There
will come a time,” I said, “when all of us are
dead. All of us. There will come a time when
there are no human beings remaining to remember
that anyone ever existed or that our
species ever did anything. There will be no
one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra,
let alone you. Everything that we did and
built and wrote and thought and discovered
will be forgotten and all of this”—I gestured
encompassingly—“will have been for naught.
Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe
it is millions of years away, but even if we
survive the collapse of our sun, we will not
survive forever. There was time before organisms
experienced consciousness, and
there will be time after. And if the inevitability
of human oblivion worries you, I encourage
you to ignore it. God knows that’s what
everyone else does.
