Beginning

With every beginning, there's obviously some kind of end.

You see new sprouts popping up in some places as we get closer to the calendar start of Spring. A lot of trees around here get that hazy green look to them. Then, almost overnight, there are leaves and flowers. But before that -- the way things are right now -- everything looks pretty much dead.

It's the clockwork aspect of this cycle that has always intrigued me. If humanity vanished tomorrow -- every man, woman, child, and points in-between -- just up an went, the seasons would stretch inextricably from one to the next without fail. Trying to figure out how all of that works -- spinning of the Earth, tilt of the Earth, the orbit of the Earth around the sun, weather, ocean currents, and so on -- hurts my brain. The amount of balance required to keep things just so is difficult for me to comprehend, especially given the scale of, well, the universe.

I don't like letting my brain stray into that territory if only because it makes me feel like a speck. Barely a mote. Insignificant compared to the vast OUT THERE-NESS of the rest of existence, of which we've barely scratched the surface of and may never actually accomplish to any extent. Forget the rocket-to-face of discovering other life out there, if it's there at all. This isn't Mass Effect or Star Trek or Star Wars or Alien or ALF. This is reality and the reality of making a connection with some other race out there... well, it's billions of trillions to one. A long shot.

Sure, scientist have located Earth-like planets out there, millions of light year away -- "practically next door!" -- but that hardly guarantees life.

So much of the universe seems to hinge on balance. Too much of this; too little of that. KABlooey! Or merely a whiff. A cosmic fart in jacuzzi -- unnoticed and insignificant.

While all these zillions bits of chaos blasting through the universe, it's a wonder we're even here in the first place. A fluke? An abberation?

Then question comes, "Can we affect the balance?" On Earth, sure. We've seen that time and again, especially in present day. Technology has allowed us to roam the Earth with impunity for the most part -- spilling and despoiling as we claw over one another for land, space to live, and accommodate the mechanization of pretty much everything. Earth is a closed system the same way a hamster cage works, so of course, humanity has some agency on the way things turn out here. But free of Earth... Could we move stars? Start pushing Universal Balance around to suit our ends? Though I have trouble grasping the purpose of why we'd be moving stars or creating artificial black holes, I don't think humanity will ever have that kind of power of technology.

Million? Billions of years from now? How does one predict what will happen that far ahead? What about 50 years? Even that one is tough.

But to my original point. I've just been thinking about Spring and this stuff started boiling inside me.

Talk about tangents!