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