In Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, the main character, Alvy Singer, has a flashback to a moment when, as a nine-year-old – and to the despair of his mother – he refuses to do his schoolwork. He has just found out that the universe is expanding and that one day it will break apart. So, what’s the point of homework?
It’s funny, of course, but why? Scientist calculate the sun will run out of fuel in a few billion years, snuffing out life on Earth. I have no reason to doubt the claim, yet it’s not stopping me from writing this article, nor you from reading it. Perhaps that’s because the calamity is so distant in time, and we assume that before then human ingenuity will have found a fix. Maybe human colonies (Elonies?) will have populated faraway galaxies.
We take for granted that after we die, other people will go on living. But suppose we were told that shortly after our death – say 30 days – an enormous asteroid would hit Earth, killing everyone on the planet. How would we respond?
It’s a question posed by the American philosopher Samuel Scheffler, who assumes – uncontroversially – that we’d be rather troubled. That’s interesting in and of itself, because it shows we care about things beyond our own experience. The fact that we won’t be around for the disaster is of no, or very little, comfort.
One source of distress might be the thought that the asteroid would kill the people we love: our children and grandchildren. So, borrowing from PD James’s novel The Children of Men, Scheffler offers us a slightly modified scenario. This time the human species has become infertile. Humanity is dying out, with no new humans being born. This differs from the asteroid collision, in that nobody’s life is cut short; our children will die a natural death.
Still, says Scheffler, the knowledge that human existence was soon to end would have a powerful impact on our well-being, how we chose to live our lives, and what projects we felt were worth pursuing. There are some obvious pursuits that would seem futile. A research scientist, for example, seeking to make progress in the battle to defeat cancer, would be bound to ask the Alvy Singer question: if there’s nobody around to take advantage of any medical breakthrough, what’s the point?
Cancer research has a specific goal that is unlikely to be achieved in the near future. But what about, say, a historian writing a book on the French Revolution? This might be published in time to be read by other people, but in the PD James scenario, would the scholar still be motivated to put in the effort? It’s not something a historian toiling away in the archives typically reflects upon, but their research only seems to have any worth because it’s part of an ongoing human enterprise.
We might imagine that even with the knowledge of imminent human extinction, some activities would continue to provide pleasure – in particular, those that provide instant gratification. Food. Music. Sex. Netflix. Watching or playing sport. But Scheffler speculates that the enjoyment we take in even these transient pursuits would suffer. Dining in a fancy restaurant or listening to the London Philharmonic might not be so agreeable in the shadow of annihilation. Could we really get worked up about whether our football team won the FA Cup this season, if there were only a few more seasons to go?
The background assumption that there will be what Scheffler calls an “afterlife” – by which he means not that we will somehow survive death but that human life in general will persist once we’re gone – clearly plays a hugely significant, if often overlooked, role in our lives.
Scheffler draws two specific and related conclusions from his grim thought experiments. The first is a practical lesson. We have more reason than we’ve hitherto realised to care about the future, and so we should take existential threats to humanity – such as nuclear Armageddon or climate change – doubly seriously.
The second is to invert the relationship between current and future people. When we think about taking action to combat global warming, we usually couch it in terms of a requirement for today’s generation to make sacrifices for subsequent generations. And, of course, that is in one sense true: fighting climate change means flying less, for example.
On the other hand, rather than framing these sacrifices in terms of the duties and obligations that we have to others, and that “they need us”, it is just as accurate to say that “we need them”. Without a confident belief in humanity’s endurance, we wouldn’t be able to find value and meaning in our lives. We’d probably adopt the Alvy Singer stance: “What’s the point?”
Next time: Newcomb’s Box
[See also: What’s wrong with Sarah Vine?]
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This article appears in the 02 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Just Raise Tax!