Anons essay that he's working on

Before mankind had ever drew itself up from the dirt and clay of the earth, we have always looked upwards for meaning. Before we even knew who or what we were, we were given our most noble goal: The search for knowledge.

In olden times, monolithic gods lurked above us, obscured in black veil. They spoke through disasters, the deranged, through miracles and nature. To young human life, what sat above us was beyond us. The gods left us clues and riddles in the stars, showed us our heroes and masters as figures of legend. We have deciphered their divine speech. We know their language now as dots on star maps. Progress naturally urged us skyward, and as we first parted the clouds and held out a gloved hand to the empty black, we began to wonder: Are we really alone? Is life and all of its totality, its urgency and orgasm, a speck of dust suspended in a sunbeam?

We sent our brave and our bold, armed with light and sensors, feeling no more safe than a lantern plunged into the bottom of the ocean, whose faint glimmer was swallowed whole by the clustering, murky depths. We clung to a weary hope. President Ronald Reagan, in the wake of the challenger disaster, once reminded a sullen nation that ‘The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave.’

In the blink of a galactic eye, we had gone from animals to explorers. Ours was a fire that burned bright and hot, but was a flickering match to a house fire. Even with all our carefully laid systems, we found ourselves teetering on the edge of hapless oblivion, back to square one. We were reduced to wolves in sheep's clothing. Dictator and mass-murderer with clean suit and tie, soldier and bomber with collared shirts and polished boots. Sociopath and anarchist beneath boards laid by the poor and downtrodden. No matter how hard we protested and fought against ourselves, the caveman lived on behind our eyes. Instead of fighting with spear and rocks, he fought with rifle and bomb, picket signs, rallies, social movements, poisons and chemicals, handshakes and deals. We were only as far as we had artificially allowed ourselves to come.

Of all the galactic and imperial certainties in the world we can only know a few grand truths: The pursuit of knowledge is our god, and god speaks through diet coke and Mentos.