The death of everything

I was eight when I first understood that the sun would eventually die.

Not the comforting classroom version where "the sun will get bigger in a very long time," but the full implications: that the Earth would become uninhabitable, that every human who had ever lived would be forgotten, and that eventually the universe itself would become a cold, dark, empty space where nothing would ever happen again.

That night, staring at my bedroom ceiling, I couldn't escape a simple and terrible thought: someday there would be no one left to remember that we ever existed.

The realization hit me with the force of genuine horror. Every person I loved, every story ever told, every joke that made someone laugh, every moment of happiness or discovery or connection - all of it would simply stop existing. Not just the physical traces, but the possibility of remembering. The universe would continue spinning through space, completely empty of consciousness, with no one left to know that billions of years of human experience had ever happened.

I tried to imagine it: empty planets orbiting dead stars, galaxies drifting apart in an expanding void, with absolutely no one anywhere to observe or care or remember. Perfect, absolute silence stretching forever in every direction.

The anxiety wasn't about my own death, which seemed too distant and abstract. It was about the death of everything. About the fundamental meaninglessness of all human effort in the face of cosmic finitude¹.

My eight-year-old brain had stumbled onto what philosophers call the heat death of the universe, and it was not handling the information well.

I started asking my parents impossible questions. What was the point of doing homework if everyone would eventually die? Why did people build things if they wouldn't last forever? Why did anyone bother being good or kind or creative if it would all disappear anyway?

My parents offered the usual reassurances: this wouldn't happen for a very long time, we didn't need to worry about it, people in the future would figure something out. But these responses missed the point entirely. The timeline didn't matter. The certainty did.

It wasn't that I was worried about personally witnessing the end of everything. It was that I had suddenly understood the ultimate trajectory of existence, and it was unbearable. Every human achievement, every act of love, every scientific discovery - all temporary fluctuations in an universe trending toward complete emptiness.

I became obsessed with the concept of the "last human." Who would they be? How would they spend their final moments knowing they were the end of billions of years of consciousness? Would they feel the weight of carrying all human memory as they died? Would they be alone?

This wasn't the typical childhood fear of personal mortality. This was something much larger and more devastating: the recognition that consciousness itself was an temporary accident in an overwhelmingly unconscious universe.

The rational adult response would have been to focus on the unimaginably vast timescales involved. The sun won't expand for roughly five billion years. The universe might continue for trillions of years beyond that. Worrying about events that distant is like an mayfly fretting about the eventual expansion of the Andromeda galaxy.

But eight-year-old brains don't process geological time rationally. They work in emotional absolutes and ultimate outcomes. The mere fact that consciousness would end was enough to retroactively drain meaning from everything that came before.

What strikes me now is how this childhood terror maps onto some of the deepest questions in philosophy and cosmology. The problem of cosmic insignificance that Carl Sagan wrote about. The existentialist grappling with meaninglessness in the face of mortality. The modern discussions of existential risk and whether humanity can become a sustainable cosmic civilization.

Consider that we are living through what might be the most important period in human history: the brief window where we develop the technological capability to either destroy ourselves completely or spread consciousness throughout the cosmos. The decisions made in the next few centuries could determine whether consciousness persists for millions of years or ends within our lifetime².

Nick Bostrom's work on the vulnerable world hypothesis suggests we might be approaching technologies that could end human civilization permanently. Climate change, nuclear weapons, engineered pandemics, artificial intelligence - any of these could potentially terminate the entire project of human consciousness.

But there's also the opposite possibility: that we could become what Robin Hanson calls a grabby civilization, expanding consciousness throughout the galaxy and eventually the observable universe. That instead of consciousness being a brief flicker in cosmic history, it could become the dominant feature of reality.

The eight-year-old who couldn't sleep was essentially confronting the central question of our species: will consciousness persist, or will the universe return to its default state of unconscious matter following physical laws?

Modern longtermism has formalized this childhood anxiety into systematic thinking about the far future. If consciousness can persist for millions or billions of years, then the potential total number of human lives (or conscious experiences more generally) is astronomical. Every action we take that slightly increases or decreases the probability of long-term survival has enormous expected value.

But there's something uniquely devastating about confronting this question as a child, before developing the psychological defense mechanisms that make it bearable.

Adults have learned to compartmentalize ultimate questions. They focus on immediate concerns and local meaning. They build lives and relationships and projects that matter on human timescales. They develop what Thomas Nagel called the ability to step back from the view from nowhere and engage with subjective experience.

Children haven't yet learned these cognitive tricks. When they discover that everything ends, they feel the full weight of that knowledge without the buffering mechanisms that allow adults to function despite existential uncertainty.

The result can be genuine philosophical crisis. Not the abstract intellectual puzzle that cosmology represents to most adults, but visceral terror at the meaninglessness of existence.

I remember lying awake calculating whether anything I could possibly do would matter if consciousness itself was temporary. If I became a great scientist or artist or leader, would it change the fact that someday there would be no one left to know I had existed? Was all human striving ultimately futile?

This line of thinking leads naturally to what philosophers call nihilism - the view that life has no intrinsic meaning or value. But it can also lead to something more constructive: the recognition that if consciousness is rare and temporary, it might be extraordinarily precious.

If we are living in a brief moment when the universe has become aware of itself, if consciousness is an unlikely and fragile emergence from billions of years of unconscious physical processes, then every moment of experience might be cosmically significant.

The anxiety gradually faded as I developed better coping mechanisms and got distracted by more immediate concerns. I learned to live with uncertainty about ultimate outcomes. I stopped lying awake worrying about the heat death of the universe.

But I never entirely shook the underlying intuition that consciousness is precarious and valuable precisely because it's temporary.

Maybe the real insight from childhood existential terror isn't that we should be constantly anxious about the end of everything. Maybe it's that we should take seriously the possibility that consciousness might be the most important thing in the universe, and that preserving and expanding it might be humanity's primary moral obligation.

Maybe we should listen to the eight-year-olds who lie awake worrying about universal emptiness. Not because their specific fears are likely to be realized soon, but because their basic premise - that consciousness is rare and precious and worth preserving - might be the most important truth we can grasp.

The child who couldn't sleep understood something that adults often forget: awareness itself is extraordinary. The fact that matter can organize itself into patterns that experience meaning and beauty and connection is perhaps the most unlikely and valuable thing that has ever happened.

The universe spent billions of years unconscious. It might spend trillions more years unconscious after we're gone.

Right now, for this brief cosmic moment, it's awake.

Someone should stay up and appreciate that.