The Future of Love

For some reason, on the way home from the Escape from Planet Earth movie (fun, not great), my family got on the topic of how long the Earth might have left to exist. My older son posited "maybe a few billion years."

"Long enough for us, anyway," I said.

"Yeah," said my son. "But what about our ancestors?" (He meant descendants.)

This got me thinking, though. Does anyone really care about his descendants?

From Fritz Lang's Metropolis

Outside of our grandchildren or maybe our great-grandchildren, how connected can we feel to the generations of our families to come? How much can we truly care for them?

The science fiction part of me looks at it this way: Parental and grand-parental love is automatic, as far as I can see. Most people agree on this, I think. For me and most of the parents I know, the birth of my children was like the throwing on of a switch: instant love. My parents and other grandparents I know have said that it was the same for them upon meeting the grandbabies.