Earth is going to die in 4.5 billion years when the Sun burns out. Once every second, a star somewhere goes supernova. Galaxies collide with each other and violently fling stars out into deep space. Black holes are constantly swallowing solar systems and deleting them from existence forever. All life that has ever existed will die and be forgotten. The entire universe was shrouded in hot and complete darkness for its first 350,000 years. Even these things (which are still miniscule on the scale of the observable universe) are on levels that are about as comparable to human activity as stubbing your toe is to the Holocaust.

Fuck it: “will ever happen to the universe” is heat death, and it’s infinitely worse than anything humans could possibly do. We’re just some hairless monkeys fighting over an infinitesimal rock harboring life and sending out some stray photons in a radius that’s almost nothing compared to the size of the observable universe.

I’ve long believed that humans are literal cancer

Earth and the universe will be just fine. It’s us humans that suffer from what us humans have done and continue to do. The universe doesn’t care. It could slam us with a giant asteroid tomorrow and kill 99% of life on earth. It has done this before and it’ll happily do it again.

Humans didn’t “happen to this planet.” This planet (along with our fantastic if very average star) made us.

Nah. The planet has had way worse and will have way worse. We’re just an annoying itch you may never had known existed in just a few short tens of thousands of years; mere moments in Earth’s timeline.