Longtermism: The Key to Human Survival?

The history of Nature from the Big Bang to the present day. Created and rendered for Wikimedia.org by Pablo Carlos Budassi.

Recently, on the 22nd of April to be precise, we have reached 5000 subscribers on Substack. I would like to thank you all for passing on these essays, recommending my work to others, providing translations and spreading the word on other channels and discussion forums. Thanks to your efforts our readership has quadrupled over the past year. Kudos! I would also like to welcome all new members to our growing community, especially those who have been generous enough to donate a smaller or larger amount of money to keep this project going. May peace, health, and happiness be with you in every walk of your life.

To commemorate this milestone, along with Earth Day which coincidentally fell on the very same day, allow me to retell a story I originally shared at the start of this blog. I thought it would be useful to take a short break from the discussion of recent events and to look a little further out in time and space to better appreciate the scale of things we are part of. Let’s start with a quote from Dylan Balfour published in 1000-word Philosophy:

“On a conservative estimate, the Earth might be able to sustain around ten quadrillion people in total before it becomes uninhabitable (that’s ten plus fifteen zeros!). And if humanity successfully spreads across the Milky Way, then this number may grow by many orders of magnitude.”

Phew, that sure sounds like a lot of people yet to be born! We must indeed be very careful not to drive ourselves extinct, lest we prevent an untold number of human lives from flourishing in this beautiful Universe… Hence the idea behind longtermism: no matter how much we or the living world suffers today, the number of people yet to come justifies just about anything which could prevent them from being born—a highly problematic concept on its own. Human exceptionalism, morals and ethics aside, there is another issue with this idea though: it’s all based on a fantasy divorced from our biophysical reality.

Longtermism is a philosophical movement holding the ethical view that we should prioritize the far future of humanity — our species long term survival — over its short term needs and desires. And when they say the “far future” they really mean it: potentially a billion years into the great unknown — hence the astronomical figures quoted above. We rarely think that far ahead though. For most of us, present day humans, thinking about the future rarely extends beyond what’s going to be for dinner. (And while this might sound somewhat short sighted, for hundreds of millions of people this is a truly existential question.) 

First, how much is that several hundred-thousand years? Let’s put that time frame into proper context first. Imagine the history of life on this planet published as a book series, with a single page dedicated to each thousand years of natural history. With a thousand pages in each volume—telling the story of a million years—we would still need to find shelf space for some 4200 hefty tomes… Enough to fill a small library. Now, close your eyes and imagine that you are standing right in front of a set of massive bookshelves hosting the entire living history of planet Earth at an arm’s reach, or perhaps just a few steps away.

Photo by Emil Widlund on Unsplash

The first half of our collection would speak only about a soup of organic matter with ancient bacteria (archea) appearing somewhere around volume 500. The first Eukaryote (a cell with a nucleus, a basic building block of all complex life) would make its first appearance in volume 2100, from where the complexity of life would explode. OK, ‘explosion’ might be too harsh of a term here, unless you refer to the ache in your arms: you would literally had to sift through thousands (!) of thousand-page tomes till you would find the first animal somewhere in (or around) volume 3600 — or some 600 million years ago. Yes, 3600 volumes out of a library of 4200 freaking tomes, each covering a million years of natural history, and not a single worm!

Dinosaurs made their debut in volume 3955 from where these massive animals did managed to dominate the book series for another 185 volumes, which is quite a feat. After reading 60 more books about the rise of mammals and the incredible ancient megafauna, things start to get interesting. The earliest fossil records clearly in the human (and no longer in the chimpanzee lineage) appeared between 4.5 to 4 million years ago, or in volume 4195. Congratulations! After lifting and flipping through almost all of the books in the entire library, you have found the first proto-human. If you thought that our species were that old, though, I have to disappoint you. Homo sapiens, a specimen of which is typing this essay for you, has made its debut only in the very last volume of this vast series of 4200 books. In this book, somewhere between page 250 and 450 (or 750,000 and 550,000 years ago), you would find the first Neanderthal, and somewhere around page 700 the first traces of the earliest modern humans.

“…fragments of 300,000-year-old skulls, jaws, teeth and other fossils found at Jebel Irhoud, a rich site also home to advanced stone tools, are the oldest Homo sapiens remains yet found. The remains of five individuals at Jebel Irhoud exhibit traits of a face that looks compellingly modern, mixed with other traits like an elongated brain case reminiscent of more archaic humans.”

Here is the “solid basis” of longtermism: 300 pages of modern human history in a library of 4.2 million pages covering 4.2 billion years. Pff. Since it took so much time to get here, my fellow Homo sapiens sapiens, you better read these pages very carefully. This is your species history! Picture yourself standing in this wast library of life, holding a heavy book in your hand and reading the last 300 pages of it. Try to feel important, if you wish, but I would not bet the farm that you actually do at the moment. When you look down on the text and read about small tribes—or communities if you like—wandering around among millions of other species in a vast wilderness, you start to feel every bit as part of Nature as any other of your ancestors’ fellow animals did and do to this very day.

No concrete, no steel and no glass. No cars, no pollution, no noise. No planes flying over your head, no machine guns, no nuclear weapons. Just us, and Nature. Page after page, a story unfolds in front of your eyes: how our species traversed the face of this planet, how they reached even the furthest bit of land imaginable. How they lived and died without wanting to grow the economy, control Nature, extract minerals and destroy entire ecosystems. Were it not for the following chapters, our species could have continued living this way for another two million years, then give way for other intelligent species to carry the flame. Truth to be told, they were far from being innocent even during those days. They drove many large mammals and birds into extinction, burned down entire forests and spread species where they don’t belong. They have clearly left their mark on the face of this globe, but they never placed themselves into the center of creation, nor believed that they are better than all the other species.

Then something changed. We have become a different species. Not abruptly, and certainly not in biological terms. Reaching the last 10 pages of Volume 4200 cities start to appear and agriculture begins here and there — but this is far from being a revolution, yet. At first, it was nothing but play farming, a side activity to hunting and foraging with ebbs and flows in its prominence. It was a gradual shift in human terms, but an unexpected one from evolution’s billion-year-perspective. Names of long forgotten places like Çatalhöyük (c. 7,500 BCE — 5,700 BCE) fill pages after pages, with the civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, ancient China, the Indus and Peru making their appearances in due order. Civilizations come and go until finally, in the last paragraph, on the bottom third of the very last page of the very last book, our species finds a way to harness the power of fossil fuels. Human population shoots into the stratosphere as we begin to use this new found energy resource to mine all the minerals we need — including plant nutrients like phosphorus and potassium — to grow as much food as we can for ourselves and our livestock. We cut down all the old-growth forests, build cities and cover a third of the planet’s habitable surface with farms sprayed regularly with toxic chemicals. Most wild habitats became fragmented or disappeared entirely in the process, rich ore and fossil fuel deposits were mined to depletion, rivers and oceans got clogged up with pollution and plastic waste, and global temperatures began to rise exponentially. A mass extinction event has been set into motion. That’s it, the story of modernity in a paragraph… Or ten pages if you include the entire history of agriculture. So, can we somehow hit pause here and go on with a stable population of 11 billion for millions of years to come…?

This is where reality bifurcates from fiction. According to longtermist beliefs we can keep on mining minerals and plant nutrients, needed to feed this many of us for as long as we see fit. And if we were to run out of anything we could then colonize other planets¹ or mine asteroids… Never mind the fact that the easy-to-access part of fossil fuels, together with biodiversity underpinning the whole human enterprise, are both in the process of running out. Fast. Proponents of this ideology fail to grasp the fact that we already live well beyond our means. We have been depleting Earth’s natural resources, biodiversity, mineral reserves, top soils, freshwater and energy resources far faster than they regenerate. During the brief history of high-tech modernity (spanning a third of a page in our library of books) we have burned several tomes worth of fossil fuels and other mineral and natural resources. The byproducts of all this slashing, burning and digging are now circulating in the planet’s atmosphere and waters, turning world oceans into empty dead zones, and melting the polar ice cap which used to reflect much of the Sun’s heat back into space… It’s no exaggeration to say that the negative side-effects of modernity has by now turned into a self-reinforcing feedback loop. The more we deplete Earth’s resources, the deeper we need to dig, the more we pollute and the faster we run out of all the economically viable stuff—not to mention life itself. Modernity is a blip, but a blip nonetheless. How could we continue with even a drastically reduced version of this inherently unsustainable proposition for another century into the future, let alone for hundreds of thousands of years to come…?

Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash

Central questions to longtermism, namely how do we prevent our potential extinction caused by AI, nanobots, or a mishap in the great hadron collider and all the rest, is rapidly becoming completely moot. Irrelevant. As natural and mineral resources decline and pollution starts to take its toll en masse these questions will suddenly look entirely fictional, something akin to: ‘How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’ The only question in front of us, is how do we wish to leave this way of life behind? The fast and furious way via nukes, followed by a multi-year long nuclear winter and taking most complex life down with us (something akin to the way of the dinosaurs)? Or gracefully, and perhaps finding a way to become a member of the many species surviving the bottleneck ahead…? I would personally opt for the second option, as it leaves at least a slim chance for us to evolve into a better version of ourselves. One which is better adapted to the radically changed climate and biosphere and perhaps — only perhaps — blessed with a little more wisdom than what we, their unwise ancestors, possessed.

Until next time,

B

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1. The answer to our sustainability question is, I believe, the same as the answer to the Fermi-paradox. While I fully accept the possibility of intelligent creatures living on other planets, I find it very unlikely that they got a chance to leave their planet before going extinct or running out of resources. The time span of a technological society being capable to visit near space before collapsing due to overshoot looks infinitesimally short (maybe a 100 to 200 years) compared to the length of life on Earth (4,200,000,000 years). The chances of finding an intelligent species on an Earth-like planet capable of traveling in space at any point in time is thus just 0.000002%. Of course, given the number of stars and galaxies, that’s still quite a good chance. Thus the only question is this: does any of them had enough time between inventing space travel and running out of resources (or dying of pollution) to solve the many problems of deep space travel…? Looking at the evidence at hand (or the lack thereof) the answer, for me at least, is clear.