So.
You can reshape the continents. Tame the seas. Re-engineer the very air itself.
What are you going to use all this power for?
Too often the answer is "We dunno. We just want to haz."
Wrong answer.
As wrong an answer as is imaginable.
Come below... no. Come above what you are, to see where this goes.
You, who would be masters of the Earth - master yourselves.
Let's take inventory.
You can tap groundwater. Process brine which is much easier to desalinate than seawater. Why are any of you thirsty?
You can capture not just the wind but the direct energy of the sun itself. Why are you turning fresh breezes into new and certain ways to kill your children?
You can send spacecraft to the edges of interstellar space. You can see tens of billions of light-years into the void. You know, from messages passed gravitational lens to lens, that the cosmos is much bigger than that. You suspect, rightly so, there are universes overlapping universes. You are beginning to understand that what you imagine is 'matter' is an exotic state, not the normal expression of materiality in the universe. Yet you still insist you are important, the most central of a universe that signals, most clearly - you are part of us, but you're not all that.
You know for sure there are hundreds of worlds far beyond your reach at the moment. You suspect there are thousand of solar systems. You dream of billions more throughout this galaxy, replicated in each and every one.
You derive models to explain why there are so few civilizations amidst so many, many trillions of trillions of chances to rise.
You fear, and properly so, for your future.
You see dimly, your own success as counted by the ruins on your own world.
You miss, to your sadness and that of the cosmos -you have surpassed quite a gauntlet to get this far.
You miss, to your peril, to be humble and brave.. for your chances to finish the bell lap of your existence on just one world are low indeed.
But they are not zero.
And you know just what to do.
You just need to ... do.
So.
What will you do with all this power? To shape the elements? To reshape your hearts and minds? To reshape yourselves if you must? To redeem all the lost chances of your past?
Will you?
Do you want to?
When you celebrate this holiday season, set some time aside to consider:
You have much work to do yet, as individuals and as a species.
You also have much to celebrate.
Prepare for the first.
Exalt in the second for you have done well. You must do better.
And you will.