Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,56
extinction of our species, and to the many ways in which creation in its entirety might be better off without us.
One evening around that time I took part in a public discussion about the future of humanity—the topic, more or less, of a book I’d recently published—and after the discussion had ended, a damp and pallid young man had cornered me to give me his thoughts on the matter. He said that in five billion years or so, the sun, having burned through all the hydrogen in its fiery core, would be transformed into a red giant and would expand to engulf much of the solar system, likely even burning up the Earth itself in its explosive demise, and so it was—“obviously,” as he put it—necessary to put in place a strategy whereby humanity could continue to survive on some planet far from our own doomed world. I told him that it seemed to me a long shot, given the way things were shaping up—by which I was alluding to the comparatively modest self-inflicted temperature rises we were facing in the coming decades—that our species would survive long enough to witness the consumption of the world by literal cosmic fire. But what I wanted to know, I said, was why it was obvious that we needed an exit strategy, that we should want to survive indefinitely as a species. It caused me no real sadness, I told him, to think that humanity might not exist five billion years from now. I found myself, on the contrary, strangely cheerful about the prospect. Couldn’t we just view the eventual death of the sun as an opportunity to call it a day, cosmically speaking? The man looked at me with what seemed like profound bafflement, and suggested that the attitude I’d just outlined was deeply ethically unsatisfactory, given all the future humans who would, in such a scenario, never come to live. He couldn’t understand, he said, why I would be okay with humanity as a whole ceasing to exist. Did this not, he asked, fly in the face of a humanist philosophy? I had not said anything about being a humanist, and was in fact not sure I would want to describe myself as such, but I let the matter slide. It seemed to me that we were facing each other across a vast philosophical chasm, one that would not be breached in this conversation, or any other we might be likely to have.
* * *
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Now and then over the succeeding days, as we walked the hills and valleys, Caroline and I fell into step with one another. She was on more intimate terms with nature than anyone I’d previously encountered, and I was impressed by her extraordinary knowledge of trees and plants and, in particular, species of mushroom. She described herself, half-jokingly, as a Womble, in reference to the 1970s BBC children’s television show about furry creatures who lived beneath Wimbledon Common, where they hid from human beings, of whom they generally had a low opinion, and turned their refuse into useful items.
“I make good use of the things that I find,” she said. “The things that the everyday folks leave behind.”
These words, she explained, were taken from the show’s theme song.
She had gone to art college, and had practiced as an artist for a time, before succumbing to what sounded like a deep despair about the futility of producing, of putting more objects into the world, which was, she felt, the last thing the world needed. After years as a musician, singing with various London post-rock bands, it was only fairly recently that she’d gotten back into making art, working solely with materials she had made herself, and making those materials only out of things she found in nature, or that had been discarded by other people—pens made from gull feathers, sketchpads made from pulped linen rags and threaded with bark strips, ink made from oak galls.
An oak gall, she explained, was a bulbous protuberance found on the branches of oak trees, caused by secretions of wasp larvae. From the days of the Roman Empire up until the Industrial Revolution, these were the primary source of ink, but in the last year or so they had become more expensive and difficult to source, she said, on account of the online vaginal health community mysteriously deciding that these wasp nests possessed certain potent vagina-tightening properties, leading to them being sold on Etsy for exorbitant sums. In order to