You write forcefully and with a lot of insight. And I don’t disagree with the hero and humanist characterizations you set forth in this essay. I will also say it is my thought that we should consider the thousands of years of how humans have incorporated the ideal of apocalypse into an inevitable end to human “sinfulness”. We have the story of how curiosity got the first humans kicked out of Eden and all the grief and turmoil that ensued from the pursuit of knowledge. And we have a religion-based promise that a great sorting will happen when our god returns to rule his chosen few on Earth. That’s the apocalypse many pray for, and perhaps it’s always been in the myth of human life that we overreach until we get sorted out by the laws of nature (that is, God).