Musing on the Ultimate

I think the pendulum that, early in the 20th cent. led to Social Darwinism (summed up in the idiotic phrase "might makes right"), had swung so far in the direction of man's animal nature, may now be well into its swing back to the concept that the evolution of the symbolic processing mind of human beings really is "so like an angel," i.e., qualitatively different from the minds even of our close relatives, such as chimps and bonobos. Precisely because we can make the unlimited mental chains and networks of concept, idea, image, emotion... and escape the bonds of the merely biologically imperative. 

We are the Earth's great experiment. Either we will survive our troubled youth and become Old Ones, who dwell among the stars and foster life and love far and wide, or we will surely die out, dust on the husk of our formerly living world (because we now know that life has perhaps 500 million years or so to go before the Earth exits stage hot). It's up to us, and we may very well be living in the cusp time when the future will be decided.