Answer: On the whole, it would be a good thing. Oh, the snails and the cockroaches would soldier on, and perhaps their distant descendants would build cathedrals and atom bombs as we have done, and end as we seem likely to end — either with a bang or a slow braising. Having done a lot of harm along the way; whenever we end, and however, it will have been justice delayed. Good riddance to us, and good riddance to those highly-developed hypothetical hexapodes or gastropodes sapientes, should they arise, and come to believe in progress.

How amiable the butcherbird and the tapeworm seem, compared to us.

Of course this is all over-dramatic, self-indulgent, etc. The nukes will probably not fly. We, you who read this, and I who write it, will probably die in our beds, with plenty of morphine in our veins. Other people will be incinerated, gassed, buried under fallen masonry, widowed, orphaned, maimed; and we will pay for it. Pay for it, that is, in the monetary sense, not the moral one.

But you and I will no doubt go our rounds tomorrow more or less as usual.

Tonight I find it very much in my heart to wish this weren’t so. I love my comforts, and I fear pain; but tonight I long for judgement. Somebody please put an end to this relentless, inexorable, monotonically-growing horror.