. . . orders of magnitude. is one of the insights that has extended our perceptions.  We live in our personal universe, a universe of about 75 years of time.  Evolution, like geology, takes place in times measured in millennia and millions of years.  And evolution "is full of traps for the beast that cannot learn."

We have survived!  We've gone a half century of sitting on tens of thousands of nuclear weapons which in turn sit on tops of hair-triggered precision guided missiles, programmed to strike at all the major population centers on Earth.   We have successfully avoided nuclear catastrophe!

... but we haven't always avoided the self-deception that convinces ourselves that wondrous things we can imagine are real, when in fact they are not yet achieved.

We have sat for years and years at the bases of volcanos that we perceived  to be "extinct."  Mt St. Helens was one of those.

...  geologists have always told us that Mt St. Helens is as far from "extinct" as possible, that it is a very active volcano.  But we watched it year in, year out, a decade here, a decade there.  Nothing happened.  We didn't believe the evidence the geologists saw—in time scales we barely perceive.  We were blind to their logic.  Then....

"To a child I shall give wings, but I shall let him learn to fly on his own."

Today's children will make tommorrow's decisions.  Perceptions they will develop must reveal to them the insight that egocentric "compassion" may well be tryanny — with those whose viewpoints they were blind to as its victims.