Most people treat extinction as a philosophical issue, a matter of opinion. “Surely, if extinction ever happens, it will occur after I’m dead. So who cares?” The worldly wisdom is that extinction always happens to someone else, to some unfortunate generation sometime in the indefinite future. It happens on another planet, but never to you! In fact, it never happens at all:
" We are at the very beginning of time for the human race... there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on." R. Feynman
We verify this widespread perception all the time in books and movies. A catastrophe occurs, and everyone dies except that young, handsome Adam, his gorgeous Eve, and a cameraman who just happened to be around. The cameraman is necessary to film the steamy scene where the human race is restarted from scratch. I don’t think that you will ever see a movie where everyone, I mean absolutely everyone, including the director, hopelessly dies. People just refuse to believe in the extinction of Man. So I have to concede that mine is not a very popular guess. I can only share with you my intuition. It seems to me like most people alive today will witness the end of our species and be an integral participant. When I say the end of our species, I mean everyone, including the guy with the camera. We will end up like T-Rex, a fossil here, another there. Let’s see why.
Module main page:How the last human died This page: The day the global economy collapses, it will be the end of Man Pages in this module: