There will come a time,” I said, “when all of us
are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There
will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let
alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and
thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this”—I
gestured encompassingly—“will have been for naught.
Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of
years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we
will not survive forever. There was time before organisms
experienced consciousness, and there will be time after.
And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I
encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone
else does.