Simon Blackburn maintains that it would not

This may sound paradoxical. I have little doubt that we are hard-wired to fight against human extinction, just as we are hard-wired to fight against our own personal extinction. But we can easily be brought to admit that the latter does not matter, not sub specie aeternitatis (from the viewpoint of eternity), not to the planet, not in the cosmic scheme of things.

Memorial and eulogies may talk of eternal fame, but we each know, in our hearts, that this is nonsense. Each of us can only hope that our own extinction will matter locally: it may be comforting to suppose that we shall be missed and mourned for a time, a loss to our nearest and dearest.
 
But extinction of the human race will not matter even that much, for there will be nobody to feel regret, and nobody left to mourn. The last survivor will have the privilege of succumbing without leaving any legacy of grief, as lonely as the abandoned orphan or the unknown soldier. The death of the last human may be, for him, sad, or it may be, for him, a blessed relief. But the same is true of each other death, and will be just as true of yours and mine.

No happiness but no misery

Full many a rose is born to blush unseen – will it be so terrible if they all are? Is it so unbearable to contemplate the natural world continuing with none of us left to see the dawn and the sunset, to enjoy the spring, to love the view from the mountain or to hear the first cuckoo? Perhaps, but then there will be no orphans or soldiers, nobody dying of starvation, catching malaria, betrayed by loved ones, racked by pain in hospitals or dungeons.

With the departure of the human race we have the departure of human happiness, but also the departure of human misery. We have the departure of human virtue, but equally the departure of human vice: no saints, but no rapists and murderers either. It may not be a bad bargain: there are more murderers than saints, and happiness has always been elusive while misery is easier to recognise, easier to inflict, and easier to come by.

Chekhov thought that happiness could only be bought at all when wilful indifference or blind stupidity prevents us from imagining the state of the lives lived by people all around us in all their horrible detail. Anaesthesia through drink or drugs is the best devices we have for stupefying ourselves: malt does more than Milton can, to justify God’s ways to man. 

Good cheer

It is a pity, then, that there is no immediate prospect of human extinction, notwithstanding media talk of ‘tipping points’, of having only ten minutes or ten years to ‘save the planet’, and all the other panic-mongering nonsense that calls itself science journalism.

Global warming is highly unlikely to do it, however many wars and migrations it causes, since at its worst it may mean moving to higher ground and concentrating ourselves in newly temperate climate zones. It might diminish our numbers, but nearly everyone thinks that would be a good thing. It may reverse our technological frenzies, taking us back to a slower unmechanized world of local village life, but since we are so nostalgic for that anyhow, we can hardly regard it as a catastrophe.

There is no mechanism at all by which global warming is going to diminish our numbers to zero: only the exact opposite, the ice-bound snowball earth that may have existed before the Cambrian age would do that. Some set store by an asteroid, but if the long history of the earth is anything to go by they are rather few and far between. Myself, I would put more money on us making some nasty biological mistake and doing it ourselves.

I am aware that in taking a cheerful view of human extinction I am likely to incur the charge of being a misanthropist. I rebut this with indignation. It is not because I hate human beings that I contemplate their absence with equanimity. It is because I am sorry for them. I am even sorry for the groundless fears with which they occupy themselves.
 
Simon Blackburn is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge