UGH thinking about the quiet rapture. because like. okay. they establish that the speed of light has not changed in any way. so. the sun and solar system vanish, defying everything people understand about physics and the life cycle of stars and quantum entanglement. but okay, that's an outlier. and it surely has an explanation. the matter had to go somewhere. maybe it's been converted to dark energy somehow. maybe we missed the ambient temperature of space raise. we are demonstrably fucked but if we can figure out light speed travel we can just find another goldilocks planet, it's fine. and then four years later proxima centauri disappears from the sky. it's happening to other star systems. is it limited to the orion arm? is it a galaxy wide thing? nothing you send out on radar ever bounces back again. you're not even catching dust. two years after that, barnards star is gone. it only confirms what you've already suspected. you try to watch it happen but there's nothing to observe. one second its there and the next second its not. maybe it's a problem with the cameras. you can catch wolf 359's disappearance in another 2 years, with better cameras. can you spare the material for a better camera? does it matter if we understand what's happening on a grand scale? there won't be a bigger picture if we all starve. the infrared cameras pick up nothing. the temperature didn't change. the matter wasn't converted to energy. you watch wolf 359. its the same thing. you knew itd be the same thing. you are watching something rip apart a law as basic as the conservation of matter. something is tearing apart and chewing up everything you thought you understood about how the universe works, spitting out all this math that no longer applies and never will again. youre looking for something, anything new that would at least affirm the cyclical nature of things. there's nothing. nothing but you and a handful of people that god forgot. when did you become religious?