NTE 2

If NTE (Near Term Extinction) is inevitable, as a group of climate scientists - the ones who coined the term - believe, we are faced with an unprecedented moral and philosophical problem. We, as a species, have always known we are mortal. It is a big part of both the human condition and the definition of humanity. We are born, we live, and then we die. That's the most basic statement anyone can truthfully make about humanity. Change just one word tho "We are born, we live, and then everybody dies" and the import of the statement changes completely. We can no longer achieve a surrogate immortality by the often pleasurable (but never simple) expedient of breeding. We can no longer achieve a surrogate immortality using any means.


And surrogate immortality is why we do most things. It's why we bother to stay sober longer than a few hours consecutively. Why we make buildings and cities instead of lying on the grass. Why we write books. Why we do anything that has the possibility of outlasting ourselves. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, to be mortal is to be constrained to a linear motion in a Universe where everything else moves in a cyclical motion if it moves at all. But our attempts at immortality were not attempts to join the great circular motion of the seasons or the stars but, rather, to preserve our particular contribution to the narrow line of human existence. Well, that's fucked now. We can see, within the span of our own lives, the point where that line ends. Nothing human passes that point. Sure, our buildings and books might survive but without humanity to understand them, to give them a place in the universe, they are meaningless and so, in a very real sense, gone.


This might be transparently obvious but it has required the possibility (some would say certainty) of the extinction of our species to make it clear to me: the entire human artifice, everything we do, say, and make, all our creations and ideas, our civilization compiled and refined over 160 000 years demands the existence of humans. When we go, it goes too. If we have, as NTE postulates, already committed suicide the only forms of human endeavor that make any sense are those previously considered worthless precisely because they were, by nature, transient. So playing music makes sense, composing it does not. Sex makes sense, procreation doesn't. Speaking still has value, writing has none. And those tasks and professions to which I have dedicated myself - building, teaching, and writing - are of no use or worth whatever.

On the one hand, that doesn't feel good. But on the other, and since hope is what we have left I'm sticking with this hand, if NTE doesn't occur it means I have managed to navigate by instinct to those professions that (because they require the continued existence of our species and our world to have any meaning) offer the greatest possibility of forging a connection between the narrow and linear human perception of time and the great cycles of the universe. That contribute most to eternity. I guess I should   change my ways if I want to live a philosophically coherent life. But, instead, I will do as the great majority of the our species is doing, pretend nothing is different. Nothing has changed. Maybe I'll re-read Don DeLillo's books. That strikes the perfect note of pathos without significantly changing my life.