>I would offer that such faux-crises are the result of a lack of scarcity, not intellectual capacity. No one who has to hunt for lunch has time to ponder the inevitable death of the sun.

Some of the oldest (and greatest) literature we have, composed in a time of extreme poverty, brutality, and hardship (not to mention 100% illiteracy), deals exactly with that. The Iliad is fundamentally about mortality, its implications, how to deal with it, questioning your culture's morality, searching for meaning in the face of impeding death, etc.