The Bomb

This comes from a book by C.S. Lewis that I've been reading a little of lately. It's a book with daily writings by him and this one especially stuck out to me when I read it about a month ago. I've shared it with a couple people and it's been in the back of my mind since so I figured I'd share it with yall.

Progress means movement in a desired direction, and we do not all desire the same things for our species. In 'Possible Worlds' Professor Haldane pictured a future in which Man, foreseeing that Earth would soon be uninhabitable, adapted himself for migration to Venus by drastically modifying his physiology and abandoning justice pity and hapiness. The desire here is for mere survival. Now I care far more how humanity lives than how long. Progress, for me, means increasing goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible ideal.
I therefore go even further than C.P. Snow in removing the H-bomb from the centre of the picture. Like him, I am not certain whether if it killed one-third of us (the one-third I belong to), this would be a bad thing for the remainder; like him, I don't think it will kill us all. But suppose it did? As a Christian I take for granted that human history will some day end; and I am offering Omniscience no advice as to the best date for that consummation. I am more concerned by what the Bomb is doing already.
One meets young people who make the threat of it a reason for poisoning every pleasure and evading every duty in the present. Don't they know that, bomb or no bomb, all men will die (many in horrible ways)?