[Ydiss]

And at the same time our existence is so totally insignificant - What are we to the universe? A tiny speck of dust in a huge empty expanse of deathly cold, filled with trillions of other insignificant specks of dust. Some of which may have living creatures asking similar questions of themselves.

I'm sorry, but if man was meant to find other life, other living planets (or vice-versa) don't you think that, in the millions of years that this planet has been inhabitable, that it would have happened already?

It's a huge, empty void. It's there for a bloody reason, it's life-less for a bloody reason and it's limitlessly vast for a bloody reason. Unless man magically comes up with some kind of super "warp" technology like all the books, movies and series like to make-believe then we will never have the resources to push a single atom as far as the nearest solar system, let alone one with habitable planets in it.

That nearest solar system is Alpha Centauri. 2 light years away. 2 light years equals 2 full years traveling at the speed of light. The speed of light is approximately 186,000 miles per second. Don't even try to do the maths on that one.

The fastest mankind has managed to travel using solid/liquid fuels is still recorded in miles per hour and isn't anywhere near the figure above. For us to travel to the nearest solar system (again, let alone all the other billions of solar systems out there) at current speeds would take more than a life-time. So, at current progression of technology there isn't a hope in hell that we'll somehow manage to visit other living planets within 100 years.

Oh, and also, just to establish my point on this before I get back to the actual topic... This planet is able to sustain life due to many freakish and extremely unlikely occurances, none of which any of us has any control over.

To list just a couple: It's exactly the right distance from the sun and has exactly the right amount of atmosphere to protect us from that sun, without which we'd all be dead. This atmosphere is there only because Earth just happens to have a core of iron. This core is what creates the huge magnetic field that envelopes the Earth in such a way that it just happens to deflect most of the lethal and harmful rays that our sun spews out. Without that iron core we would not exist.

And that doesn't take into account the fact that life evolved once the surface cooled from a mass of molton lava.

So, to presume that there has to be life on other planets, just like ours, is as silly as saying we're the only life in the entire universe. Neither can be proved so neither is true. To hope somehow that we will reach a planet that has gone through the same extreme freakish accidents as Earth and that this will be our salvation from killing it is totally insane.

The world would live on happily until it was consumed by the sun, millions upon millions of years from today, if humans never existed. Religion, "civilisation", buildings, fuel, industrial waste, murder, destruction are all inventions of humans. They weren't here until we grew these brains capable of reason and they won't be here when we're extinct.

No matter how advanced we are, anyone who believes that humans will not be out-lived by this planet is a fool.

Unfortunately, as Spooge correctly pointed out, our own destruction and extinction will be expedited by our own actions.

So fucking what. When it's all over and we're all dead, who will mourn us?

God? On-looking aliens (who've been studying us from "afar")? Ghosts who roam the planet in some kind of human-invented after-life?

Hah! No one will. The universe will continue into oblivion and not one living creature will be aware of our small, insignificant impact.