Assume it has happened before and it will happen again.

If there is nothing it is like to be dead or asleep, there is bound to be a another self-aware substitute inquirer with an inquiry, even if what is doing the inquiring is a non-biological replicator or an arachnid prince, pauper or a sleepwalker.

Why should this state of being be statistically impossible? This is likely the only kind of state that is possible, which is to say that all states of being are reductively equivalent in terms of "being" at all.

We, humans, are the guardians of the planet. We've been asleep for a long time. The alarm has just gone off. Are we late or can we still make it?

I am a very negative person, so I'm probably not the one to do this, but here's my two cents: Lets say that we have an early death. In the next 1,000 years, the Homo sapiens sapiens species will not have any living members. Life on Earth, after this, will do what we should do when we encounter a travesty or the like - move on. The Earth will forget about us, and life will move on. Our death will not be a negative ultimately. It could, in fact, be a good thing if you think about it the right way. Also, if we go extinct when the sun dies out, then all the other species will die, too. so our death can't be a bad thing, because there isn't anything left to be bad to, and it's not even our fault.

What I am doing is trying to find a stress-relieving context in which to fold our own species-death. So far I have not been successful.
— Bitter Crank
Could you expand on that? — frank

I suppose Jews and others, contemplating the unfolding Holocaust of which they were the designated victims; or Aboriginal peoples watching their homelands slip away from them and become someone else's homeland -- all these people may have felt a profound grief of not merely dying, but dying and knowing they were the last (or nearly last) of their kind.

Some deaths are more final than others. A person dying who departs from a thriving community knows that he follows others, and believes that others will follow him into the grave, and many more will live on.

It would be a far greater sorrow to know that my death, or yours, moves the counter one space closer to "zero" of people surviving, and that there will one day be no more of our kind. In epidemiology there is a "Patient Zero" who begins the chain of transmission, and there is a last patient when the epidemic is over. In our supposed extinction event, there will be a "Last one", after which there will be none.

Now at 7+ billion, soon to be 8 billion, worrying about extinction may seem unhealthfully morbid.

I read a book, "Uninhabitable Earth" which doesn't claim that we will become extinct (on an uninhabitable earth), only that our species could be extinguished, and sooner than we might think possible. I'm not recommending the book. There is nothing new in it, and the author isn't claiming that we have 10 years left, or 25 or any other number. ONLY this: Given enough bad luck, given enough bad decisions, given enough environmental policy paralysis and inertia, given enough unfortunate synergies, given enough unforeseen disasters and misfortunes, we could arrive at the point where our goose might be cooked well done, and we would join the mass extinction sooner than we thought.

Our demise is neither a slam dunk nor so unlikely we don't have to think about it. It's only a distinct possibility in the cards. We are not dealing and there are a few rounds to be played. Time will tell.

The author's main point is that we have not accomplished much of anything in terms of reducing CO2/methane emissions since we discovered how badly things could turn out severel decades ago.

Our death will not be a negative ultimately. It could, in fact, be a good thing if you think about it the right way. — RosettaStoned

Well, Mr. or Ms Negativity, our passing may or may not be tragic, but what about all the other species? Looked at in the right way, the passing of monarch butterflies, or lions, or whales, or eagles, or snails, or orchids might be truly tragic.