"Logically speaking, the desolation in Children of Men is peculiar. As Scheffler points out, all people have known from childhood that they will die. As individuals, we have no long-term future. Personal extinction is guaranteed. But this tragedy--one that will be directly experienced by every single man, woman, and child--provokes no public alarm. No tabloid has ever blared the headline, "All 7.3 Billion of Us to Vanish Within Decades." Our conviction that life is worth living is "more threatened by the prospect of humanity's disappearance than by the prospect of our own deaths," Scheffler writes in Death and the Afterlife."