Searching through space
Wandering humanity
Seeks a new home,
Any safe port to escape
Its announced inevitable fate
As its God reclaims its death,
A primordial right
To an apocalyptic full stop
On the brief sentence of its existence.
Trying to conquer time
Neglecting its beliefs
Attempting to free away from faith,
To embrace conjectures
Of old beginnings and new ends,
From Big Bangs to Big Freezes
Big Crunches and Big Rips,
Anything between 2.8 and 22
Billion years from present,
Capable of explaining the absurdity
Limits of its unfathomable consciousness.
Before then, other predicaments
Analysed, studied, categorised,
Asteroids to crash on Earth
Galaxies to collide with the Milky Way
Life-giving Sun to collapse into a white dwarf
7.6 billion years from now,
While humanity would still have
Another dozen to go,
It needs some place else to call home.
As it ponders and calculates
Theorizes and lucubrates
To offer a direction,
Survival instincts left to blame
For genius and engineering,
Creativity with an aim.
Eligible planets here and there
One 39 light years away,
A journey to last 500,000 years
At its fastest speed today.
Bewildering dismay.
Never once to reconsider
Its own perennial doings,
Consequences of intentions
Leading up to self-destruction
Preceding and outrunning
Natural disasters
In nurturing its disappearance
As it wipes out 30,000 species
Year in year out
Effectively carrying out
The greatest mass extinctions
In Earth’s history.
Global warming, ecosystem collapse,
Nuclear and biological threats,
Pandemics, environmental toxins,
Global wars and mass insanity,
All to occur long before,
The end of the world.
[Featured painting: Venusian Weather Balloon. A painting view of future exploration mission by Ahmad Alromeadheen, 2016]