Balance and Moderation

The Buddha suggested the middle way between extremes, to find a balance between hedonism and asceticism, but I’m not sure that statically staying in the middle was what was meant. The Middle Way can be seen as the middle point between extremes, or it can be seen as the way that encompasses extremes in balance. This reminds me of another saying: All things in moderation, including moderation.

The Fate of Humanity on Earth

The Earth’s last human / will observe their last sunset / and write a haiku.

What will life be like for the last human on Earth? That’s something I’ve sometimes contemplated.

The Earth has a lifespan and cannot go on forever. Like us, Gaia is mortal. The Earth’s ability to filter greenhouse gases to keep itself at survivable temperatures will reach its limit as the sun expands and grows hotter with time. But before then, human civilisation will come to an end as complex life becomes more and more a burden to Earth’s life-sustaining powers – the last organisms will be as the first: single-celled organisms. Here I’ll contemplate one possible future for humanity, as positive as this vision of the Earth will allow.

The last humans on Earth will be something akin to Buddhists, contemplating, quite appropriately, the impermanence of it all. With equanimity and perhaps a bit of melancholy, they may realise that enlightenment is not needed to “cease suffering,” but that entropy will eventually achieve this anyway. Some, who cannot face such an end, may take off in their rocket ships to colonise the stars or other dimensions, if at all possible, but not everyone will be able to achieve this, and not everyone will want to.

How do we reach that point?

If we do not destroy our habitat or blow each other up we will survive and resolve the problems that currently face us, and we will achieve a complex global civilisation based on sustainability, creativity, diversity, equality, peace and cooperation. Our technological capacity will increase as time goes on, making life easier and letting us concentrate on being free and creative entities.

Over time, as noted before, the Earth’s capacity to sustain complex life will become limited, so civilisation will have to face its own mortality, and its citizens, freely and peacefully, will understand this and dismantle civilisation so that it doesn’t have an abrupt and catastrophic end. In the end, a small community of people will remain, celebrating and affirming the legacy of humanity to the end.