by Thomas R. Wells
All things come to an end eventually, including the human species. From the perspective of the universe it won’t matter, and so it also shouldn’t matter to us now. The discontinuance of a taxonomic unit is not particularly interesting or important, especially since no one will be around to notice.
My basic point is the same as Epicurus’ philosophical medicine against the fear of death:
Death should not concern us because as long as we exist, death is not here, and when death is here, we are not.
People think they are worried about death, but in fact they cannot be since they will never experience it. Their actual worries are about how unpleasant the process of dying might be, and of what will become of their worldly interests, from family to reputation to half-completed projects.
In the case of Homo sapiens there is even less reason to care about its ending, because a species is merely a taxonomic unit within which creatures of similar and compatible physiology can be grouped to distinguish them from members of other sets when that seems helpful (other definitions are available). The human species lacks the integrated psychological cohesion of an individual human life. It contains but is not reducible to supra-individual entities like societies. It has no ‘life projects’. It does not really exist in any meaningful sense – less than a tree, or even a rock – and so can have no interest even in its own persistence.
Neither do any individual humans have an interest in the persistence of the human species. Individual humans may care about their children’s future, and about the intergenerational social institutions, like countries, which they hope will secure that future. If there were no more humans then those things we actually care about would necessarily also end. But we still would not care about the end of the human species itself.
Disaster movies are the main way in which the esoteric topic of human extinction is brought to our attention. They have taught us to worry about it, and thus made us too ready to believe that extinction must be worth worrying about.
The first problem is that disaster movies focus on the transition, on the process of humanity becoming extinct. Of course movies have to do this as there is limited entertainment in contemplating the non-existence of any people. But this is the same problem Epicurus diagnosed: just as people confuse death with dying, so we also confuse the non-experience of extinction with the unpleasant experience of being made extinct.
It may help to separate ourselves from the typical disaster movie scenario. When I say that humanity is definitely going to end, that ending doesn’t have to be in fire by asteroid or nuclear war anytime soon. While it is necessary (a fact in all possible universes) that there will at some point, again, be no humans, it is not necessary that this will involve the unpleasantness of mass destruction for ourselves and people we care about. Humans could simply evolve over many thousands or millions of years towards some post-human form, upload to the cloud, or otherwise transform into creatures no longer reasonably classifiable as Homo sapiens.
If you – like me – cannot see why it should matter whether or not there are creatures physiologically compatible with us still around in millions of years, then you have seen my point. When you abstract from the emotional hooks of disaster movie scenarios – the exciting contemplation of gigadeaths and the destruction of all we have come to care about – it is clear that there really is nothing about the persistence of Homo sapiens itself that matters.
Some people may still disagree. Disaster movies have familiarised us with the importance of humanity’s survival by constructing it as the ‘happy ending’ of the entertainment. Thanks to the survival of some small fraction of the original population, humanity will go on. The light will not go out.
One can extend the point in a more philosophical sounding way. So long as there are human beings in the universe, there will remain that peculiar kind of consciousness that is able to value things, for example to see form and beauty in the rings of Saturn. Thus, a universe with human beings in it necessarily has more value (because more valuing is going on) than a universe without them.
One response to this would be to point to non-human sentient life, which certainly exists on Earth and probably does elsewhere too (and in our post-human forms). Humans may be particularly active and sophisticated valuers, but we are not so unique. It is a constitutive feature of all life that it creates interests and hence the phenomenon of ‘mattering’. Sunlight matters to plants, for example, and will continue to do so even when there are no more humans. The extinction of Homo sapiens does not mean the extinction of mattering from the universe.
A more Epicurean response would be to recall that death is simply the extinction of experience itself. For in a universe where the light went out there would be no one left to notice. There would be no perspective from which to compare the universe with and without the light of human understanding, and no possibility of caring about it one way or the other.
***
Thomas Wells teaches philosophy in the Netherlands and blogs at The Philosopher’s Beard
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.