We are not the chosen ones.

The universe is one huge accidental attempt to find a species that can avoid self destruction, and we turned out not to be that species.

Periodically among the septillions of stars there's a planet suitable for life. Life occurs and evolves on each of these planets, but eventually something appears with the ability to destroy the ecosystem and most or all life gets wiped out, essentially doing a reset; an asteroid or massive volcanic eruption perhaps.

This cycle of life might happen several times during each brief fertile period of the planet, until eventually one species comes along and is so "resourceful" that it preempts all natural causes of extinction and generates its own global catastrophe, one so big that the planet may never again produce conditions suitable for life.

We have now reached this point, or more accurately we did this already and our expiration date is near. The planet's own warming feedback loops have begun and the environment is now spiraling towards a hot house. Species are becoming extinct at an extreme pace meaning the sixth mass extinction is well underway. The global weather is producing some dangerous extremes, and yes, volcanoes are erupting and fires are burning all over the place.

Honestly, things simply get worse from here no matter what we do individually, or as a species. Short of miraculously finding an energy neutral way of quickly sucking out between a third and a half of the carbon from our atmosphere and yet more from our oceans, we're pretty much done.

Our species has driven itself, and all others we share our planet with, to the edge of extinction. We have known of carbon dioxide's greenhouse effect since 1896 and we've had a few warnings about our behavior from scientists since, yet instead of quickly developing and then globally moving to alternatives, our extreme idiocy means we've continued to burn the planet's stores of carbon in a massive climate experiment that's now boiling over.

I hope that somewhere out there in the universe on one of these planets where life evolved (or will evolve) there is a species that manages to escape our fate. Maybe there's one that might be just as ingenious and resourceful as we have been, but does not do the horrors we have done. Maybe it can progress more slowly, more deliberately, and less destructively and survive beyond the angry toddler phase.