How humanity moved from ‘eternal’ to ‘bookended’ time | Aeon Essays

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Nothing lasts forever: not humanity, not Earth, not the Universe. But finitude confers an indelible meaning to our lives

Do you recall the first time you knew you would die? It’s a milestone, realising your time is limited. That things happened before you, and will happen afterward, in your absence. As we grow up, the understanding of death comes in stages, but it culminates in acknowledgment of one’s own – unavoidable yet unpredictable – mortality. Sometime between the ages of six and 10, children become aware that their time is inescapably bounded. Roughly the same might be said of humanity’s self-knowledge. Only recently has the human collective begun accepting the fact it is itself mortal. We now…

How humanity moved from ‘eternal’ to ‘bookended’ time | Aeon Essays

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