The Sense of an Endling | Hacker News Reader

The Sense of an Endling

longreads.com

63 pointsVigier10 comments

If I may, the article would be much more enjoyable with pictures of the animals discussed populating the margins. I am constantly googling for said animals :)

> (...) and a gorilla used his hands to tell humans the story of how he became an orphan.

This is touching. Deeply.

    The last pair of great auks had hidden themselves on a
    huge rock in the northern Atlantic. In 1844, a trio of
    Icelandic bounty hunters found them in a crag, incubating
    an egg. Two of the hunters strangled the adults to get to
    the egg, and the third accidentally crushed its shell
    under his boot.

Without being too cynical, that exemplifies part of Human Nature in a nutshell.

With only one living member of a species left and the egg, I doubt the species would have survived for much longer without humans.

Humans do too much harm. Yes, the world is violent. That doesn't mean we can kill anything at will.

I thought this was going to be about the Booker prize winning book by Julian Barnes.

Apparently not. I would check it out though, It's a good one!

I imagine the last member of a dying society (defeated in war, disease, etc) has a similar lonely experience.

We are seeing a similar process as the last native speakers of now extinct languages pass.

Except for human, they are conscious of the fact they are the endlings of a society.

This is truly one of the saddest things I've read. :(

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