Keeping Perspective with Calamities

From time to time I watch science TV series like Wormhole, Cosmos, or the The Universe.  Inevitably, the topic of cataclysmic catastrophes will come up, something that I tend to be interested in. You may already know about the asteroid collision with Earth that is generally believed to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs around 65 million years ago.   Or even lesser known, the much more devastating Permian extinction  250 million years ago when almost all life on Earth was nearly snuffed out from a chain of disasters originating from a massive, drawn-out super-volcano eruption in what is now Siberia.  But the scale of a disaster can be much smaller, and yet in our world today seem almost incomprehensible in its toll on lives and property...take a look at Nepal and what has recently happened there with those two massive earthquakes.  And if you happened to be in the middle of it, yesterday's horrible passenger train derailment in Philadelphia most likely seemed cosmic in its devastation.  But a  cataclysm can be very personal as well.  A few years ago I lost a friend of mine, a co-worker, to an auto accident not of his own fault on the Interstate when traffic slowed to a stop and a truck obliviously plowed in behind him, causing the fatal collision.  Two other friends have recently been diagnosed with cancer and have had their lives turned upside-down with it. Given our own personal fragile existence on this Earth, it then becomes preposterous to watch those same science shows and hear supposedly learned people express concern that our sun, in a few more billion years, will die out...but before doing so, will devour Earth as it greatly expands in size.  Oh yeah, right, I want to start worrying about that...