
The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement - nirmel
http://www.vhemt.org/
======
damoncali
In the eighth grade I had an english teacher who challenged us to write either
a serious essay or a piece of satire, with the goal of getting half the class
to believe it was satire and the other half to think it was serious.

I do believe this would have won.

~~~
mjfl
I have no idea why these kinds of misanthropic ideas, having little or nothing
to do with programming or entrepreneurship, get this kind of attention on
Hacker News.

~~~
shoo
I think some people who read hacker news may be interested in discussions of
the increasingly serious challenges facing us as individuals, communities, and
as a species.

Compared to many people in the world, I suspect that those people reading
hacker news may have a relatively large opportunity to influence others, for
better or worse.

If we discuss these kinds of issues there is a small chance that some people
will decide to act in a way that is more beneficial to others, society, & the
environment.

~~~
mjfl
It's backwards thinking, based on a moralization that mother nature is all
good and human beings are all bad. If you look at all the problems associated
with the "human overcrowding" problem, the solution is more knowledge, not
less people. To stop overpopulation: educate and empower women. To slow carbon
emissions: keep track and educate people about the consequences. You can join
this particular doomsday cult if you so desire, as long as you don't try to
prevent me from reproducing. I will still roll my eyes at you, but nothing
more.

------
reasonattlm
At first glance this crowd are a sort of polar opposite to the paradise
engineers. The goal is eliminating suffering. Paradise engineers want to do it
by building. Extinctionists want to do it by removing those capable of
perceiving suffering.

But at second glance, there is more going on here.

Even if we are being charitable we would say that extinctionists have a
critical lack of ambition. A poverty of the mind. A parochial vision of the
possible, narrowed down to such a narrow slice of what might be that it may as
well be invisible. They cannot look much beyond their noses. They do not see
the natural world as the seething pit of pain and anguish and violent death
that it is. They are willing to bow out themselves while condemning animals to
that for the foreseeable future. The rational and caring extinctionist would
destroy the entire biosphere, but even that is short-sighted, as it doesn't do
anything about the rest of the universe and all future time. There will be
more biospheres, more tooth and nail evolution.

Extinctionists are fixated on relinquishment, a form of cowardice in the face
of being challenged by circumstances and change. They have seen the problem,
and their answer is it is to leave the building, making no effort to address
the issue. How can that possibly help? It is a pathological lack of ambition
taken to its logical conclusion, and weaponized by jealousy of those who feel
that, yes, something might be done.

There is suffering. So build the means to end it. If you can't envisage how,
then you aren't reading widely enough. Ultimately we can replace all of the
natural biosphere. We can rebuild man and animal in reality or emulated
environments: all of them, every last thing capable of pain. We can remove the
circumstances of suffering from any who suffer and who want that suffering to
end. That it will require centuries, molecular nanotechnology, brain
emulation, and other technologies of the same ilk? So what? How long has this
world waited already for those capable of making this achievement? Seizing the
future and continuing the work that our species has barely started on in the
quest to eliminate pain is the high road.

And if at the end of the day there are still those who feel that they would
like an untrammeled world, well let them build as many as they like - provided
that all the species living upon them capable of pain are in fact living in a
paradise free from suffering.

But heaven forbid we feel any sympathy for those who want to press the game
over button now, who cannot raise their eyes just that little bit to see the
golden future we could build with just a little more time.

~~~
shoo
What do you propose should be done in the short term - say, the next 50 to 100
years?

~~~
reasonattlm
Be utilitarian. Make a list of what causes the most suffering and involuntary
death, and personally contribute to work on whatever is high in the list and
not being aggressively worked on today. Which is most of it. Degenerative
aging and farming of animals, for example, being two things to eliminate on
the time scale you mention. There is a lot on the list that can't be tackled
meaningfully today, such as placing all higher animals into some form of
simulation or at least controlled environments in which they can live as close
to usual as possible without pain. Or means of human mind engineering to
remove suffering without terrible side-effects. For that help to advance
enabling technologies in the fields of computation, nanotechnology, and
biology.

------
sliverstorm
I'm always confused why the "two kids" i.e. replacement is treated as growth.
This seems to be a systemic belief.

Maybe there's something I'm missing about population dynamics, but generations
are a _pipeline_. Yes, you're around for many years after your kids are born,
but as your kids are born your grandparents or great-grandparents are probably
reaching the end of their rope.

A system where a process dies as soon as it spawns a new process will have no
more net growth than a system where the process sticks around for N cycles
after spawning a new process, and then dies. Given the same original number of
processes, it will have a greater number of processes running at equilibrium,
but it will experience equilibrium nonetheless.

Not to mention, "two kids" actually leads to a very gentle decline (because
not everyone reproduces) which is reasonably socially stable, unlike a world
in which fertility is 0.2 per couple.

~~~
chrisfosterelli
Replacement-level total fertility rate is actually generally accepted to be a
little bit above 2 (around 2.3), due to unnatural deaths and other causes. At
least in Geography.

With only two kids per couple, even if _every_ woman had 2 children (which is
what a 2.0TFR would mean), the population would still decline.

------
silveira
_Step 1_. Extremely altruistic people join the Voluntary Human Extinction
Movement.

 _Step 2_. Extremely altruistic people cease reproduction.

 _Step 3_. Humanity goes on. If there was a gene for altruism (or a set of
genes and their relationship) it was now removed from the gene pool. Humanity
is now less altruistic, probably worst than before _Step 2_.

~~~
shoo
There are other means of passing information between individuals in a
population, e.g. by communication, upbringing, education, propaganda.

E.g.

Step 2. Extremely altruistic people cease reproduction and use the time and
energy they would otherwise have spent on their own children to educate and
encourage others to become more altruistic.

~~~
dllthomas
... and you wind up with those more predisposed to being altruistic, upon
education and encouragement, also foregoing reproduction. The result may be a
short term surge in altruistic behavior, but a stronger selection away from
altruism at the genetic level.

------
lamuerteflaca
Life on earth has around 1 billion years left(Sun will be too hot). Without
intelligent life all will surely go extinct. We may be its ultimate saviors
when/if we conquer the stars.

~~~
marricks
Comparing the odds that we will destroy it with global warming or nukes is
tough though. Seems like we may well be the arbiter of it's doom.

Plus, what if we do leave? Do you think our governments are really progressing
towards that Star Trek enlightened super government, or are we progressing
toward some sort of Orwellian nightmare? What would humanity look like when it
colonizes more planets and leaves? Would we be the good aliens or bad aliens
you see in sci-fi movies?

Right now we still seem like a species dominated by self interest, and it
doesn't look like we're changing any time soon...

~~~
nickbauman
We'll only seriously start responding to global warming when a significant
part of Manhattan is underwater.

~~~
jqm
Eh, they'll just move everything to Denver and keep right on going. Cities
have been covered with water many times before.

------
Aqueous
Oops, the site is down. I guess the verdict is in: Voluntary human extinction
_doesn 't scale._

------
nirmel
A better-presented analysis that links to this site:
[http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/13/climate-c...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/13/climate-
change-family-size-babies)

~~~
shoo
That's a good analysis. Here's an excerpt:

""" Under the constant scenario, an American who forgoes having a child would
save 9,441 tonnes of CO2 – almost six times, on average, the amount of CO2
they would emit in their own lifetime, or the equivalent of making around
2,550 return aero­plane trips between London and New York. If the same
American drove a more fuel-efficient car, drastically reduced his or her
driving, installed energy-efficient windows, used energy-efficient lightbulbs,
replaced a household refrigerator, and recycled all household paper, glass and
metal, he or she would save fewer than 500 tonnes. """

------
oconnor0
But why? It seems just as foolish to assume we need to die off to save others
as it does arrogant to assume we can pollute and kill without consequences.

------
gojomo
They've been at it for a long time, so if the site isn't responding, you can
look at archived copies nearly 20 years old:

[http://web.archive.org/web/19961230175931/http://www.vhemt.o...](http://web.archive.org/web/19961230175931/http://www.vhemt.org/)

Of course most of their KPMs have been headed the wrong direction, so perhaps
they'll soon throw-in-the-towel?

A related site...

[http://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/](http://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/)

...which also goes way back:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20000511095311/http://www.churcho...](http://web.archive.org/web/20000511095311/http://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/)

------
quadrangle
I love Nina's work and appreciate Sir David Attenborough's focus on population
as an issue (though he would never agree with the VHEM). But…

My whole perspective on the situation was largely changed when I learned the
latest scientific perspectives about predicted population from the
incomparable Hans Rosling: [http://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-
facts-about-p...](http://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-
population/)

That said, a good portion (not all) of the foundations of VHEM are valid even
if the conclusion and complete package is, well, less valid. I won't go into
details here. I sympathize with the feelings, but they aren't really the right
perspective in the end.

------
JesperRavn
Like Peter Singer, I believe that preventing suffering in living beings is the
most important ethical goal. On this count, human impact is ambiguous. We
cause a lot of animal suffering through agriculture. But we also cause a lot
of animals (especially marine life) not to exist who would have otherwise.

See [http://foundational-research.org/publications/importance-
of-...](http://foundational-research.org/publications/importance-of-wild-
animal-suffering/) for more discussion.

------
klenwell
Site's down for me, but the epilogue of Michel Houellebecq's novel The
Elementary Particles[0] laid out an elegant program for accomplishing this.
Although it often goes unremarked in critiques of the novel, I thought it was
the most remarkable part of it.

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomised](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomised)

~~~
snowpanda
The site ended up working for me after a lot of attempts.

I took a full page screenshot, it's not a great solution, but I hope it helps
until the site is back to normal.

[https://www.anony.ws/i/2015/06/09/5b0d9946_o.png](https://www.anony.ws/i/2015/06/09/5b0d9946_o.png)

------
jonpress
The earth and the universe will cease to exist eventually so we might as well
make the most of them.

------
tomc1985
And who is going to care about Earth's natural splendor when noone is around
to appreciate it?

Earth will drift on, as it always has and will. What would be the point,
except for some flowery aspirations (by dead aspirants) of beauty and
perfection? These people want humanity to die off over something that could
never be more than principle? One man's principle no less? Give me a break!

Beauty, perfection, extinction... all of these concepts are distinctly human
in nature. But the cosmos (and our planet) are not, and we barely understand
the rules (let alone the game) which they play. Our beautiful planet is a
statistical footnote, special only in that the results of its RNG yielded an
environment especially fortuitous for life. The cosmos is only matter
interacting with other matter, at all levels and at all scales, forming
systems upon systems upon systems, the interactions of which we perceive in
this thing we call consciousness. (Separate from most worldviews, I think, is
that this one can (theoretically, eventually) be expressed completely in
models of physical interaction, which is something most of the world's
creation stories cannot do.)

