/lit/ - Literature

Old Testament

Rage at the dying of the light.

I have both books with this title.

>>16259146
That addresses individual mortality but all the questions about total mortality are just answered by "lol god will fix it".

>>16259146
What? Their flood version? That’s not extinction

>>16259141
idk, doesnt seem to matter that much. its all in perspective.
>>16259152
gay schloppy sentimentalism. “an unnatural history”. like anything is unnatural. the hubris.

>>16259141
why you wanna do something about it, immortality only makes sense under a individualistic light

>>16259141
a fucking party

>>16259141
Timothy Morton might be up your alley. But his and the rest of the speculative realist's project seems doomed to fail.

>>16259175
>immortality only makes sense under a individualistic light
?

>>16259175
What are you arguing for, trying to make hedonism accessible to the whole human race or entirety of your ingroup and then just doing that?

>>16259207
What fucking time zone are you in?

By realizing that you are not "human" any more than you are say, French or German. These are concepts, stories we tell ourselves. We are of the same substance as the trees around us, or stars in the sky. To "go extinct" as you say, is merely to change.

>>16259267
There are some changes that actually exist.

>>16259152
Both books are about humans making animals extinct. What about the implications of eventual human extinction?

>>16259267
Based redditposter

>>16259199
He lives in the UK and has a teaching position at Oxford but spends his entire time trying to get people on Twitter to vote Biden. Even if trying to change the US election was a good use of his time, he won't accomplish that on Twitter.

>>16259469
We’ll follow.
I’m sure there’s some utterly bleak post apocalyptic dystopia out there describing the last squeaks of humanity. (I Am Legend? Zombi apocalypses?) but I haven’t read or remember any titles. Just a lot of large enough to start over stuff. Clearly not trying to face the inevitable end.
Stapledon’s Last and First Men does another take on it

>>16259544
I'm not asking about what human extinction will entail, I'm asking if there are any works that assess some part of the modern world - art, philosophy, politics etc through the lens of humanity all dying out at some point.
Whether it's an asteroid in three days time or something incomprehensible in a million years time is not the point.

>>16259141
listen to this and you'll feel better. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY1T0lZnUdU

>>16259141
Good riddance, humanity is evolution's greatest failure. A creature totally alienated from his place in the natural order, an abomination

>>16259267
a tree wouldn't say that anon

>>16259267
>And then after I said this, everybody clapped, and the professor gave me an A!

>>16259141
>What can be done in the face of the knowledge that the human race will one day go extinct?
Rejoice, my friend. Rejoice!

>>16259141

The old geographers really grappled with this after discovering 'deep time.' It really traumatized them.

>>16259823
Ironic or not... sentience is an inherent disruption to the natural order. Nothing to be done except be the custodians of this plane and the curators of its beauty.

>>16259141
Well, that fact doesn't make the slightest difference to anything. You folks and your weird obsessions about immortality and endless legacies. "If shit isn't literally eternal, nothing matters!" Get a human scale and calm down.

>>16259141
What do you mean by "what can be done?" Whatever you were already doing?

What's the painting?

>>16260081
La Vérité sortant du puits armée de son martinet pour châtier l'humanité ("Truth coming from the well armed with her whip to chastise mankind"), an 1896 painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme.

>>16259141
You should be thrilled

Anything by Dave Cohen.

>>16259167
I like how you judge books you've never read!

the human race will never go extinct. what gave you that idea?

>>16259141
>Only the love that springs from pity, and carries its compassion to the utmost breaking of self-will, is the redeeming Christian Love, in which Faith and Hope are both included of a—Faith as the unwavering consciousness of that moral meaning of the world, confirmed by the most divine exemplar; Hope as the blessed sense of the impossibility of any cheating of this consciousness.
>AFTER recognising the necessity of a regeneration of the human race, if we follow up the possibilities of its ennoblement we light on little else than obstacles.... We cannot withhold our acknowledgment that the human family consists of irremediably disparate races, whereof the noblest well might rule the more ignoble, yet never raise them to their level by commixture, but simply sink to theirs. Indeed this one relation might suffice to explain our fall; even its cheerlessness should not blind us to it: if it is reasonable to assume that the dissolution of our earthly globe is purely a question of time, we probably shall have to accustom ourselves to the idea of the human species dying out. On the other hand there is such a matter as life beyond all time and space, and the question whether the world has a moral meaning we here will try to answer by asking ourselves if we mean to go to ground as beasts or gods.

Of course, there is a more metaphysical prescience left out of these quotes, but they are not opposed to it but rather encourage that mentality.

>>16259805
>Italian Pomp
I say NO!

>>16259141
>What can be done in the face of the knowledge that the human race will one day go extinct?
What are you talking about? This unironically fills me with unspeakable relief.

>>16261479
If a giant asteroid hit Earth tomorrow, we would be functionally extinct. The human race has a grand total of three people in space right now, and they're incapable of sustaining themselves without support from the ground. I don't know how long they could survive, but if Earth were rendered uninhabitable they would soon die themselves. To top it off, even if there were some miracle which allowed them to live out the duration of their natural lives, all three astronauts in space right now are dudes, so it's not like they can start fucking and making babies.

>>16261536
i'm well aware of the mechanics of mass extinctions. however, even if a meteor impact, or some other cosmological or tectonic event, were enough to end humanity- which is itself debatable, given that earth's biosphere has survived several such events in the past- the odds of that happening are so low that it's only worth discussing as a hypothetical. there is no basis to the supposed 'inevitability' of the extinction of the human race.

>>16259141

lol you know how many species have gone extinct in the past? Let's just say a lot
Human's going extinct only seems like a big deal to you because you are one

>>16259544
Ah, it's you! My lily of the valley.

I have been looking for you. Fate thrusts needles through my heart in keeping you behind this lattice of anonymity. Oh! How I yearn for you to be my sassy wife and be at my side so that these ignoramuses might have their miseries nursed on your sassy manner and interjections.

Reach out to me, my Eve! My Juliet! My death, my death! Reach out from me across this wretched valley and take my hand! Oh, DM me! Please give me your DMs!

>>16261498
Me 2 because of suffering risks. I hate redditfags that want to go to space.

>>16261586
You assume that the human race has an immunity to extinction from everyday forces of nature that make other species extinct - disease, food shortages, major volcanic eruptions, competition with other species, climate change, habitat loss.
Assuming this is true, then if the human race never leaves the solar system then they go extinct when the sun leaves the AGB branch of stellar evolution and partially explodes.
If the human race does, then they go extinct when they run out of stellar objects to live near.

>>16261733
consequentialist ethics are for pseuds

>>16261893
Unless we figure out a way around thermodynamics, no matter what we do we're going to go extinct as entropy marches everything in the universe towards inexistence. Everything which composes every single human being that exists and has ever existed will inevitably be sucked into a black hole and spat out as Hawking radiation.

>>16259267
The differences between everything are equally what makes things worthwhile

>>16261733
No, I'm just glad all the shit we fuck up will eventually be undone, and we'll disappear. How relieving it is, to know that no one will remember our mistakes, and the things we're ashamed of.

>>16259141
i dont know but i find it incredibly boring and uninteresting

>>16259141
Fourteen. We send all the kids into a T-rex shaped rocket to find a being whose superior genes can redeem us

>>16259152
>Pulitzer
>Elizabeth
>butterfly tranny

oof....the memes write themselves

>>16259141
Why, can't we evolve into something new and better like primates did?

>>16259141
Man will be surpassed.

>>16259141
Do what you always do: whatever makes you happy.

>>16259141
In my opinion human race will evolve to something we can't predict right, probabily it will mix itself with synthetic life force abbandoning its human nature. Maybe we will become similar to stars or something, gods with nothing in common with humanity right

>>16259141
>What’s reality? I don’t know. When my bird was looking at my computer monitor I thought, ‘That bird has no idea what he’s looking at.’ And yet what does the bird do? Does he panic? No, he can’t really panic, he just does the best he can. Is he able to live in a world where he’s so ignorant? Well, he doesn’t really have a choice. The bird is okay even though he doesn’t understand the world. You’re that bird looking at the monitor, and you’re thinking to yourself, ‘I can figure this out.’ Maybe you have some bird ideas. Maybe that’s the best you can do

>>16264460
Kino

>>16259141
>What can be done in the face of the knowledge that the human race will one day go extinct?

To live in the moment. That is all.

>>16266487
you can’t do that. you take your past with you everywhere and you plan your actions to revolve around the future

>>16264460
>Maybe you have some bird ideas. Maybe that’s the best you can do

>>16266499
Then you are cursed and will find no peace.

As long as the bad times happen after me I don't care, what more needs to be said?

>>16266834
Why not just hedonism then?