There’s an awful lot of people working to make life better (at least more than those doing their best making it worse) and it’d be fair to say that us humans have come a long way in the last half-million years.
Imagine what you’ve done in the span of your life as part of “long way” I mention. It very well might not be a great dealI but odds are you will, by the time you die, have contributed positively in some small way. Now imagine something terrible; that everything you’ve contributed is undone by somebody else after you die. You may as well have not done anything, and lived only for yourself.
Now scale this up and imagine something more terrible, a disaster that destroys your whole country. The implication again remains; all of your efforts and your countries’ domestic efforts since colonisation have been for nought. No future generations will get any benefits of the civilisation built by the generations before them; everything that was unlucky enough to be in your country is gone and anybody that was to do their part of humanities “long way” will never get the chance.
Not a nice thought in the least, but bear with me.
Scale up once again; something wipes out the entire human race. The stuff of films, books, and many doomsday religious tales. Every single thing that humans have achieved, discovered and invented will be completely nullified in one fell swoop. We may has well have never existed.
Nobody likes to think about this, and it’s amazingly easy to never dwell on it too much at all. No doubt this never even occurs to a lot of people, and ignorance really is bliss when it comes to the end of human existence.
But whether it be the cause of Man or Nature, our future is almost certain – unless we manage to spread ourselves fairly extensively throughout the universe (not only to other planets in our solar system nor into space and planets in our galaxy) we are set for extinction, one way or another.
DISCOVER Magazine have compiled an excellent list of 20 Ways the World Could End, which could very well have the subtitle; “And humanity if we’re too complacent to get as far away from it as possible.” It’s not the newest article as you’ll notice, but reads as a comprehensive look at what we’re up against – that we know of.
Well worth the read, even if it is a little disheartening. The more you know about it, the more you’ll realise that nothing we do matters if it’s going to be wiped away in the future – yet our priorities are definitely Earth-bound, and it’s going to be one hell of a slog to change thought on the topic. It’s almost as hard not to sound like a conspiracy theorist or (worse-still) a treehugging greenie when talking about it – hopefully I’ve skirted the line. 
- And I certainly can’t pretend otherwise myself. [↩]
