I bet if we could know for certain there was no life out there, and no hope of interstellar travel, we’d lose 90% of our interest in space/astronomy. I’d still be personally interested, because I like stars, black holes and the idea of empty planets. But most would stop caring.
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What might end is the capacity to feel the kind of incredibly poignant loneliness that took Hubble, Pioneer 11, shipping containers, and a double helix to deliver to us. It might be the most precious emotion we’ve constructed for our minds to experience. Better than religion.
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Our ability to feel this feeling might be perhaps the peak experience of being human if the worse climate futures play out. We might live on, but on a dispiriting subhuman journey. Or we beat the crisis and go on to experience way more on our many frontiers of the spirit.
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You may not share this sensibility. But ask yourself: do you possibly not feel this because you’ve short-circuited your capacity to feel it by putting your “soul”, for lack of a better word, in an illusory place where it cannot die, but doesn’t truly live either?
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This is ultimately what many of us are thinking/feeling when we talk about climate. We’re not secretly trying to shove Big Government down the world’s throat. We’re trying to prevent the soul-death of the world as we know it. Harsh as 90% collapse might be, soul death is worse.
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