Reddit reviews Our Final Century? : Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-First Century?

It's always been something like utilitarianism for me. "The greatest good for the greatest number of people in the long run". I'd die for that. The problem is that "good" is really poorly defined. "In the long run" is a long time.

I was very opinionated and politically active in highschool, before deciding that my passions were ill-directed. Righteous dynasties continuously rise up to defeat the old corruption, only to become corrupt themselves after enough generations have passed. Even more influential than political struggles are things like disease. The black death wiped out a third of Europe, and suddenly there weren't enough people to farm the fields. Demand for labor skyrocketed in response to the lack of supply, and the value placed on those human lives went up. This spurred inventions of labor saving devices like the printing press, and arguably contributed significantly to the enlightenment, the industrial revolution, and the notion of human equality. Did the benefits outweigh the drawbacks? If so, should I also vote for disasters that I think might cause net gain in the long run? It's all to ambiguous, and for years I figured that the best I could do was to think about it all, and exchange thoughts with others. I built myself up from an introvert into an extrovert, and explored all the worldly pleasures i could, in hopes of experiencing everything I could of the world.

A year or so ago, I came across a concept that inferred the existence of a much clearer purpose in life. Before that, I had just resigned myself to the idea that my purpose in life was to try to find a purpose in life, so that maybe hundreds or thousands of years from now, some philosopher will finally figure out what humanity's purpose should be. I never really expected to find it myself, but then I encountered the concept of Existential Risk.

Statistically, the average length between a modern-style civilization’s rise and fall is about 300-500 years. (Motesharrei, Rivas, & Kalnay, 2014) That's just history, though, and we've changed a lot since then. In 2004, Sir Martin Reese published the first works since the cold war examining what our chances were of wiping ourselves out as a species. He concluded that we had about a 50/50 shot of surviving for another century, although he stressed that this figure is a hard one to calculate. (Rees, 2004) More recently, a number of scholarly research organizations have sprung up to investigate the topic further. At the forefront of these is Oxford University, and the Future of Humanity Institute. Nick Bostram is one of the more public scholars from that institute, and I highly recommend his books on the topic. He is much more hesitant to assign a probability, but in 2008 he helped conduct an informal survey at a existential risk conference. The median estimate for the chances that humans would survive the century was about 20%. (Sandberg & Bostrom, 2008) All these numbers have large error bars on them, but I like to summarize them rather than getting into debates the exact figures: We will almost certainly last another 10 years. We will probably last another 100 years. We probably won't last another 1,000 years though.

The implications of this seem pretty clear: my purpose in life should be to lower these risks. It's actually a pretty elegant solution to my original uncertainty. I don't need to be able to put my finger on exactly why human lives are valuable; all I need to be sure of is that intelligent life is valuable. I started a comparative cost/benefit analysis of various options, including underground/underwater cities, and the colonization of Mars. These were all rough Fermi-approximations, because good numbers are hard to come by. My results came up that Mars would be the most protective, but wasn't quite as cost effective as underground or underwater cities, at least in terms of $/percentage point reduction in existential risk. Deep sea mining is currently an expanding field, but they are just retrieving certain objects and bringing them to the surface for extraction of precious metals. They invested billions just to develop the technology this far, but precious metals aren't useful as large-scale building materials for underwater colonies. This means that such colonies are unlikely to be self-sufficient, so they are only likely to be a sort of fallout shelter. Underground cities could mine what was nearby, but would have to eject large amounts or material to the surface to make room. In terms of $/percentage point reduction in existential risk, our best options at the moment would probably be to staff more of the fallout shelters from the cold war, which now operate with only a skeleton crew. Even better would be to solve our sexism issues in the military, so that women were free from harassment. This is because then there would then be a viable population, distributed among military bases, bunkers, and submarines, which would stand a very good chance of surviving an apocalypse scenario.

However, in doing all this thinking, I considered exactly what it was I was trying to optimize, and exactly what it is that makes life valuable. If individual lives are all that matters, and not the continuity of the species, then we should all stop reproducing and just maximize our enjoyment of the remainder of our lives. If it makes sense to maximize the duration of intelligent life though, then it also makes sense to maximize the scope. This means the ideal is humans seeding a self-sufficient colony on Mars, and then building space stations in the asteroid belt out of the materials there, and some day spreading to other stars. Trillions of lives spread across the galaxy, instead of all our eggs in this one blue and green basket.

The problem with just surviving a existential threat is that we may never rebuild to become space fairing again, and all that potential will never be achieved. The Exyptians built the pyramids, then forgot how, then forgot how to even read hieroglyphics, then forgot even that they had once build such impossible things. Even if an existential threat only killed a small percent of the human race, it would still be bigger than anything we've experienced in centuries. Even WWII is barely a blip on the graph of increasing life expectancy, and that tore the world in half. It's hard to even imagine more destructive forces. What are the odds that a society under such stress would keep up it's space program when there were more immediate concerns? NASA only costs half a percentage point of the US budget, but studies repeatedly show that most people don't see the benefits, and think it is over-funded. People were under the same opinion during the space race, when NASA's budget was 5%, but the opinion didn't improve when the budget was cut by 90%. If society is stressed, NASA will likely shrink by another 90%, and is unlikely to return. A brief window of opportunity is now open, which may never be open again. My purpose in life is to make sure that we don't miss it.

Work Cited:

Motesharrei, S., Rivas, J., & Kalnay, E. (2014). Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies. Ecological Economics.

Rees, M. (2004). Our Final Century: The 50/50 Threat to Humanity's Survival. Arrow Books Ltd.

Sandberg, A., & Bostrom, N. (2008). Global Catastrophic Risks Survey. Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University.

Here's a good book on the subject of 'the end of humanity'

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Our-Final-Century-Civilisation-Twenty-first/dp/0099436868/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1416921014&sr=8-1&keywords=martin+rees+our+final