A story by Isaac Asimov (WARNING: Depressing as hell)

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Sadness is an emotion indicating some kind of personal loss. I wonder just how personal one can feel about a demise taking place to whatever might exist billions of years in the future. It's reasonable to assume humanity will have long vanished. I would have enjoyed seeing dinosaurs but to actually feel sad about their vanishing hundreds of millions of years ago seems way out of proportion. All of humanity will surely be gone in a matter of a few thousand years at the rate we are destroying Earth's environment. I feel quite sad at the senseless killing of most large animals by humans such as elephants rhinoceroses, tigers, lions, etc. and this is something we can do something about but it seems unlikely.

The sadness derives from the fact that everything is ultimately futile. All of our suffering and glory shall come to naught. So it goes.

ruveyn

I really don't care what happens after I'm dead. I enjoy being alive and the opinion of the rest of the world about who I was or what I did while alive concerns me not in the least. The pitiful handful of people remembered after a thousand years has very little significance to the world and none at all to the people themselves.

What Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses did does count for something. That is why infants are not sacrificed to ensure good crops (at least in civilized countries). What Aristotle ( 384 b.c.e - 322 b.c.e.) said and wrote has a great deal of influence on how you think. Euclid (circa 300 b.c.e.) set the mold and form for abstract mathematics which drives the physics which drives the engineering which produces the gadgets you take for granted. Ditto for Archimedes (287 b.c.e. - 212 b.c.e.).

ruveyn

You and I are not Plato or Archimedes, or Aristotle. We will disappear like a puff of smoke.

Speak for your self. I have a few years left to do something Immortal.

ruveyn

No Smoking topic

I concur.