Thanks,
@Stuart-T. You offer interesting insights, too. I just think the governments of this world need to manage their money better. People should always be prioritized first. There are 7,000 rare diseases that have no cure. Of those, 90% don't even have an FDA treatment. And sufficient funding never sees the light of day. Yet, we see unlimited funding for other things.
I think the people who get rare conditions, like hyperacusis or noxacusis, are kind of thrown in the closet because there's just no money to be made off them. With hyperacusis or noxacusis, only 10 to 20 people out of a million will get the ailments, so why would the government fork out $ for such a small group? At the end of the day, $ always comes first in their eyes, even over people. It's a disgusting truth. Perhaps there should be a fund set aside for just "rare" disorders in general, not for one kind of disorder, and then that $ could be divided up. If we had 54 billion or some significant number for those 7,000 rare diseases, we'd be a lot further along all around, not just for ear problems, but for the overall well-being of humanity.
As for the future of mankind, I don't think we'll ever migrate to distant planets because of my religious beliefs. I think the world will end before we'd ever get that advanced. You're right — if we had 10,000 more years or a million, we'd become something more than "human." We'd be a force to be reckoned with in the cosmos, where we could control and achieve things that seem unimaginable at this time. I don't think God will allow us to get that powerful.
And this one will melt your brain. It's a thinker. Personally, I don't think time has existed for as long as we've been taught. I don't think the cosmos is really 13.8 billion years old, in a sense. Same with the dinosaurs. I don't think they existed for 165 million years. I'll explain. Science supports that age for the universe because the creation was made to be a mature one. If you look at the Genesis account, for example, Adam was created as an adult. He never experienced childhood. He came into this world as a grown man. Same with Eve and the animals. I think the same can be said for the universe itself. It never experienced childhood. It came into being as an "adult," so to speak. Everything in it. The sun, moon, stars, and so forth.
The reason I say that is because an infant universe wouldn't have worked so well from a creation standpoint. Besides the moon, the night sky would've been pitch black, for example, for the first 4 years after creation because the nearest star is 4 light years away. Animals need the stars. I researched this and National Geographic confirmed my thoughts: From dung beetles to seals, steering by the stars is a critical skill, as it aids them in migrating, finding food, or searching for mates. Even a creature as small as a beetle, with a brain the size of a grain of rice, can gaze up at the starry night and decide where to go.
An infant universe wouldn't support life near as effectively if you wanted the creation to be up and running right away, as God did in Genesis. So if my theory is true, that the cosmos was created to be already old, then it turns science on its head in some ways and makes a fool of scientists, who say we have proof it's 13.8 billion years old. It really is that old, but time itself isn't. Time's only been around, who knows, 10-20 thousand years. There's no way to truly slap a date on anything, as far as time goes, if what I say is true. We think we know everything and perhaps we have no idea. The ultimate folly of humanity is to assume we know.
When we look through a telescope and see a star system that's so ancient that it's estimated to be X billion years old, we're looking at something that technically never happened within the construct of time. If the universe was created as a 13.8 billion year old system, then the light along with it was, too. So even though it's there and looks that old, it really never happened under our watch or the universe's. It was that way from the beginning. God bypassed time and joined everything in progress.
And maybe dinos existed alongside humans. Some believe that. There are supposedly cave paintings in various places around the world where our ancestors drew dinosaur-looking creatures. They look like stegosauruses, for example, and other well known dinos. These drawings are thousands of years old, before paleontology. If humans never coexisted with such creatures, how would they have drawn them or conceived them? They wouldn't have known they ever existed. Maybe dinos got wiped out in the famous flood that sunk the world. Maybe the crater from the asteroid contributed to that flood. As smart as humans are (or aren't), there's no way to truly know. People who believe the simulation theory would say the same.