"I cannot shake the conviction that life is (usually) worth living, and that we should continue to create the conditions for intelligent life to experience beauty, create art, discover how the world works, and continue to set and satisfy goals that presuppose a complex form of intelligence. It is at this point that our intuitions bottom out. If you think that life is pointless, given that we will leave no trace in 20 billion years, it is hard to know how to convince you to believe otherwise. An obligation to reproduce, no matter how weak it is, cannot exist unless there is value to the future experiences intelligent creatures will have."