FYI.. @Storm1752 to have your reply linked to a specific comment use the bubble with ... next to the like button, otherwise it's hard to know which reply goes with which comment. Thanks. ?

Humans cannot destroy the planet. And, i am sure we cannot destroy humanity.

Objectively speaking, TOTALLY meaningless. Subjectively speaking, meaningful only to oneself. I agree.

i take Camus' view in that i realize that our lives are absurd & meaningless.
all i can expect or hope for is to snatch a few fleeting moments of happiness/contentment along the way.

By the way, nihilism is "the rejection of all religious and moral principles. The belief life is meaningless." Hey, I have moral principles! I don't equate them with RELIGIOUS principles, true, but I think they're MEANINGFUL, to ME. Your moral principles, I'm sure, are meaningful to you. Hitler had principles, too. So did Stalin. The Pope, Castro, Trump, Reagan, Kennedy, King George, Pol Pot, Che, Mother Theresa. all very principled. Not a Nihilist among them. In fact, every person who's ever lived has or had principles. All quite meaningful. All quite irrelevant. None mattered.

Fine. Have it your way. If I think it's a profound point, all you're saying is there have been many other people who have made the same (profound) point. Lots of people make all kinds of profound points, many of which contradict each other. My only "point" is, IT DOESN'T MATTER. Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't. If you think it does, fine. I don't think it does. Equally fine.

Wait a minute. It's not whether we "should" do things or not. It not MATTERING doesn't mean we shouldn't DO it! We might as well! Anything to keep from getting bored! Steven Spielberg makes cool movies, other people go to them and are vastly entertained. Great! If he's going to make movies (and why shouldn't he?) they might as well be good ones. My POINT is, worrying about all the bad things (or good) things that are happening is a waste of time. Yes, by all means, try to make the world a better place, if that's what floats your boat, or be a mass murderer, if you enjoy being hunted down yourself and being killed or incarcerated for the rest of your miserable life, but don't make the mistake of thinking it has any lasting value or not, whether you should feel ashamed or proud, just do it because YOU gotta do SOMETHING, after all, even if it's just sit in a chair and breathe. Whatever you want. We MIGHT go to the stars and colonize other planets. Neat! We could discover how to extend our life spans to a thousand years or more. No telling. Invent time travel. There's a good one! I will say this: the person who discovers WHY we do these things will in all probability never be born. Why? Because THAT is impossible.

Our existence doesn't matter on the grand scale of the universe ... but it matters to us.

Sure, we could go extinct and the universe wouldn't blink. Some other species in this part of the galaxy may eventually become sapient and space-faring and find our bones and then they'd die and etc etc.

I mean, there's a argument that reality isn't real. So even the end-game of your scenario would be pointless. Everything would be pointless.

We're a bunch of dead matter somehow constituted into live matter in ways we don't understand ... a self-replicated pattern with sapience. We exist right now. The person who typed this is gone forever. Some part of me has already changed, I'm not the same.

And while we don't understand how, there is a purpose to our existence, at least to us. We are explorers. Our entire existence has been built on finding new greater things, not just land, but in every facet of life.

Think what we could learn, what we could become, were we to go to space, conquer the galaxy. It's possible, even if much more likely isn't. We could learn enough to where our existence has galactic, possibly even universal consequence. We could learn how to do more than harvest energy from a star, but how to create them, we could amass knowledge that would help other civilizations, raise them from planet-bound infancy. We could ... well, the possibilities are endless. We could even teach people that capitalizing entire words isn't a good way to punctuate an argument

We should care what happens to the planet because if it becomes hostile to us, we can do none of that. If irrelevance could be said to be a scale, we'd be on the far end, dying on a little blue marble before we ever even got to explore the spaces around us.

Then the universe dies, and none of that matters, either. Not the scale of irrelevancy of civilizations itself, nothing.

But something not mattering has always been a bad reason not to go ahead and do it anyway. Or at least, not an accepted one. We define what matters to us, and we are all connected to the universe.

You wanted toast this morning, so you made toast. It didn't matter if you had toast, it doesn't matter if you die right now. Or me. Or all of us. But that's a silly reason not to keep going anyway. We're the only thinking, feeling arm of the universe we're aware of. We are the universe exploring itself, and that at least, matters some. To us.

You say "conscious awareness" is the thing of value. Why is THAT important? To who? I admit I find my OWN conscious awareness valuable. I love contemplating the sheer mystery of it all. I read about it, puzzle over it, try to wrap my feeble mind around it...then try to make up my mind what to eat for dinner. But why is that more important to the "Universe" than whether the molten core of the Earth will suddenly become unstable and spawn a hundred volcanoes, or whether on some distant planet a blob of protoplasm grows legs? Please explain.

I agree fully with what you are saying. Angst over natural event not under our control is irrational. There’s nothing to fear.

Of course we will try to survive as long as possible, but even if all life everywhere were instantly wiped out it wouldn’t matter. It’s not the nuts and bolts of living organisms that are of value. What is of value is conscious awareness and appreciation for reality.

Say that life is wiped out and in a trillion years it re-emerges. From the perspective of the cosmos that trillion years would seem no longer than the blink of an eye. Without conscious awareness time has no meaning.

I did NOT mean to imply chipmunks weren't important! Ants? Try telling an ant colony one individual ant isn't important to the entire existence of ants on Earth. Similarly, one human being IS important to his or her society. I never said otherwise. What I AM suggesting is, chipmunks and ants and human beings (and llama and spiders and bears) just don't matter much, PERIOD. Too harsh? Maybe. But after Armaggedon, and/or an alien invasion, or a zombie Apocalypse, not much will have changed.

It follows it would be just as easy to take out the garbage as it would be to leave it in the kitchen, and tidier, and aesthetically more pleasing, so why NOT take it out?

A good and reasonable perspective.

I think I understand your point, and I think it is profound, at least in its usefulness for dismissing all the relatively trivial worries that keep us angry and divided, but I feel compelled to add, that, while I’m confident the universe won’t care when we’re gone, I do care about our planet and our species, if for no other reason, that it’s more interesting to care than to not care. It makes for a more tolerable and rewarding existence, while I’m here, to be engaged rather than to be idling. I hope our species figures it out and manages to evolve into something that can survive forever, somehow, somewhere. I’m sentimental like that.

..sorry. Break it up ..and I'll try again ~