Nice post. I’m reminded of this Bertrand Russell passage:
“all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins … Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”
—A Free Man’s Worship, 1903
I take Russell as arguing that the inevitability (as he saw it) of extinction undermines the possibility of enduring achievement, and that we must therefore either ground life’s meaning in something else, or accept nihilism.
At a stretch, maybe you could run your argument together with Russell’s — if we ground life’s meaning in achievement, then avoiding nihilism requires that humanity neither go extinct nor achieve total existential security.
Nice post. I’m reminded of this Bertrand Russell passage:
I take Russell as arguing that the inevitability (as he saw it) of extinction undermines the possibility of enduring achievement, and that we must therefore either ground life’s meaning in something else, or accept nihilism.
At a stretch, maybe you could run your argument together with Russell’s — if we ground life’s meaning in achievement, then avoiding nihilism requires that humanity neither go extinct nor achieve total existential security.