Let’s ponder the really big picture for a moment.
Writing at aeon, Ross Anderson has a fascinating piece that attempts to peer into the distant future of humanity and touches on many issues, including threats to our existence and our long-term survival.
The entire piece is 8,100 words, so below I’m just going to hit upon a couple of its themes. I highly recommend the whole thing.
Anderson bases the article on a visit to Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, a research group that ponders the long-term fate of human civilization, and interviews with principals there, including its director, Nick Bostrom. The institute envisions a range of futures for humanity, from near-term extinction to colonization of the universe.
As Anderson relates, there are good reasons to be concerned about the future of humanity — 99 percent of the species that have lived on Earth have gone extinct, including five hominid ancestors who used tools.
In addition to the traditional catastrophic threats — large asteroids and comets, a rogue star or a nearby supernova — human technology represents a new force capable of ending our species. There are nuclear weapons, of course, and it is entirely plausible that one day soon it would be possible to engineer a species-ending disease or even something like a bacteria that devours plant material.
But that’s not actually what worries Bostrom the most:
There is one such technology that Bostrom has been thinking about a lot lately. Early last year, he began assembling notes for a new book, a survey of near-term existential risks. After a few months of writing, he noticed one chapter had grown large enough to become its own book. ‘I had a chunk of the manuscript in early draft form, and it had this chapter on risks arising from research into artificial intelligence,’ he told me. ‘As time went on, that chapter grew, so I lifted it over into a different document and began there instead.’
Another interesting line of thinking centers upon the Fermi paradox, which asks why humans have not made contact with extraterrestrial life, if life is common.
Are intelligent species, therefore, destined to die out due?
Robin Hanson, a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute, says there must be something about the universe, or about life itself, that stops planets from generating galaxy-colonizing civilizations. There must be a ‘great filter’, he says, an insurmountable barrier that sits somewhere on the line between dead matter and cosmic transcendence.
Before coming to Oxford, I had lunch with Hanson in Washington DC. He explained to me that the filter could be any number of things, or a combination of them. It could be that life itself is scarce, or it could be that microbes seldom stumble onto sexual reproduction. Single-celled organisms could be common in the universe, but Cambrian explosions rare. That, or maybe Tsiolkovsky misjudged human destiny. Maybe he underestimated the difficulty of interstellar travel. Or maybe technologically advanced civilizations choose not to expand into the galaxy, or do so invisibly, for reasons we do not yet understand. Or maybe, something more sinister is going on. Maybe quick extinction is the destiny of all intelligent life.
A final point explored by the article is whether existential risk, which refers to anything that threatens the existence of our species, is a much larger moral issue than it is generally regarded to be.
And if so, what does that mean for humans today?
The idea that we might have moral obligations to the humans of the far future is a difficult one to process. After all, we humans are seasonal creatures, not stewards of deep time. The brevity of our lives colours our intuitions about value, and limits our moral vision. We can imagine futures for our children and grandchildren. We participate in their joys and weep for their hardships. We see that some glimmer of our fleeting lives survives on in them. But our distant descendants are opaque to us. We strain to see them, but they look alien across the abyss of time, transformed by the passage of so many millennia.
Some people worry a lot about what the world will be like a century from now. But do any of us really worry what the world will be like, or whether our species will exist, thousands or millions of years from now? Should we?