Some people aren’t bothered by the idea of an apocalypse. It doesn’t seem to them like a big deal if all life was extinguished, whereas the prospect of the death of a loved one carries a lot of weight. And some people even pride themselves on the clinical detachment and calmness they show in the face of such threats, while other criticize them for their lack of concern. Why is this?

I think the idea of an ultimate catastrophic disaster seems like less of a big deal because we can can’t seriously entertain it or process it. So we think we’re being detached, but we’re really just alienated. It’s too foreign a concept to grasp, so we assume that we have grasped it and that it wasn’t that big a deal.

If you really think it through, the apocalypse is a sort of existential solution. Not to the problem of your individual life, but to the question of the value and meaning of life itself. It turns out, none of it was for anything! And now it’s all gone forever. The universe falls silent. There isn’t even anyone around to be interested in our remains. Life is over and forgotten, from the tallest skyscraper to the lowest invertebrate. It wasn’t going anywhere, it wasn’t for anything, it didn’t mean anything.

So what was life? Life was a weird physical anomaly, a strange side effect of physics and chemistry in one tiny spot, now rubbed out and gone forever and forgotten, as if it had never been. A corrected abberation, a passing curiosity. But it has passed, a brief interlude in an eternity of space and time where it doesn’t figure. Now there isn’t even anyone or anything left to arouse such concerns and questions.

Even a frog, in its own way, raises such questions, even if it cannot reflect on them. Why should a lump of matter behave in such odd ways? Why organize itself so, why seek to perpetuate itself so? What does matter gain by being so ordered and perpetuated? The protons don’t benefit, the electrons don’t benefit, the neutrons don’t benefit, the chemicals don’t benefit. Nothing physical benefits in any coherent sense from having been part of a biological process.

It seems that the only true benefactor of all of this kerfuffle we call life is information. But information isn’t tangible; it’s not clear how it benefits from being, much less from continuing to be or from growing in size or complexity or imposing itself on more matter.

But now, after a proper global catastrophe, at least such strange questions are finally settled, as they are all moot. The questions themselves have decohered, along with the frogs. It isn’t even tragic, because there’s nothing and no one for it to be tragic to or about.

If you have to think about of this now, when all of it, including us, is still here; well, it all flies in the face of our experience. I mean that quite literally. Life exists and acts as if it matters, in defiance of all the consistency and good sense of nothingness and unliving matter. Simply by being, it generates a defiance of unbeing, as crazy as that is.

So long as it manages to escape universal obliteration, life’s very existence argues madly in favor of some purpose or value or meaning, coming from where we do not know and going toward what we cannot guess. Life believes by its very existence and nature that it is meant to exist and can’t contemplate a world without that strange kind of destiny. Only a good old-fashioned meteor or stellar explosion could shut up those questions for good.

If the death of everything did come, the questions would be answered. But not answered in the way that life desires. By existing, life generates questions that the rest of the physical universe lacks any capacity to engage with and that make no sense in a properly ordered world.

The answer of death must always be unsatisfactory to life, because it isn’t really an answer, it’s the cessation of that which provokes the question. And life, if still living, cannot help but be confused and dispirited and feel contradicted by it.

Imagining the end of all life, as a living thing, simply isn’t a coherent concept. It cannot be properly entertained by us, except in absentia, by ceasing to be. And so we cannot take it seriously, as living is a premise of our being so fundamental as to be inescapable while we yet exist. It cannot be properly entertained, either while we exist or when we don’t. So, naturally, it’s hard to have a proper or accurate or realistic perspective on it.

Whatever any of us feel about the end of the species, it’s sure to be a bit disconnected from the reality. And it always will be.