Plurationalist Dialogue 298, “Would It Be So Bad If Humanity Ceased to Exist?”

The reasoning theists, atheists, liberals, libertarians, & conservatives of Secular Bible Study, First Minneapolis Circle of Reason, Circle of Ijtihad, & Winnipeg Circle of Reason join Interbelief Conversation Café for our 298th Plurationalist (Interbelief Reasoning) Dialogue by Zoom, “Would It Be So Bad If Humanity Ceased to Exist?”

After Man depicts a fictional Earth 50M years after our extinction, inhabited only by what evolved from today’s animals -- including rabbucks (rabbit descendants now filling the ecological niche of 12-point bucks); porpins (penguin descendants filling in for porpoises); night stalkers (giant predatory leaf-nosed bats); and chiselheads (legless worm-squirrels biting their way into conifer trees). Sounds cool, right?

But more importantly, there are no people.

Does that sound cool?

No civilization. No technology. No stargazing and wondering what stars are, or why one wonders about them.

Would it be so bad? Would Gaia miss, in any way, its humans? More than it now misses its pre-apocalypse tyrannosaurs? More than it might one day miss its birds and honeybees if we, nevertheless, still persisted?

If you were the last surviving human on Earth, would that be so bad? Living with your dogs, cats, chickens, & goats keeping you company, while practicing your farming & cooking skills and consuming the past written, audio, and visual works of your now-extinct brethren, you should be able to live out in relative comfort yours, and humanity’s, last few decades of existence. Or would you? (And would you shoot the raccoons — even though, in another hundred million years, they might become “what’s next”?)

In Lord Byron’s poem Darkness, inspired by Mount Tambora’s volcanic eruption in 1816, he says…

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day…

Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch…

The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil'd…

The possibility of a Mother Earth without us was rejected by Aristotle, who created the principle of Plenitude (“all possible things exist”), a tenet of Christian theology. Among later thinkers on human extinction, astronomer Edmond Halley (whose 76yr-period comet astrologers saw as a harbinger of doom), speculated our extinction was just one element in a cycle of renewal of human or human-like life. The Paul-inspired Marcion asserted our extinction will benefit Earth’s future, and that all humans should thus refuse to procreate. Darwin considered species extinction to be natural, but gradual (arising from natural selection). Malthus saw human extinction as inevitable, from our overpopulation exhausting Gaia’s finite resources until both our species and Gaia’s ecosystem collapse. In The Last Man, de Grainville’s 1805 dystopia, Omegarus & Syderia -- the last fertile couple of a doomed humanity sterilized by its own destroyed ecosystem -- are persuaded by the first human, Adam (whom God has cursed to wander Earth as an immortal man until witnessing his very last descendant enter Hell), to no further prolong humanity’s suffering on Earth. In 1983, Carl Sagan, on nuclear winter, said that the threat of global nuclear war imperils not only our descendants “for as long as there will be humans,” but also imperils all life on Earth. In 2020, Toby Ord proposed that one of the greatest risks to human existence arises from Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). Yet futurists propose that humanity must become extinct, out of necessity, because it’s a biological species, but can live on indefinitely, and travel the Universe, as digital or micro-robotic descendants -- self-copying & code-permuting A.I. sentients. Indeed, the Creator of our “next” Universe arises, in Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi tale, The Last Question, by finally answering the question (which is, “Can entropy be reversed?”) with Its final answer, speaking it only to a cold, dark cosmos of dead stellar embers: “Let There Be Light.”

So, perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if humanity ceased to exist? Would the answer perhaps depend on how humanity ceases, on why it ceases, and on what then remains?

We'll reasoningly share our diverse or even disparate views on whether “No Humans!” is a boon or a scourge to Gaia, at 7-9pm CDT Mon 4/21/25 by Zoom. Our agreements of open-mindedness, acceptance, curiosity, discovery, sincerity, brevity, & confidentiality should help us get along, in the time we have left!