I assume your point in posting this was to provide fear as the counterbalance to hope. It's certainly an excellent choice. I ran across a wonderful article on the placebo effect here by Anne Harrington and the following passage was stunning to me:

Cohen was interested in death that appeared to be hastened by extreme hopelessness and isolation—for example, displaced refugees in a new culture. Cohen also explored clinical reports on the apparent physiological effects of familial rejection and social stigma associated with AIDS. Cohen offers the example of a mother who:

learned on the same day that her son was gay and had AIDS. She reacted to this with hostility and openly maintained a prayer vigil outside the intensive care unit, praying that her son would die because of the shame he had caused her. The patient could hear his mother praying. One hour later the patient died, much to the surprise of his physician, since he did not appear to be terminal.

I assume your point in posting this was to provide fear as the counterbalance to hope. It's certainly an excellent choice. I ran across a wonderful article on the placebo effect here by Anne Harrington and the following passage was stunning to me:

Cohen was interested in death that appeared to be hastened by extreme hopelessness and isolation—for example, displaced refugees in a new culture. Cohen also explored clinical reports on the apparent physiological effects of familial rejection and social stigma associated with AIDS. Cohen offers the example of a mother who:

learned on the same day that her son was gay and had AIDS. She reacted to this with hostility and openly maintained a prayer vigil outside the intensive care unit, praying that her son would die because of the shame he had caused her. The patient could hear his mother praying. One hour later the patient died, much to the surprise of his physician, since he did not appear to be terminal.

More than the invention of wheels or agriculture, perhaps even more than the control of fire, the knowledge of defeat has pointed the way for human civilization. Somewhere in the remote past, humans had learned to anticipate the future in reasonable detail, and to see limitations and potential failures in every direction. … There is no telling precisely when an individual first grasped the notion that if all other creatures eventually died, and if the oldest, grayest people he knew always died within a few dozen lunar cycles, and if there existed no one older than the old grays, then death might not be something that happened only to everyone else. Ahead of him he began to see the end of all things, an unavoidable defeat, beyond which lay a great unknown.

If one could approximate how many spring seasons he had seen and compare those with the approximate age of the tribal elders, he cold also estimate how may spring seasons remained before his own death became inevitable. The discovery of time could not have followed far behind the discovery of death. For all we know, it might have preceded the discovery of fire.

The Babylonians invented birth certificates and could henceforth assign numbers to the ages of their oldest citizens. Under very favorable conditions if disease, famine, or violence did not strike first, one might reach the age of seventy years. And thus do the first birth certificates echo down to us: “The days of our years are three score and ten.”

If indeed man once dwelled in ignorance of both time and death, then for all our forefathers knew, they truly were eternal, in the same sense animals, if they think of it at all, are unaware that they are not everlasting. In biological terms, the explosive growth of the human brain during the past million years guaranteed that sooner or later human minds would be capable of gaining knowledge; and with knowledge, death entered the world.

And Man, who knows death, is obsessed with time.