Earth in a billion years

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Professor David Kipping at Columbia University, speaks with passion and poetry.  His words at the end are so moving.

It also reminds me of a thought of Bertrand Russel that’s been on my mind for many years. From memory:

That all the labours of the ages,

All the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius,

That the whole temple of man’s achievement,

is destined for destruction in the vast death of the solar system,

All these things, while by no means beyond dispute,

Are nonetheless so nearly certain that any philosophy that does not take them into account,

Cannot hope to stand.

I’ve just looked it up and the whole quote is here. 

What David Kipping says is that we may have many new goes at it.... But I don’t buy his suggestion that we’re an “infestation” on the earth. We are the only species -- that we know of -- which can apprehend the universe. There is intelligent life other than us on earth, and life that uses tools. But none that has ideas about what the rest of the universe is like. We may be the universe’s way of understanding itself.