Patricia Finney
2 min readAug 4, 2021

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Does humanity deserve to survive?

No, clearly not. Especially if, as you say, humanity demonstrably doesn't even believe humanity deserves to survive.

Then there's the god question. If humans simply end when their bodies do, clearly there isn't a god either - or he's a monster of cruelty.

If humans don't end when their bodies do, if there's some kind of (pretty much unknowable) afterlife, then the question is more complicated. Because then we're not asking the question about the physical humans that we are or were, we're asking the question about our souls, the parts of us that continue. Humanity could be wiped out, but if our souls are immortal and still survive, perhaps we'll have learnt something that'll be useful to our rodentoid successors?

I think we'll be pretty pissed off with ourselves though.

You're completely correct about the attitude of our fellow-travellers on this planet, the other multicellular life: their votes would be to wipe us out for sure.

How about the point of view of the Earth Herself, the planetary organism.

I know: first you have to assume there is such a thing and then you have to assume that she's somehow conscious.

If she exists and knows about us - why did she allow such a rapacious destructive overgrowth of river apes - was it for our technology?

Was it so that she could be transported to other planets by our technology and start growing and evolving there?

It's hard to reproduce if you're a planetary organism because of all the hard vacuum and ionising radiation between you and other places to live. Maybe we're being tolerated as long as we look as if we'll colonise space and green Mars and Venus?

I know, I too hate the possibility that the billionaires are right.

What's quite exciting - in a cliffhanging sort of way - is that we'll probably get to see which is correct. Humans gone completely in 20 to 50 years - or humans in cities on the Moon and Mars.

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Patricia Finney
Patricia Finney

Written by Patricia Finney

I've been a published author since the age of 18, back when dinosaurs roamed. I write books, poems (patriciafinney2.substack.com) and anything else I feel like.

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