ONLY 500 MILLION YEARS TO GO It was an ordinary winter morning when I sat down with my coffee and morning paper. There were many items to ponder. Like, do we need a new multi-million dollar jail in Benton County? We punish or mistakes and failures. Onward. Then a couple of science articles. Another on global warming. I chuckled at remembrance of an angry e-mail from a blue sheet reader, bummed out that I should dare comment about an issue he thought out of my realm of concern. He thought global warming was a political issue. I hoped he was reading the same article.  The next science article jolted me almost awake. It told of our previous belief that the earth was good for another 4 billion years or so before the sun would either overheat us, or go out and freeze us. I never worried about such a possibility because it was so far off. Now scientists are estimating the time left for planet earth as a mere 500 million years. We just lost three quarters of our remaining life span! It makes you think. What matters? What's the point of embalming, or airtight caskets, or even tombstones? Should I bother paving the driveway? Will our species find refuge in a safer galaxy? Or will we have vaporized in some galactic catastrophe? Will we go the way of dinosaurs that lasted 50 million years before turning into petrified bones? Will we even approach their longevity? Our 30,000 years of possible humanoid existence is not far down the road. And what about God? As a sort of theologian, I'm supposed to ask that. I'm freshly informed about God, just coming out of the God at 2000 conference. That's funny, isn't it? A narrow Christian perspective, of course. For Jews it should have been God at 5000 or something. For Moslem's it is only God at 1400 something. For cosmologists it has to be God at 13 billion or so. As for God, who knows anything? What if our Universe is but a swirling speck spun out of a bunch of other Universes? Just a random thought. I guess I would like to think that this planet would go on and on as a place to be inhabited and enjoyed by endless ages of successors. I would like to think they might have evolved beyond our mediocre level of being.  As I think of our species, full of religious arrogance, it seems to me that nobody else has a notion of anyone being on this planet for more than a limited number of centuries. We don't seem to be in it for the long haul. We're acting like we're not even in it for the next century, much less for 500 million years. My coffee cup was drying up and other tasks calling as I moved on to the sports page, then the business page, and finally the comic page. What matters and in what order?  I decided that maybe I don't have much say about what happens 500 million years from now. I'm not sure I would want to know how our pleasant planet exits the galaxy. I don't even know how much I have to say about anything beyond the moment.  Besides the obvious importance of enjoying life moment by moment, and contributing something to enjoyment of life by others, there's not much I can give to the next 500 million years. I can wonder that for this brief, mini-second spark of time in the universe, our species has a level of consciousness to even be aware of the span of existence. In fact, maybe that is the chief responsibility in being alive as a human in the universe—to be awake to the amazing complexity and expanse and wonder of the universe. For a moment we have been allowed awareness of a cosmos too grand to comprehend. To be aware is wonder enough. Whether 500 million years or 500 billion years, we are part of all eternity because we are a part of right now.  As I shuffle off to next things I realize that it's small of me to fret beyond my life right now.  — Art Morgan, February 2000