Interesting question, and one I sideswiped a bit on my entry earlier this evening.

With an increasing number of Americans indicating they do not believe in an afterlife, I suspect if the revelation were made that an asteroid were to wipe out all life on the planet, law and order and civility would all pass by the wayside quickly.

But if an increasing number of Americans have no belief in an afterlife, what is holding the general breakdown of morality back now?

There is so much I could say in response to this. I'll say it in shorthand for now since I'm pressed for time. On the positive side: Doomsday vault, Message in a bottle (V'ger), Radiotelescope, etc. See the Star Trek Next episode The Inner Light, which is lovely. But these are all fantasies. Realistically, I expect a lot of wars, crime, denial, opportunism, snake oil salesmen in religious garb, etc. If there's to be any high-minded stuff, it will be by individuals or very small, well-organized groups, well-walled-off or hidden from most of society, equipped with resources enough to outlast the desperation that comes of not knowing exactly how much time there is or whether there will be resources enough. You might want to look up what happened at Easter Island. That's probably a good model.

Carolina, I read your post after I wrote this, and noticed the similar theme. In answer to your question: if society denies an afterlife, then the glue that holds it together is the knowledge that society will continue with subsequent generations. In both the film and Adams' letter, once you lose that, chaos ensues, and all hope is lost.

Kent, thanks for stopping by. Some time ago I read about a 16th century sailor who was shipwrecked on the coast of Greenland. He came across the ruins of a village, and the still preserved remains of a European man dressed in skins and furs, clutching a small sword of the Viking style in his hand. He was the last of the Greenland Vikings, and had died not terribly long before his body was discovered. He was part of a society utterly forgotten by Europeans, and completely cut off from the rest of the world. Can you imagine what that man's life would have been like? How long had he been alone, and what was his village like when there were still a few survivors who knew their society was soon to end?

Thats a relief, I thought you were building a doomsday devise. Actually I blieve the male sperm count has dropped 50% in the past 50 years so Children of Men might come to pass.

extinction of human life? too horrible to contemplate, yet we contemplated it every day during the nuclear terror under which we grew up, I remember seeing the movie "On the Beach" when I was an adolescent and the sense of utter hopelessnes and desolation it left

You could make the same argument about religion-- what good are morals if there's no 'great reward' ?? How can you 'justify' one type of behavior over another? These types of debates tend to slide into 'moral relativism' fairly quickly.

What would happen? Some people would seek power and wealth and persecute others and find that, in the end, they would perish too. Some would turn violent or mad and attack others; they, too, would find no release from their doom. Some people would seek plesaure and carpe the diem; they would also become ashes in the end. Some would find solace or liberation in love, or art, or spirituality. The great mass of humanity would muddle through, buffeted by forces that they cannot control, and, as the end came, clutch to whatever memories of love or happiness or belonging they had once fleetingly felt and perhaps have a glimpse of peace.

It would sort of be like all of human history, but more intense.

Noirville, doomsday machine is under development. I have heard that statistic about the sperm count, although I wasn't sure if it was true, or an urban legend.

Roy, I saw that movie within the last year or so. A very good film, and yes, it's bleak, although does manage to capture a love of life.

Mr. E, good questions. Isn't religion's purpose to teach how to live? If our time as a species were coming to an end, then religion should help us live what time we have left well. But then the question is, why? What's the point? I don't see how one could NOT fall into despair.

Pilgrim, your last phrase is pithy: "with more intensity". In a situation that is rife with despair and anarchy, that's pretty scary!

You've given lots to ponder, especially in light of the epidemic of ecological denial on the part of so many.

Frightening question. I read The Stone Gods by Winterson this summer and she also asks this chilling question. Beautiful and sad. I remember reading Childhood's End in college and it really disturbed me. The end of mankind is not something one likes to contemplate. This contemplation makes me overwhelming sad. I can't truly believe in it. I have to believe that something continues on.

Stacey, good point. Thanks for stopping by.

Gwen, I also read Childhood's End in college. Of course, as I recall, it dealt not so much with the extinction of humanity, but its evolution to a new, higher life form, a Hegelian leap. It certainly was a sad, disturbing story, though.

Since we have inhabited only a small part of the supposed lifetime of the planet, it seems to me there is vestige of life that survives every unexpected sudden change, or catastrophe. Relative to many bodies in the universe, Earth is quite young, so if most of our species were wiped out, there would be a continual evolution of consciousness when balance was again established, from some form or another.

Now....no one can say if our aspirations transfer forward through millions of years, but it seems plausible that our genes would, and that is no less than a grand bounty of information.

Interesting that you draw that conclusion so adamantly, Steve. I don't believe in any form of after life spiritually and find nothing dark about that. It's entirely neutral: when something dies, it ceases to exist. Not existing, the dead thing doesn't care that it's dead. If everyone was dead, literally nobody would care. No big deal. I don't want to die (a conscious, living process I would experience), but I'm entirely unconcerned about the prospect of being dead (a state that impacts something that isn't me, i.e., my dead body as it decomposes and eventually disappears).

Barring Adams' scenario, where a divine being reveals in an undeniable manner to everybody that the end is near, my suspicion is that a majority of people would deny it. Assume an asteroid: we would unlikely have decades of advance notice. In the days, months or years between the first speculations about impending doom and the scientific consensus of the inevitability of doom, many people would create pseudo-scientific counter-evidence. Others would be sure that humanity could save itself (nuke the asteroid or what not).

Humans tend to be a pretty optimistic lot. We tend to believe that bad things happen to other people until so many bad things have happened to us we can't deny our ill fortune anymore. No reason to believe that would change.

More terrifying to me would be the incomplete destruction of mankind: a nuclear holocaust that destroys civilization as we know it, leaves millions alive but seriously ill. The healthy survivors would face terrible choices about who to save and would have to quickly discover how to survive in a severely degraded world.

Re: the idea that religion is the great moral teacher. In many ways, the significantly less religious western European nations have a lot to teach Americans about living up to Christian morality. At least within the confines of my own liberal Judeo-Christian morality, religion is a neutral factor for creating and sustaining morality. People do wonderful things due to religion; they also do unspeakable things in the name of religion and god. Faith seems to reflect, not govern morality.

Gary, it's interesting to speculate that human consciousness might survive the human race. Gwen mentioned the book Childhood's End, and in that book humanity ceases, and a new species replaces it -- still, awareness of humanity remains among those who come after. Of course, they likely don't really care much about their memories of the species, since they are now a higher species, similar to our relationship to other primates.

Specular, you bring up an intersting idea, that humans being what they are, would deny the obvious as the end approaches. I still think society would crumble, but perhaps self-delusion would win the day. I do think that any sense of meaning and purpose likely requires the belief that the human species will outlast our own existence, and that a new generation will replace ours. I interpret your comment as suggesting that people would give meaning to their lives through self-delusion, and that they do anyway with their religious faith. In other words, an erroneous faith wins out over the obvious doom of the species.

No matter what the scenario, it ultimately ends in human extinction. The only real question is, how soon?

As I have no descendants, and no belief in the afterlife, I am left to wonder...why do I bother not punching everybody I meet in the face? One of these days when I come up with an answer I'll let you know. :-)

I remember seeing a stock trading game being used as a simulation of the stock market. The difference was that the game had a limited life. Trading was normal until the very end, when prices fell off a cliff.

I suspect that if we had a firm deadline for the end of the earth, the same would be true. People would go about their business fairly normally (except with no retirement savings) until near the end and then they'd throw trash in the street and leave dishes piled up in the street.

I suspect rape of the environment would be committed equally by believers and non-believers. If the earth is going to be destroyed, why preserve it.

In civil society, we'd want criminal justice systems to continue. You don't want to be robbed blind when you still have 30 years to go, but towards the end, what's the use of money or goods? Why not give it away?

All this being said, I remember so many skies are falling. The new ice age (Ha! now it's global warming), the end of oil by the year 2000. Not to mention Malthus's prediction that the earth would no longer be able to feed the population, When was that supposed to happen? Some time in the 1900s?

Verbal, I refuse to be your punching bag! Unless I can punch back...

Malusinka, I think your idea of what would happen sounds pretty likely, and is the same scenario that the film "Children of Men" postulated. And just to be clear, I'm not suggesting the end is near. This is just a hypothetical consideration of what would happen if it were, and we were aware of that fact.

The idea of Verbal punching a few of us, especially the men is of interest. I like folks with alot of gumption......so I guess I would want "gumption" to be the sustaining force, or attribute of a surviving species.... even in something unfamiliar and perhaps somewhat gelatinous...

The idea that all of humankind could vanish is a fascinating one, both philosophically and scientifically. It certainly could happen, and is justification for our space program. Both Carl Sagan and Steve Hawkings have made it very clear that we live in not such a great neighborhood astronomically speaking, and the scenario of a colony of humans on Mars as the last survivors of mankind is not implausible.

Have you ever seen the movie Testament (you can see it on Youtube)? It's actually a very well done film with Jane Curtin and a young Kevin Costner and a number of recognizable other. It's a "what if" nuclear weapons were detonated all over scenario that takes place in a small northern California town. At first the survivors have hope that their missing loved ones will return and they all help each other and cooperate but civil order slowly but surely falls apart and hopelessness becomes as pervasive as the radiation sickness slowly killing them all.

Humans have been on this planet for but a blink of an eye geologically speaking and, though we have had an enormous impact with relation to our stay here, the law of averages would suggest that we too will go the way of the dinosaurs.

I am not a religious person and blame organized religion for much of woes of man over the centuries. The belief in an afterlife has often been used to placate the laboring, miserable masses, to suffer in this life and toil for the betterment of a few with the promise of reward after death. Sounds like a con job to me.

Religious beliefs have sought to explain natural events such as flood and famine, earthquakes, and floods, things that had no explanation, things that terrified primitive man. If there was definitive proof that after death there is simply nothing, just a void, the end, would society disintegrate, or would the opposite happen? Would people live their lives with more gusto, more determination to extract the most from their lives, to revel in the now rather than the quasi promise of a better world? Perhaps it's better for it all to remain ambiguous and unknowable.

So is the idea of a spiritual afterlife completely beyond the realm of possibility? Pretty much, but there are phenomena that defy explanation so it cannot be discounted as impossible and comforting somehow in the unknowable.

Oh, I forgot to add, excellent post Procopius. It is the ultimate question.

Ablonde, thank you for your thoughtful comment. I tend to agree with Specular's comment to the point that if there were irrefutable evidence that an afterlife was out of the question, then much of humanity would deny the obvious and still fulfill the need to believe in something greater than themselves. It's called Faith, in the truest sense of that word, an internal belief unconnected to physical or verifiable reality.

On the other hand, what if the "End" pertained not just to the individual's existence, but the imminent extinction of the entire human race? If humanity knew that there would be no future generations to carry on, would society crumble? I think it would. I think the belief that humanity exists beyond us, in the lives of the next generation and the generations after it, is absolutely central to the functioning of civil society, and to mankind's sense of self.

I'm with Roy Jiminez above. Although 20 years have passed, it seems like just yesterday that we were anticipating imminent nuclear war, which, we were always told, meant "the end of life as we know it." This was long after the age of "duck and cover" and fallout shelters. When I was in high school and college, full-scale nuclear war seemed all but inevitable. How quickly we forget! And how easily - and absurdly - people today regard such potshots as 9/11 as the dawn of the apocalypse.

As I remember, this fear of imminent megadeath had little real impact at all. Sure, it heated up politics here in Europe - Europeans rightly suspected that the Americans would nuke the entire continent to save their own skins - but life went on pretty much as usual, as it does today in the face of "Islamo-fascism" - surely the greatest threat our planet has EVER confronted.

Alan, I agree with you. I was only writing this post as an intellectual exercise about how society would respond if we knew that humanity's end was imminent. I certainly don't think we are there yet!