“And my point is, there's always something I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we're living at the climax of the story. It's a kind of narcissism. You want to believe that were uniquely important, that were living at the end of history, that now, after all these Millennia of false alarms, now it's finally the worst that it's ever been, that finally, we have reached the end of the world"

"But all of this raises an interesting question, " Olive said. "What if it always is the end of the world? She paused for effect before her the holographic audience was almost perfectly still.

"Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world," Olive said "as a continuous and never-ending process”