I never understood the desire to believe in the end of the world. It's been around for millennia (the idea, that is), and it hasn't happened yet. I suppose it's almost a mark of maturity when one grows up enough to learn that nothing lasts forever, but it somehow seems arrogant to me to fantasize about the end of the world.
Why?
For the same reason it's arrogant to think that a special Creator built the world just so you could go to church in it. To believe that the end of the world is going to happen in your lifetime is to believe that this generation, the one that invented decent clothing and music, not to mention sex of course, is the ultimate, the pinnacle of history. Everything else was leading up to THIS world of which you are a member and there can be nothing after. How could there be? YOU won't be there. Silliness.
Bad things will happen now and then, the population will reach a peak, wax and wane and go through statistically predictable changes that certainly feel like the end of the world for the single data points involved. I'd like to think that eventually we'll begin to spread slowly but surely through space, building our own inhabitable planets as we go until we speciate due to simple reproductive isolation and varied selection criteria. At some point people might not be recognizable as people any more. I guess that's the end of the human world, although nobody'll notice its passing.
It's hard to make a movie about that sort of thing though. There'd be too much math involved in a universe like that for even Nicolas Cage to do.
Why?
For the same reason it's arrogant to think that a special Creator built the world just so you could go to church in it. To believe that the end of the world is going to happen in your lifetime is to believe that this generation, the one that invented decent clothing and music, not to mention sex of course, is the ultimate, the pinnacle of history. Everything else was leading up to THIS world of which you are a member and there can be nothing after. How could there be? YOU won't be there. Silliness.
Bad things will happen now and then, the population will reach a peak, wax and wane and go through statistically predictable changes that certainly feel like the end of the world for the single data points involved. I'd like to think that eventually we'll begin to spread slowly but surely through space, building our own inhabitable planets as we go until we speciate due to simple reproductive isolation and varied selection criteria. At some point people might not be recognizable as people any more. I guess that's the end of the human world, although nobody'll notice its passing.
It's hard to make a movie about that sort of thing though. There'd be too much math involved in a universe like that for even Nicolas Cage to do.