On the Copernican, Darwinian, and Shelleyan Revolutions in Thinking About Humanity and Our Place in the Universe

In a recent article for Aeon, the historian Thomas Moynihan writes this about our realization that humanity can go extinct:

It’s now clear humanity lacks the luxury of eternity. We know this because evidence has accumulated to show that there are greater, even more encompassing mortalities than our own. We now understand Earth and its life had their orig…