Scientists have calculated that our earth is about 4.56 billion years old. Our sun is roughly half way through its life-span of about 10 billion years. We humans have only been around in our present state for about 200,000 years. That's less than hundreds of a single percentage point of the age of our planet and there's still about 50% left to go. So, how do we propose to squat around here for another 6 billion years and to succeed in doing what none other of god's creatures has ever done, cheat extinction? When you ponder it, isn't it highly likely that we're not actually the culmination of the evolutionary process at all, as some would like to think or believe? We weren't here when it all began and we sure as dinosaur shit won't be around when our sun finally calls curtains.
Where are all the life forms that preceded us for the last 4 billion + years? They gave way to us, of course ... as we too will give way to bigger, better, brighter versions of god's chosen — Ourselves. That's a difficult prospect for our species to swallow: we're so hubristic, so callous with our nicks and our knacks, our gods and our guns, our bullshit and our beliefs. We believe the entire universe was created just for us so that we could come along and fling our balls of petrified excrement into orbit; we believe at the back of all this immensity there's an eternal godhead whose primary and sole purpose in creating the universe was to secure our collective terrestrial and celestial wellbeing, and that's why this deity sits back on the nowhere-to-be-found demiurgic throne and permits us to turn his creation into a veritable shit-storm — because our 200,000 year old sojourn here is so very important to the divine plan for the vast and limitless cosmos. Without us, planets a million light years away might just shrivel up and die, and life at the end of the infinite galaxy might say to itself, 'What's the use in living any more, now that god's fallen angels, the human beings have become extinct? Let us commit collective Harakiri or Seppuku.'
We pride ourselves [our species prides itself] on our creative, imaginative prowess. We cite examples from all the arts over a few thousand years of our sublime greatness, and indeed we are great. We're the best so far, I presume. But what we still can't imagine, or let's say we have much difficulty getting our little crania around the notion, is our own extinction. Even our death [and everybody dies — hate to break it to y'all], the finality of our death, is something we just can't comprehend or accept. We concoct all these contradictory and ludicrous ideas [even by our own silly standards] of an afterlife, where our undying and unkillable spirit/soul lives on for all time. And this invisible immortal force is the locus of all god's interest in us, because this god is also invisible and soul-like, and I presume again that god likes to hoard what god considers his, or hers, or its. Whatever.
Anyway, there's zero evidence for the veracity of any of these grandiose delusions, but maybe that's what makes us so very special: I mean our ability to defy our own rules of logic and reason and to put our destiny in a glorious and self-perpetuating phantasmagoria. If dung beetles could pull off a stunt like that why they'd be great too ... and the godhead must really love beetles because there are 350,000 species of the ruffians. We have absolutely no evidence for our logic-defying beliefs but that's ok. Is it though? If you challenge the absence of soul-convincing evidence you're branded a heretic and dispatched to your non-existent afterlife to prove you were wrong. Luckily, you won't be returning to affirm the errors of your ways and to vindicate the priests who put the halter round your craw. Ah well, god is good, god loves you and me and god forgives us all, even the most vile of us he eventually pardons. And just as well too because I know a few fat cats who could do with that death-bed conversion and godly absolution.
We're unable to imagine our own place in the grand scheme of things. We're unable to conceive of our own extinction. We cannot imagine what a billion years can do to a planet like ours. And we cannot handle being put in our place, being humbled by what we secretly know to be the case — that we are as transient and as insignificant as any other organism that once squatted here and will do so once we're gone. The very most we can hope for is to become good fertlizer — beyond that is wishful thinking indeed. Best make the most of it while we're around because knowing our kind I'd venture to say we'll carry on with the same old reliable orgiastic butchery and destruction that makes us so unique and worthy of god's undying love, and interest.
Julian Barnes [citing Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and professor of cosmology and astrophysics at Cambridge] says all this better than I ever could. In fact his words inspired mine. When asked to describe the single idea he wished was more generally understood, Rees had this to say:
I'd like to widen people's awareness of the tremendous timespan lying ahead — for our planet, and for life itself. Most educated people are aware that we're the outcome of nearly 4bn years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun's demise 6bn years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.
