Step into my mind ...

The teleological progression of the cosmos (yes, it is teleological), if plotted on a graph, would be a sine wave.

Downslope: first the expanding universe, then the stars, then the planets, then the atmosphere; each iteration of the universal progression is smaller, finer than the one before. Why?

This continued until biological life formed. Trough.

Upslope: The size downturn reverses with eukaryotes, bacteria, cell colonies, multicellular organisms and so on. Even when we hit human, the scale-shift skips to the things we make, build and/or control. Things continue to get bigger and bigger (buildings, vehicles, agro-engineered foodcrops, societies etc.) Industrial Age, Information Age - Boom!

Downslope again: miniaturization rules the day. This is where we are now.

So.

Every time life hits a new paradigm, the slope is reversed. By this logic, the next iteration of life will be technological. Shrinking computer chips, quantum physics, nanotechnology - as our tech grows more capable, we are probing smaller and smaller, hoping to understand the vast. Our growing knowledge creates the seeds for the next upslope.

What would that be? Space travel, of course; (the whale effect = larger and larger spacecraft - as soon as we actually get off the f#&king ground ) terraforming and/or space habitats logically follow. What comes after? Megascale engineering of course.

OR

You want a really wild vision? Megascale existence ...


To be continued.