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After years of relative indifference, space exploration has caught the public’s imagination once again. But this enthusiasm may well hide a disturbing question: what if humankind is in fact bored with life on Earth? Indeed, we have discovered every piece of land, tried all sorts of political regimes, exhausted all the forms of the arts and committed ourselves to all kinds of religious beliefs. Yet if we admit that the thirst for exploration and novelty is at the heart of our human nature, can we survive the end of our world? Will we hold out long in this cloistered and domesticated Earth that has become so devoid of all mystery and adventure? And if we can’t conquer space, will we be tempted to destroy our world and start anew, as after the Great Flood? Or will we die of boredom when the Earth will have become the biggest open-air zoo in the universe?
Knowing the world has nothing more to offer us is not a mere piece of information; it is a shattering reality to which our bodies and minds will react wildly and the biggest existential challenge humankind will have to face in the near future, says Pierre-Henri d’Argenson in The End of the World and the Last God.
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