The chap­ter opens with the announce­ment of Joseph Ricar­do’s death, the last human born on Earth, who per­ished in a pub brawl in Buenos Aires at age 25. The news is deliv­ered dis­pas­sion­ate­ly on British state radio, coin­cid­ing with the nar­ra­tor Theodore Faron’s 50th birth­day and New Year’s Day. Faron, a soli­tary Oxford his­to­ri­an, begins a diary as a per­son­al defense against exis­ten­tial empti­ness, reflect­ing on his insignif­i­cance despite his con­nec­tion to Xan Lyp­pi­att, Eng­land’s dic­ta­tor. He mus­es on human­i­ty’s futile efforts to pre­serve its lega­cy for hypo­thet­i­cal future extrater­res­tri­al vis­i­tors, ques­tion­ing whether they will under­stand or care about human achieve­ments.

The nar­ra­tive shifts to the glob­al obses­sion two decades pri­or with iden­ti­fy­ing the last human birth, a con­test ulti­mate­ly won by Ricar­do. His birth, offi­cial­ly record­ed in 1995, became a sym­bol of nation­al pride, though the search was acknowl­edged as incon­clu­sive. Ricar­do’s fleet­ing celebri­ty fad­ed as the world moved on, and his death now pass­es with lit­tle notice. Faron doubts any­one will revis­it the search, high­light­ing human­i­ty’s resigned accep­tance of its impend­ing extinc­tion and the futil­i­ty of such sym­bol­ic ges­tures.

Faron cri­tiques human­i­ty’s fail­ure to uncov­er the cause of uni­ver­sal infer­til­i­ty, a blow to the suprema­cy of West­ern sci­ence and med­i­cine. Despite past tri­umphs over dis­ease, sci­ence has been unable to explain or reverse the steril­i­ty plagu­ing the species. This fail­ure has shat­tered col­lec­tive faith in sci­ence, once a revered “god” that pro­vid­ed com­fort and solu­tions. Faron, though sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly illit­er­ate, shares in this dis­il­lu­sion­ment, com­par­ing it to a deity’s death. The inabil­i­ty to pro­cre­ate, a basic bio­log­i­cal func­tion, has left human­i­ty humil­i­at­ed and resent­ful, strip­ping away its sense of con­trol and pur­pose.

The chap­ter con­cludes with a ref­er­ence to 1995 as “Year Omega,” mark­ing the begin­ning of human­i­ty’s decline. Pub­lic debates once cen­tered on whether a cure for infer­til­i­ty would be shared glob­al­ly, but these dis­cus­sions have since fad­ed into irrel­e­vance. Faron’s reflec­tions under­score the para­dox of a civ­i­liza­tion that mas­tered its envi­ron­ment yet remains pow­er­less against its own extinc­tion. The tone is one of resigned melan­choly, empha­siz­ing the fragili­ty of human achieve­ment in the face of an inex­plic­a­ble and insur­mount­able cri­sis.