On Extinction

Status: Draft, Archived Epistemic status: Weak These are a few unconnected thoughts about extinction, why it matters, and how we might prevent it.

Tl;dr: we shouldn’t calculate the expected value of all future humans to determine what’s at stake (futile anyway), but the maximum possible number (lower limits here should be “precise” given current model of physics). This number is unfathomably large, so extinction is the most important thing to worry about.

What’s at stake

Here is the classical reasoning behind why the extinction of our species would be bad:

Any human life is probably good
More good lives are better
There could be a lot of human lives, a mammalian species lives 1 million lives on average, we have lived for 200 thousand, so we have roughly 10 thousand generations à 80 years left, or 100 trillion people
If we die out prematurely, all that would be lost,
Therefore, we should not die out.

Let’s try to give an even stronger argument, one that is more robust and scientific. Because you might have noticed a few flaws in the previous argument:

Are we sure our lives are good? Does the average life matter, or only those in extreme suffering? Would it still be good to create billions of happy people, if a few suffer?
Do non-existent people even matter morally?
And this calculation for the “Expected Value” of humanity, is this really meaningful? Like, can we actually predict anything so far into the future?

Here are a few attempts at answers.

Not just a 100 trillion.

We are a peculiar species, having lived for only a few millennia, and we are already thinking about reaching for the stars. Humans are incredible problem solvers, so can we be compared to an average mammalian species? The answer might be worth discussing, but I believe it’s a distraction. Let’s step back and think about what we are doing, and why: we are trying to estimate the expected number of people who could live in the future, in order to illustrate what extinction would cost us.

But this is an inherently unknowable prediction: the number of future people will depend on our ability to prevent extinction. If we outsmart mammals, we might live longer than a million years. If we can move out of the solar system we can outlive the earth. So,

The question of how many people there will be and how much you can do about it are inherently related, not separate.

This is important: it makes estimates of how many people there will be pointless. Instead, we need to ask the question: how many people could there be? And then estimate how our actions in the present allow us to fulfill our potential.

So, what is

…

On Extinction
What’s at stake
Not just a 100 trillion.

Longtermism: The future is vast – what does this mean for our own life?

If we manage to avoid a large catastrophe, we are living at the early beginnings of human history.

ourworldindata.org

Longtermism: The future is vast – what does this mean for our own life?