this world is the only world that we will ever know.

throughout the pages of the book of the universe, the recurring footnote appended to the name of God is silence.

life is a road that passes from nought to nought, and the void before birth is of one substance with the void that arrives at the moment of your death.

in a humanity that is forever striving for normality in life, the presence of outer space and its contents present the ultimate abnormality, a sanity-devouring unreality whose very existence prefigures humanity's eventual extinction.

in the imaginations and invented beliefs of the human species, these abnormalities have been reconciled to the extent that they may be ignored by most of the species, most of the time.

the reality is that the abnormality that is the cosmos hangs over the heads of the entire human race every second of every hour of every year, colossally dwarfing it, and there exist only incomplete, partial explanations for its presence in this world, their origins and their ultimate fate.

every minute of every day, infinity has the entire human species closed within its fist, closed off from everything that may or may not exist in a figurative and literal death grip.

two factors exist to close off the rest of the universe to humankind: one is distance, the other is mortality.

humankind will eventually land on the martian surface, and there we will find no mark of life, present or past.

humankind will visit the moons of jupiter in latter years, and there we will search desperately for any signs that point to a truth other than that of humanity's total abandonment on a lost world drifting in black, colossal midnight.

absolutely every moon and planet the human species will visit will be devoid of life, as nothing is alive anywhere for many trillions of miles around the earth.

for a member of the human species – a single stream of consciousness with an infinite duration of non-existence before its birth, and an infinite length of time after its death throughout which it does not exist – distance and mortality mean instantaneous engulfment will be the result of any attempt to find life elsewhere in the universe.

no human invention will ever conquer mortality or distance, and the human species will end its days still impeded by walls the unknowable and the unassailable will have maintained, whose blank surfaces and haunting silences shall confront humanity in every direction.

no human being will ever know what forces sent it into this world, nor the forces behind the thing called death.

the term "humankind" will remain as empty as eggshells forever, as no one will ever be able to state with certainty what an "individual human consciousness" is, or whether humankind's fragile destiny (so easily engulfed by the infinities that surround it) is real or a fiction, or whether humankind's final fate awaits in this world or some other.

the same part of the human being that thinks these words as its eyes go over them on this page will never know any more of the truth of itself than it does about anything else: not what its body ultimately is, nor its thoughts, nor its senses, nor its soul.

the human species has awoken from the void that precedes all of history into the dream called self-awareness, only to find itself – an abnormality within a larger abnormality – attached to a tiny corner of an immeasurable vastness, condemned to dwell in isolation that precludes it from ever learning anything at all about itself.

humankind's future is to find only dead worlds and empty darkness wherever it travels.

the never-formed words of the unspeaking void's eternal silence are of one substance with the all-encompassing death that will confront humankind at the end of every road it takes.

the obscuring veil which the void has drawn over humanity's knowledge and self-knowledge will never be lifted, and in the end the human species will die out, leaving behind a dead earth, and a dead universe.