From our early, chimp-like origins we have gazed into the cosmos tied up in the knots of our inherent love for facile truths. As a casual fan of the universe, I have benefitted from the draught that has overtaken New England in recent months. The nights have been achingly cold, alternating with warm days, and these night skies have a desert-like purity - every planet and star has been enhanced via the climate catastrophe. Who would have guessed that lethal injections of atmospheric CO2 come with celestial HD? As we - humanity, corporate civilization, the USA - flip over in a lethal tailspin, everything that radiates its cosmic beauty has been flourishing with overdrive.

In the neighborhood of midnight, I take my son's dog for his final walk before tucking him in. His name is Pogo, and my son snatched him from a Brooklyn shelter in spite of his having a mangled right front paw, and a fear of new people that causes him to cringe and shake at the approach of any stranger not holding a leash. He only trusts people who have been vetted by dogs.

My wife and I have temporary custody of Pogo until my son - living in Brooklyn - recovers from hip surgery. We are an elderly couple, an unlikely match for a super high energy, untrained and traumatized beast, but here we are. We even took the initiative to have Pogo fitted for a limb brace to remedy his paw injury - an act of good will I may regret. Even on three legs he pulls chaotically after every squirrel on our morning runs. On four legs he might drag me along like a kite.

Every night Pogo and I walk down the cold street under a cosmic vision. I throw back my neck to survey infinity, and he bolts after rabbits and shadowy prey that dart back and forth in his imagination - perhaps I unfairly attribute his enthusiasm to hallucinations rather than enhanced awareness. I tie Pogo's leash around my waist so that he cannot escape while I trace the stars in Orion's belt down five lengths until I reach the spot in the sky where Sirius dependably blazes. Everything in the sky glows in utter stillness. The planets and the moon alone violate the static designs of the universe, everything else - Polaris, Betelgeuse, The Big Dipper, Scorpius, Leo, Cygnus etc. all obey the structural perfection of creation. Until quite recently, prior to Edwin Hubble, even physicists assumed that the universe obediently conformed to the stasis of eternity.

We now know that everything adheres to the laws of cosmic expansion. The interrelationships of cosmic motion transcend the abilities of ordinary minds, like mine. The earth rotates at 1,037 MPH at the equator while we orbit the sun at 67,000 MPH. The solar system whizzes about the central black hole in the Milky Way at 490,000 MPH, and everything speeds away from everything else in the universal rush to oblivion. AI summarizes the details of cosmic expansion as such:

"The speed at which the universe is expanding is known as the Hubble constant, and its value is currently estimated to be around 73 kilometers per second per megaparsec. This means that for every 3.26 million light-years of distance, the universe expands by 73 kilometers per second."

As residents of the Milky Way, we hold membership in "the local group," the "Virgo Supercluster," and the "Laniakea Supercluster." The Laniakea subsumes some 100,000 galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars and untold trillions of planets. Each unfathomably massive structure is subordinated to larger and larger structures - all moving together and pulling apart. How fast are we going and how do we make sense of it all? Our visual perception fails us catastrophically. I look up at the miraculous light of cascading speed and mistake it all for stillness, repose, eternity and silence.

We have depended upon hallucinatory, perhaps psychotic defaults. On cosmic scales we are nothing - our lives that flicker and depart as so many blinking fireflies, cause us to miss the tumult, violence and patterns of things. With the utter inadequacy of both human vision and collective imagination, we invented a geocentric universe - a product of expansive, narcissistic self-deception.

The ancients saw the sky as a mirror - full of bears, lions, dragons, dogs and hunters. If our remote ancestors had looked up and had seen incomprehensible vastness, our historical trajectory might have been set on an entirely different journey. There may have once been a debate between those primitive, tribal ancestors who saw the sky as a symbol of human frailty, limitation and ignorance, and those who craved an explanation. Whoever reduced the sky to a tapestry, a day's worth of labor for a god intent on creating an anthropomorphic paradise, let loose a terrible "butterfly effect."

For most of human existence we have suffered under the crazy notion that heaven and earth have a common source - god - and that "he" made humanity in "his" image. The ancients saw the sky as an accoutrement to immortal designs, and as I stroll at midnight with Pogo, I have no way to perceptually appraise the heavens. My eyes did not evolve to measure cosmic scope. I am unable to see the Laniakea Super Cluster or to fathom that a beam of light travelling at 186,000 miles per second, since the Cambrian Explosion, would not yet traverse more than a portion of the whole super structure. There are no visible cues in the sky to convey that the Laniakea is only a drop of water in the celestial ocean.

The sky that I see, might be the same one that Pogo sees, if he ever looks up from his obsessive sniffing. There is Jupiter, almost straight overhead with its frozen, blue crystalline hue. To the northeast of Jupiter one finds Mars - its orange tinge barely less luminous than Sirius. The "dog star" oddly shifts from reds to blues - a hand held sparkler in the grip of a celestial child.

The ancients, looking up at the night sky - Pagans, believers of every stripe, superstitious, cursed with human grandiosity and impatiently disinterested in waiting for Edwin Hubble - doomed us with our original sin. The curse that set us on course for slavery, empire, war, capitalism and ecocide did not leap forth from the tree of knowledge. Quite the opposite - no snakes, seduction or loss of sexual innocence condemned us. It was the greatest of all cognitive failings - narcissism - that sent us down the mother of all wrong turns. The night sky screamed at us - "you apes with opposable thumbs are so many suffering mots of cosmic dust, no better than worms, ants or sand fleas." But, we had no ears to hear this. To our ancestors the silence of the cosmos offered a blank slate.

If you must imagine a god in this tale, she condemned us to travel through time, passing murderous delusions from one generation to the next. You can hardly blame the early, part time cosmologists and full time hunter gatherers. We have no perceptual apparatus to fathom celestial scales. Even now, with the internet, every scientific website offers a different guess regarding the distance to Betelgeuse - Orion's famous right shoulder. The controversy ranges from 400 to 725 light years.

Ptolemy believed that all stars were about 20,000 earth radii away or- for those of us with access to a calculator - 80 million miles up (less than the distance to the sun). Where that figure came from we will never know. Betelgeuse, is one of a small number of stars available to the naked eye. The 2,500-5,000 visible stars are but a microscopic sampling of the hundreds of billions of our sun's fellow stars inhabiting the Milky Way. Sirius, the brightest, and one of the closest stars to earth (a binary star system) is about 51 trillion miles away - roughly .75 million times farther away than Ptolemy imagined.

But we have now been liberated by science, by Einstein, Hawking and Hubble - or have we? Forgetting for now that religious authorities can "god-wash" infinity, even esteemed physicists have run with the "Fermi Paradox." This famed thought experiment asks, "given that there are countless trillions of worlds, intelligent life must exist in abundance - where are the aliens"?

The Fermi Paradox, however, should be seen as just another variant of human arrogance - collective narcissism fitted to our brand new notions of cosmic scale. Aliens - in our imaginations - are invariably projections of human greatness. Given enough time to develop our transcendent technology, we grandly assume that we will travel to distant stars and even other galaxies. We will find ways to eclipse light speed, or find "wormholes" that somehow connect one remote cosmic outpost to another. We have adopted the transcontinental railroad of the 19 century as a rather subconscious model of our future conquest of space.

So where are those aliens, those beings mirroring the human future of interstellar colonization? After all, humans have been travelling and colonizing throughout history. If England, Belgium, Spain and France could colonize Africa, and initiate a profitable slave trade, why shouldn't our species someday drain resources from planets connected to Alpha Centauri?

But the Fermi Paradox is not so much a paradox as a failure of imagination and a triumph for the greatest of all human defense mechanisms - denial. We fiercely refuse to accept that we have been evicted from the center of creation, and hang on to a colonial vision of cosmic conquest. Humans will never travel to Alpha Centauri - a distance of more than 25 trillion miles. With current rocket technology, we can get there in 75,000 years, assuming that there are filling stations along the way.

Of course, given the encroaching matters of climate, fascism and nuclear war, the psychotic delusion of human omnipotence has been consigned to nefarious madmen like Elon "I will colonize Mars" Musk. Our expansive, celestial distortions have led us to Musk, to Trump, to a world quickly leaking its final drops of hope. The sky, however, may still offer a rather muted consolation. As I walk Pogo at midnight, the stars talk about us, how small, tragic, brief and meaningless we all are. It is a lesson that makes war, conquest and politics all melt away.

We are equally small, doomed and worthy of pity. The lights twinkling above tell us that. The sky, I believe, has intended - if we imagine it as a willful thing - to stick a pin in the human dirigible of delusion, since we walked upright and first puffed ourselves up with the invention of our invention - an easily annoyed god. If we are to survive in some downsized, contracted, grieving version of ourselves, the sky gives us the needed tool. We are alone in a universe far too big for aliens - for they can never get to us, and we can never get to them. All intelligent life, the smartest citizens of the Laniakea, have been destined to suffer from the solipsism of cosmic separation.

Maybe the universe is also too big for god - what sort of magical immortal has a magnifying glass powerful enough to see something so tiny as a human being? If we must have a god, should it not be in our image - small, uncertain and limping along by trial and error? But, if god does not exist then all we have are ourselves - and one another. At our best we have only a few needs - like Pogo and me. Picture us - an old man contentedly lost somewhere in the Laniakea Supercluster, and a young Shepherd/Saluki mix alert for the chance to chase a darting bunny.