For a long time, I’ve valued reading books, except I didn’t really read books myself. I bought books, I planned to read books, but that’s as far as it went. When I decided to read Infinite Jest along with the Infinite Summer website this spring, it was an active decision to reevaluate my reading habits.

I’ve read perhaps a dozen books in the last five years, most of which have been read in very quick bursts followed by long lulls in reading, and that’s an abysmal rate in my opinion. So I’ve started being more proactive in my reading of late, trying to jump right into a new book each time I finish one.

Related to that, I recently finished Last and First Men, by Olaf Stapledon, a book not considered science fiction by its author but widely seen as one of the most influential early science fiction novels. It is written as a chronicling of the future iterations of humanity for the next two billions years.

The time scale is exponential in nature; the first four chapters cover a mere five thousand years, whereas the last three chapters cover a full billion.

Some of the initial ‘history’ is obviously wrong. His ‘predictions’ that France and England would war to such an extent that both nations would be decimated, that Europe and America would come to violent throes leaving Europe a biological wasteland, were both quickly proven wrong by World War 2.

But the end result of those early events is that Russia’s Bolshevik revolution slowly morphs to a capitalist nation and grows stronger connections with America. China also develops into a communist nation working not as a vassal of America but a strong economic competitor. These details aren’t quite the world we live in, but to consider them outlandish is also cutting Stapledon short.

From there, the world goes through epic changes, the rise and inevitable fall of countless world governments, cataclysms that shatter the world, and much much more. Humanity evolves into 18 unique forms, some more advanced than us, others vastly more primitive, even more so foreign as to barely recognize their origins.

Having read this book, my old post about people’s terrifying pessimism seems not strongly worded enough. These are troubling times, but every time in history has been troubling. The world isn’t ever going to magically become a utopia. We’re going to continually struggle against our needs, our wants, our vices, our neuroses. But we will, in the long run, improve.

The global temperature might rise five degrees, destroying island nations with rising sea levels, crippling the economy and agriculture of the world, but we will adjust. We all won’t adjust because a lot of us will be dead. But we will persist. I think that any one who is so pessimistic as to look at the state the world is in rate now and imagine it can only get worse, or that it’s just not worth it to live a longer life in these dire times, or any of these sorts of things suffers from an extreme, almost hysteric, lack of imagination.

I’m still not sold on immortality, I still suffer from the belief that life would eventually get boring and I’d prefer the nothingness to continued life. But this book has shown that there’s so much more out there than we can even imagine, from the sheer quantity alone. If any one person lived forever, who knows what they’d discover, what truths they’d develop, what intractable problems they’d swat away with a few millennia of concerted effort.

I’ll close this post with a video that, every time I see it, reinforces the idea (among others) that even immortality isn’t enough time. There’s simply too much to experience, too much to do.

Last week, when Prison Break took over Dollhouse’s time slot and its ratings were even worse than Dollhouse’s, I thought that maybe — just maybe — Dollhouse had a chance of renewal. But then the ratings for this week came in and Dollhouse hit yet another series low and underperformed compared to the Prison Break episode that aired earlier that night. So Dollhouse looks truly, and unequivocally, dead. But let’s not dwell, let’s follow the show into the dark.

This week, the main story was that of a dead Dollhouse client. She planned regular brain scans with the Dollhouse and a plan to revive her in a Doll for a brief period of time after her death. To solve her own murder. Talk about paranoid.

Well, I guess not in this instance.

Echo takes on the role, and while the murder mystery is relatively interesting, it’s not too hard to unravel the clues, and the best part about that entire story thread is the idea that the Dollhouse can offer eternal life, as Topher says, “if they really like you.”

This eternal life troubles Boyd greatly, who seems to be playing the role that the professorial dude from Man on the Street played. As he said then, if the Dollhouse’s technology existed, “as a species, we will cease to matter.” Boyd, not having caught on to the ultimate implications of the Dollhouse until now, says of the eternal life he’s discovered the Dollhouse can offer that it’s “the beginning of the end,” and while his claim that morality doesn’t exist without the fear of death seems a little juvenile to be coming from a Joss Whedon show, the idea that humanity would be altered at a fundamental level if immortality, in any form, was invented remains true.

Heady issues were being tossed around right and left this week, with all three plots examining the Dollhouse in a new and exciting way. First, the just discussed immortality. Second, Topher loads Sierra up with a friend personality. Because Topher has no friends. Which is sad, really. But all of the scenes of Topher and Sierra geeking out are all so fun and airy, that the implication doesn’t hit you until Adelle’s monologue about the need to feel connected, to have friends, to evade loneliness however you can.

Finally, we get Paul Ballard’s sad little tale. He’s fucked, both literally and figuratively, by the Dollhouse this week. He’s unable to break it off with Mellie lest he reignite the Dollhouse’s investigations, but unwilling to invest in a relationship with her. Ultimately, Mellie offers herself up to Paul with no expectations. She doesn’t care that he doesn’t like her, so long as he continues to let he be in his presence. It’s incredibly debasing, and emphasizes that Mellie’s so called love for Paul is nothing more than a programmed parameter. After this monologue, a switch seems to click in Paul’s mind, and he no longer sees Mellie as a person, but as an object. And in that moment, he sinks to his baser instincts and fucks her. The next morning in the shower, as the water fails to clean the filth from his body he tells Mellie that he’s found a new Dollhouse client, but he doesn’t say that it’s him. Paul’s scenes were the shortest and the least frequent but I thought they packed the biggest punch, despite the discussion of immortality in the A plot.

This week’s Dollhouse was all over the place in the best sort of way; none of the stories really had anything to do with each other, and the ideas they were exploring were all mostly independent, but they were all beautifully explored while servicing the growth of the characters along the way. Which is the way good television works.

A few years ago, I took a philosophy course and one day my professor asked the students of the class to raise their hands if they would want to live forever. Not a single student raised their hand. No one but me, that is. I wasn’t sold on the whole immortality deal, but I was at least interested. I wondered if this hypothetical offer was enforced or endorsed. In particular, I wanted to know if I could choose to die at some point in the future when I’ve finished, or at the very least grown tired of, exploring the infinite expanses of both the universe and of the mind. His response was no, so my choice was no. Just as the eternal immortality of heaven and hell seemed unappealing to me, eternal immortality in our world was not a goal of mine.

But still, I chose to explore the possibilities. I thought for at least a moment that immortality would be a good thing. No one else did. What the fuck is wrong with everyone?

When I finally opened the door to that question, the professor asked a few others why they wouldn’t want to live forever and none of them gave the answer I thought. I assumed that most of them, being philosophy students, had thought it out in great details. But no, they all said it was because of global warming.

Global warming. Seriously.

More abstractly, they all talked about the disastrous effect humanity has had on earth thus far. They didn’t think they would want to live forever when 100 years from now the world would be a desolate wasteland destroyed by the cruel banalities of man. More reasonably some thought that earth would survive but humanity would likely be extinct in the near future and then they would be alone forever. To wit, a majority of the students believed not only that humanity would be gone within their lifetime, but that earth would be irrevocably damaged by us.

Our planet survived an impact with a Mars-sized planet. Without ten thousand more years of technological improvement humanity could not irrevocably damage the planet even if we tried. We could destroy the majority of life on the planet and possibly all of it, but life would grab hold again. It’s tenacious like that. That innate tenacity in combination with the intelligence of our species is what makes us the dominant species of our planet. We’ve made many mistakes over the millennia, and with each new generation’s greater reach and power those mistakes become more and more dangerous but we’re not done yet.

There has been talk recently of what might happen if the Yellowstone Caldera erupts as it did 640 000 years ago, because of a recent increase in tectonic activity there. The level of damage that would cause is beyond catastrophic. Ash from the eruption would blanket most of North America and change the climate of the entire planet in ways far more drastic than the accumulation of greenhouse gases we’ve contributed in the past 200 years ever could. It’s hard to imagine just how much the world would change because of an event like that, and yet I’m not worried for the future of humanity. I’d almost certainly die, but humanity would persist.

It seems like the environmentalists have managed to scare the shit out of the world. Gone is the quixotic optimism for the future of the 50′s, replaced by the dour nihilism of now. We talk of alien archaeologists examining our cities thousands of years from now wondering what killed us, but we’re not going anywhere.

We’ve reached a point in our evolution where our intelligence is almost a detriment. Given the comfort of our more base needs, we have more time to think and greater minds with which to think. And so we think of what can go wrong. Each new generation imagines new terrors capable of destroying us with their free time. These thoughts of dread can paralyze us with fear of the inevitable or they can spur us to imagine new solutions. Lately there has been far too much of the former and not enough of the latter.

Here’s what I know about the ultimate fate of humanity. We will go away. There will come a time when no humans exist. That is inevitable. But the question is when. Do we want to give up and whimper away in the next hundred years, or do we want to keep growing, keep getting smarter, keep fighting until the end, until the universe dies around us?