Hello and welcome to The Last Garden. I hope you will stay a while.

May I be vulnerable for a second? For some time now, every time I dwell on the state of the world, I feel my heart break. Do you too? Do you also check the news immediately after waking up, seeking proof that nothing (more) calamitous broke when you were asleep, or taking stock of the calamities that did indeed unfold?

Do you have the sense too—louder and more persistent every day—that we're irrevocably headed towards a darker, bleaker, more bereft future—one that we wouldn't know how to survive?

Does the end arrive with a bang or a whimper? Is it here already? How would we even know?

By some new estimates, we may lose half of humanity by 2080,¹Institute and Faculty of Actuaries in the UK (2025). "Planetary Solvency—Finding our balance with nature". See also "A Tale of Two Actuaries" by Matt Orsagh on Substack. likely to heat stress, food insecurity, and new infections. Meanwhile, according to savvy prediction-market forecasters on the Metaculus platform, there's a 2% chance of complete human extinction by 2100.²"Human Extinction by 2100?" Metaculus. As you read these words, the "doomsday clock", a measure of how close humanity is to destroying itself, is 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been.³The Doomsday Clock is maintained since 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the organization founded by the scientists who built the first atomic bomb. 85 seconds to midnight, set in January 2026, is the closest it has ever been. Right now, 2,100 nuclear warheads stand on hair-trigger alert;⁴SIPRI Yearbook 2025, Chapter 6: World Nuclear Forces. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. once launched, there is no recall—it will take mere minutes to end entire cities. Bettors on Polymarket put a 22% chance of a nuclear weapon detonation somewhere in the world this year.⁵The bet was eventually taken off Polymarket, but not before trades worth $838,000 were completed. See 404 Media and FastCompany.

But it's not just about us, right? Every day, we lose about a hundred and fifty species—most of which we did not even get to know and name.⁶Pimm, S. L. et al., "The biodiversity of species and their rates of extinction, distribution, and protection." Science 344:6187 (2014). So much of the world's coral reefs have already been damaged that the US's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has had to invent entirely new categories of severity.⁷NOAA Coral Reef Watch, Bleaching Alert Level update (December 2023). See also ICRI, "Fourth Global Coral Bleaching Event" (April 2025).

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And thus, given these facts, I invite you today to consider this darkest of eventualities in its fullness: What if we truly, despite our efforts—or more likely because of them—do not make it? What if this moment in time is indeed the beginning of the end—of the world, of us, of the basic and essential goodness that we've taken for granted for so long? And what if it ends before we get to say goodbye?

This website exists to provide space for these thoughts while we may still be around to express them: a collective farewell, perhaps, or a memorial service.

So what would you say if you were to lean into your worst fears about the planet? Would you share something you've never told anyone? Write a poem? List all the things you haven't done and may never get the chance to? Rick-roll the world a final time? Apologize?

I welcome you to do any and all of these things here. Please scroll on and interact with this website. Plant a note in the garden that appears below—then wait a few moments for it to bloom. See what emerges (and then look around—perhaps there is a pattern to what grows). All notes are completely anonymous (but you're welcome to identify yourself if you wish to).

Please feel free to read other notes; and revisit to see how this garden grows over time as we collectively memorialize our home and world.

Posting rules: Your notes are anonymous and this website collects absolutely no user data. Messages once posted cannot be deleted. And please be kind. Hurtful notes will be weeded out. We are all human here, after all, and isn't there already enough pain in the world?