Bill Bryson has written very funny and arresting (one of his favorite words) books on travel in such places as the Appalachians, England, Scotland, and Wales, the US Midwest, and Australia, as well as two excellent books on the English language. Now he's written an introduction to essential yet fascinating science called A Short History of Nearly Everything.
Interesting reading, to be sure, but he has some pretty discouraging news: anytime between now and the next, oh, 5 million years, one (or more) of several worst case scenarios will occur.
These are kinds of scenarios that make arguments about capital gains taxes seem pretty irrelevant. For example, we will probably have about one second's notice before the next asteroid hits and wipes out most of the human race, mammals, birds, and most of everything except bacteria. And it apparently doesn't have to be that big to cause major devastation. A 100-meter rock will make up for in velocity what it lacks in mass.
Also, Yellowstone National Park is apparently one huge volcano that is overdue for an eruption that will make Mount St. Helens seem like a baby's burp.
All this has gotten me thinking philosophically lately, and I've arrived at a theological test of sorts. It seems to me that all human efforts are based on a premise of indefinite human existence. We don't know what we'll be doing in 20 million years, but we're working on the assumption that some of the things we're doing now will have some relevance for people 2000, 3000, 4000 years in the future.
This is the shared effort of all people, whether they are religious or not. We aspire to contribute to something greater than ourselves - the future of humankind and whatever succeeds us. I think our collective unconscious drives us to profoundly change the universe for the better.
But if we knew that the human race would be extinct within, say, 1000 years, would we do things differently? I think we would. I suspect we'd give in a little more often to our hedonistic desires, not constantly invoke the idea of future generations, etc.
Nobody knows the probability of the human race going extinct in the next 1000 years. Although past performance is no indication of the future, it's been many thousands of years without any cataclysmic, global natural disaster. But we're obviously working on the assumption that nothing really bad will happen before we develop an ability to do something about it. We're installing radars or something to detect asteroids in time for us to deflect them somehow. We've started to watch Yellowstone a bit more carefully. Obviously, we're not fatalistic about this - we want the human race to survive.
And I don't think we'd be doing that unless we thought we are part of a Larger Purpose.
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