That graph showing poverty reduction in the last 20/40/60 years is wild, and very encouraging. This is so important, because it’s almost impossible to get people to cooperate on solving long term existential risks while their own short term existence is at risk.
> A catastrophe that ends human history would destroy the vast future that humanity would otherwise have. And it would be horrific for those who will be alive at that time. The people who live then will be just as real as you or me. They will exist, they just don’t exist yet. They will feel the sun on their skin and they will enjoy a swim in the sea. They will have the same hopes, they will feel the same pain.
I agree with the idea of preserving opportunity in the future, but the way it is posed in this article is strange. It treats these unborn billions as if they exist right now, and to change the future is to betray them. Focusing so much on the number of unborn people also makes it seem like the author thinks a larger world population is inherently better, morally better. Say the world population instead stabilizes at six billion by the year 2700. That leads to trillions less people being born than in the author's scenario. Is that a lost world? Would the people alive then care?
I think you're reading some moral judgements in that aren't there. We have very little control over the future population of the world, especially over a 1 million year time scale. Nothing in the article says "it would be good for there to have been 100 trillion people in 800 thousand years", it just says there might be.
However you tweak the numbers, unless you assume a much more significant depopulation than just the current 8 or so to 6 billion people, it's many trillions of people either way. Even with a massive depopulation, if human life continues until then the number will unquestionably dwarf the current population.
So it's posing the simple question: If your actions cause pain for future generations, how many people will it effect? What's an acceptable number of future people to hurt for whatever you're doing now?
This is a moral question, a kind of ultra scale trolley problem, not an answer.
The many exist not in one huge mass, but in generation after generation- and the author is right to assume there interests more worthy then short-term comforts of the few and those whose who disguise laziness as a ideology or law of nature.
What he fails to accurately represent is the structure of the future. Cause this its not accurate to depict it like the past as one line of history, of sequential events and scenarios. The future is the sum of all possible scenarios, and that includes short-term disasters and recoverys. Its a scenario-tree with overlapping forests in the branches.
Its a tree, that deforms as one moves on it, gains capability and gathers risks to return to a scenario that is similar in ways to the past. Branches thicken as the fruit of research thicken the likelihoods. And its not explored by one tribe on leader, one people, its explored simultaneously by all of humanity, even the dead branches leading nowhere, not even into the past and diminished trees. On some planet we might one day have a nuclear exchange.
With this tree of chances in mind, some recent developments also make more sense- as long as humanity has no behavioral self-control, developing ever more advanced exponential technology and hand it to the individual, reduces the thickness of the probability branches higher up in the future. Exploring one self, social engineering, social implants and protect against disaster by root-hardening (investing in technology that allows for easier, faster recovery) is more important sequentially then having next level tech (like fusion, flying cars and space travel for everyone).
"Focusing so much on the number of unborn people also makes it seem like the author thinks a larger world population is inherently better, morally better."
From a utilitarian perspective, which values the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people would consider more happy people to be a good thing.
Morlock-Eloi style division of species. Except the Eloi will be billionaire supermen. And the Morlocks will exist within a totally controlled, synthetic, optimized THX1138-style reality where they work hard, but at least they have their pride.
All progress will be bent to that end.
The only alternative is something completely different. Wizards or something.
The scenario where the destitute masses toil for the crazy rich few does not make economic sense in the post-industrial age we currently live in. That scenario only makes sense in low-productivity societies (and that was essentially how most pre-industrial societies were structured).
Why? Because it is mass consumption of goods and services by the many that allows for the massive wealth of the few on top. If not for this mass consumption, the very rich would be orders of magnitude poorer in an absolute sense (though they may be much richer than the median in a relative sense). It is only by skimming from a huge economy that allows for the very rich as we understand them today to exist. And if the mass consumption exists, that means, by definition, that the majority are not destitute.
That's the most plausible alternative by many orders of magnitude.
In fact, the filters on our past are things with odds of survival that we estimate by counting orders of magnitude. At the same time, you will have a hard time getting estimates of survival lower than 1% for the known filters on our future.
Unless there is something really surprising with space travel, we are past the Great Filter.
I think you have this precisely backwards? When humanity was scattered across the globe and unable to do any large scale geo-engineering or deliberately induce fission or fusion, we were largely incapable of dying by our own sword, so the only things that could eliminate the species are things that essentially would wipe out all medium-sized mammalian life on earth. Meteor strikes, absurdly large solar flares, a planetoid crashing into the moon, whatever.
Now we still have basically all of those -- because realistically we're still not at the point where we have anywhere to colonize and survive long term without a living earth, even if we had the tech to try -- but we also have the ways in which we can eliminate ourselves, like causing our own climate crisis (which we are gleefully doing right now) or nuclear annihilation.
There was a paper here on HN recently that estimated the odds of abiogenesis. OF course they are not certain, but his best guess was around 10^-100 for the Earth.
Now tell me, what odds do you place on humanity killing itself before we learn to live in space?
I guess I think you're underestimating the scale of the problem of independently living in space? In theory we already know how to just live in space -- people live on the ISS, and before that on Mir, for decently long amounts of time.
But if we kill earth before we've fully worked out how to terraform somewhere for permanent living without restocking from a living planet, of which we know of only one for sure, that might extend human living for like.. 50 years or something but certainly not a million.
I think we're realistically a long long long way away from that, and most of the ways in which we might "kill the earth" will have a negative impact on our ability to achieve it to begin with.
And again, the odds of a planet-killing asteroid hitting the earth haven't changed materially in probably like a few million years. We're no less vulnerable to that than we were 20k years ago. So I don't see why you think we're less vulnerable now just because we've managed to throw some tin cans in orbit.
How much is "a long time away"? Is a thousand years enough?
An almost planet killing asteroid hits us every 50 million years or so. Thus the probability of one not hitting us in a thousand years is around 99.99%. Certainly you are not proposing the great filter has a 99.99% survival rate? So talking about asteroids is absolutely a non-starter.
For comparison, I was talking about a filter with survival rates of around 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% (more a few zeros, but who is counting?). What odds you place on a nuclear war?
I feel like you're going around in some odd circles here. I'm not really super interested in trying to guess the odds of things we don't know about or things that have never (to our knowledge) happened, which makes me pretty skeptical of any concept built on the fermi paradox to be honest. Too many unknown unknowns.
Your assertion is that the things that face us now are somehow less likely to destroy our species than the things we faced before, thus the "great filter" must be behind us. Ignoring for a moment that we certainly don't even know all the potential species-killing events we potentially face (ie. unknown unknowns), I haven't seen you explain why any of the ones we have faced are less of a problem now, or why any of the ones we face now are less dangerous than the ones we faced before. You just assert it as true and then when pressed try to haggle on some percentages you seem to have pulled out your ass.
It’s also a possibility that no matter what the timeframe, it’s simply not feasible for biological humans to live outside the Earth independently. It’s worth a shot, but it’s also worth acknowledging it may never work despite our best efforts.
Only in the bad sense, as we're still subject to the dangers of nuclear annihilation, cosmic disaster, vulnerable world hypothesis, etc. at pretty much every moment.
We could have already exhausted all of the easy to obtain energy and resources, and that would make growth very hard to sustain at a level where we can expend extra effort on space exploration.
Imagine an alien civilization that didn't have a Carboniferous period where energy was just left sitting around and accumulating for future use.
Now imagine us exhausting it before we expand beyond our planet. That's the worry. Will we be able to tap into renewables in a way that sustains growth? Maybe. We're not there yet, though.
I hear many minerals and fuels are past/near peaking. Recycling and thriftness will ease the descent a bit but I share your urgency. We have to go full-bore on space and nuclear.
The great filter could presently already be on it’s way to us. Perhaps in the form of a gamma ray blast crawling across vast swathes of space. Or a vacuum metastability event rapidly expanding and destroying reality from some point in the unobservable universe.
Of course, we can be hit by a big asteroid, or the planet sterilized by a nearby supernova or some other totally unexpected events out of our control, but we keep turning our present reality something unsustainable in many ways.
We should not be surprised if we hit the barrier we built in front of us.
I definitely understand your sentiment. But I can't help but think whatever nuclear angst we are experiencing right now can't have been anything compared to what was experienced in the 50s and 60s.
Civilization is far more resilient than most people today seem to believe. History shows that utter devastation can tear through a civilization, killing as much as one in three people, but civilization will rebound within a generation or three. If an apocalypse happens, it will certainly be horrific for those who experience it, but humanity will not just survive, it will rebuild quite rapidly. You may not live to see the new renaissance, but will happen.
I would like to see things as positively as you, but until the 20th century humankind had never before faced the dangers of nuclear destruction. We just don't know the extent of the damage power hungry rulers are willing to unleash on the world when they are cornered and feel they have nothing to lose, while controlling more destructive power than ever before in history.
Your figure of 1/3 deaths, or up to 3 generations to rebound might be too optimistic. We just don't know.
Given how reliant we are on existing supply chains, their complete breakdown could send us back into the stone age. We've certainly seen how even a relatively mild pandemic can disrupt our lives for years. The effects of something far worse would be difficult to predict. Us measly tax payers can only hope for the best.
> History shows that utter devastation can tear through a civilization, killing as much as one in three people, but civilization will rebound within a generation or three.
That news to the ancient egyptian civilization, mesopotamian civilization, incan civilization, aztec civilization, etc.
I think we're still far more likely to kill ourselves slowly than quickly, though the slow but accelerating erosion of our ecosystem could certainly accelerate things that would lead to a quicker end.
Either way, 800k years feels very optimistic right now. We need to stop thinking about a trillion potential future people over a million years and start making things better for the few billion or so who will live in the next 20-100 years if those trillions are ever going to exist. We're really really bad at this near-medium horizon, endlessly shuffling the costs of our choices onto them and their children as if we can amortize it forever.
I always wonder about what goes on in the heads of people who claim that. I've never had any desire to have kids. Is it a case of something like pluralistic ignorance, or do they really feel a strong overriding drive here?
There's a difference in the individual level and the species level. An individual does not necessarily have to be concerned with direct propagation to participate in propagation. A bee that kills itself stinging something that is attacking the hive potentially increases the overall survival of the genes which it shares with the hive, even at the expense of its own particular genes. An individual human who assists in the aid of other adult members or children in the group, even though they themselves do might not mate successfully, does something similar.
It is all-consuming in the sense that it is fundamental to life by definition. (Unless we are to posit some organism arising from proto-life and just 'hanging out' until the end of the universe.) And it is the second half fundamental to evolution -- the other being death.
How many of us who didn't want children have siblings that had children in our place? The drive for reproduction wins, even without considering that without the drive for reproduction of our parents we wouldn't even exist.
More so, the drive for reproduction isn't necessarily about kids, but sexuality. Sex sells. A big chunk of our civilization is about food and sex.
Not having children is very common and always has been, and yet seems to me a somewhat radical decision when you think that you represent an unbroken line of reproduction going back 4 billion years, and somehow that line ends with you.
If you fail to reproduce (voluntarily or otherwise), only a small mutation in a giant cross-breeding pool is lost, not some great bloodline of ancestry. Provided, of course, that you're not literally the last living descendant of some genetic bottleneck.
The total genetic consciousness of humanity cares for your particular genes about as much as you care for a single hair or cell of skin falling off the greater whole.
> And yet, industrialized countries fall below replacement level and world population plateaus.
Yes. Reproductive rates vary over time and due to environmental conditions.
See Calhoun's Mouse Utopia Experiments for an extreme example of this. (Though simplistic applicability of this to human society, in the ways that have been done in the past, should probably be discouraged.)
> Also your quote is blatantly false. Consider bees. The queen produces offspring literally to build her hive and feed her young.
Other animals act in collective ways. Yes. But it's not talking of collectivism in terms of bees, ants, or wolf packs.
So far as I understand the quote, or the sentiment, it refers to the seeming fact that bees, ants, wolfs, etc, reproduce as a series of drives that function to that end without them needing to be cognizant of that end. Whereas humans, in addition to the compulsive drives of pleasure, etc, require justification. A queen bee does not concern itself (so far as we understand the mental processes of other animals) with prospects a billion years from now. A queen bee doesn't have to justify that more bees are good. Eggs are just cared for, fertilized, hatched in relation to the functioning of the hive and the processes which occur to regulate such. The seeming distinction with human beings is that the course of evolution has perhaps instilled them/us with a sort of, if not a 'meta drive', then a drive to override other aspects of our evolved intelligence which might undermine reproduction. In short, humans don't just 'get horny', they/we also have to 'get religion[1]'. Other animals (again, so far as we are aware, which is admittedly not very far sometimes) don't seem to require any justification on top of 'the mating dance makes me horny', they just 'do it'.
[1] This, of course, should be considered in terms of ideology broadly, rather than just religion specifically. (In addition, I would also contend here that ideology is not an external addition, but a fundamental of human psychology, and to paraphrase Zizek 'the most thoroughly ideological environment is the post-ideological one.'
> See Calhoun's Mouse Utopia Experiments for an extreme example of this.
Calhoun's experiments are kinda sketchy and likely are not reproducible. [0] They were extensively promoted as PopSci, especially by Calhoun, but only limited papers where actually published, never the full results, and attempts at reproduction have called into question many of the findings.
Which is in part why I stated: Though simplistic applicability of this to human society, in the ways that have been done in the past, should probably be discouraged.
But you are likely correct; I should have been stronger in my warnings.
Unfortunately, however, it could be taken that I was indicating the wholesale applicability of a possibly one-off event as explanation to broader and seemingly repeated phenomena (leveling and/or declining population rates in so-called developed countries), rather that just as a possible single extreme instance of population and reproductive instability as generalized example.
My interest is confined strictly to the rat populations themselves. The particulars of the designs involved and for the issues that were introduced by them, I think that to be the more interesting part.
Any applicability to human sociology I would regard as ridiculously erroneous at this stage. (Or perhaps any stage. We tend to cross-associate species too much sometimes.)
Though, I wonder if reproducibility may not, here, be as useful as we think. It is of course necessary for such to scientific, or at least scientifically studied. Repeatability, however, is not a prerequisite of existence. It is a question of how high a degree of variability exists within the flow and inter-relation and outcomes of population-wide phenomena among social species.
> It is of course necessary for such to scientific, or at least scientifically studied. Repeatability, however, is not a prerequisite of existence. It is a question of how high a degree of variability exists within the flow and inter-relation and outcomes of population-wide phenomena among social species.
Except Calhoun didn't do the basic stuff to rule out the obvious non-social causes for population breakdown. He didn't take offspring from the colony and test to make sure they still could reproduce healthily in a new setting. Calhoun doesn't clearly specify all the starting conditions, but at least one run started from 4 breeding pairs which introduces the possibility of inbreeding as a close call. There are also diseases that cause sterility and odd behaviors in rats.
So basically until someone can reproduce the experiment properly, there is pretty much zero epistemic content that can be drawn from the Calhoun experiments except as a cautionary tale about taking self promoting scientists at their word rather than demanding their data as well.
I never focused on the social role as causatory[1]. All I wanted was a quick, easily searchable, not-overly technical example of reproductive variation in a population over time. What is known of Calhoun's experiments still satisfy that requirement. I have tried to dispel the social aspect in two posts so far and have completely failed. Obviously, that the connection of such in the broader imagination is to a degree which I underestimated continues to haul in baggage that is sinking my intentions.
Would it have been better to talk about bivalves[2] and baboons[3]?
I would generally prefer bivalves to baboons.
But then I would be accused, again, in trying to illustrate a general phenomena or principle, of drawing a line to some vector of particular conflux between species A and H. sapiens, ala the domain of Jordan Peterson's lobsters.
The problem is, I am afraid, in such discussions as these, my posts will have to account down to the punctuation, lest one correction will need be issued or question be raised, in which case the totality of the thing is blown to the proverbial kingdom come by its (and my) inability to account for the sum totality of a minute portion of the universe. (A trivial failing, I admit, but one I have to own up to.)
Except perfect is never going to be good enough.
It's similar, after a fashion, to having to deal with young earth creationists. Yes, but where is the transitionary fossil between H. habilis and H. erectus? The counter claim will then arise that there are differences in opinion as to whether H. ergaster is a precursor to H. erectus or categorizable in terms of inclusion with H. erectus.
The question is: why do I put in the effort?
Maybe because silence, inaction, is always likely in support of something. Neutrality can likely only exist at minimum if the subject and phenomena are not extant within the same light cone. Practical considerations might allow for a smaller distance, but might as well be thorough.
Ultimately, I have to be fine with misstepping. Failure, after all, in the end, is the only option.
Returning to Calhoun a moment, since I might as well ride the derailment off the cliff (semper desistas semper exieris[4]), the final outcome of Newton's Flaming Laser Sword is that swaths of reality functionally cease to exist. Of course there is epistemic content. That content is not applicable within a scientific framework, that is very true. But something, unless the entirety was fabricated, did happen. Maybe Calhoun purposefully funneled the experiment into his result, The Mad God of Universe 25. Maybe he was the Harry Harlow of rats. But the basics of it are that reproductive rates changed and the population collapsed. Maybe it was from disease. Maybe it was from inbreeding. Maybe it was from the food. Maybe it was from the design of the enclosure. Maybe one day Calhoun decided to climb into the enclosure and stomp them all. Maybe it was all these things together. It's not much. But 'pretty much zero' is not zero.[5] As almost everything I tend to post proves, close enough doesn't cut it.
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[1] Yes, I am aware this is not a 'real' word, and I don't care. Another few hundred years and it will be a word. It's been independently derived too many times.
I will also add that it was likely a mistake to reference any laboratory-observed phenomena whatsoever, replicable or otherwise, with regard to such a topic. It would seem likely for there to be a bias against such references extant prior to any given proposition, the conflict between the common notion of the 'sterile' lab and 'bountiful' nature. Also, as with the case of Calhoun's experiments, zoo observations of 'alpha' wolves, or prior unrecognized variances between male and female experimenters with regards to rat subjects and pheromone exposure[1], there are more than enough 'plot holes' to provide psychological ammunition for the automatic dismissal of inconvenient propositions.
Generalization of scientific studies (especially in the "softer" sciences) is a hard problem. On good approach is combining multiple studies that are deliberately designed to asses different aspects of generalization.
Psychology in particular has a problem with many papers poorly assessing their own generalizibility and making much stronger/broader claims than are justified by the actual design of their study. This, combined with the widespread teaching of badly run "famous" studies such as Calhoun, drove me to abandon getting a degree in that field.
Does a bee think about winter? Does a tree? Or do they react in response to stimuli with evolved, complex behaviors? Does a bear go out and gorge itself to gain weight because it thinks that's the best way to get through winter or does it do so because changes in weather/seasons signal a set of immediate compulsions which have broader survival advantages?
We can even grant that honey bees, for instance, do appear to have some type of awareness of time and space, as indicated by their communicative 'dances'. However, there is a vast gap between encoding approximate seconds to kilometers (in human terms) and the time relations of the heat death of the universe.
Intelligence, self-awareness, these are all things that have developed in various species to varying degrees. And new data generally keep showing that we have previously underestimated just to what degree that is the case.
However, it has yet to be shown that bees (or any other animal) are compelled to instantiate and perpetuate social interactions with the point of advancing propositions such as "people who live in the future matter morally just as much as those of us who are alive today."
> billions of years ... survive through the winter
That's G.R.R Martin levels of winter.
EDIT:
I don't want to make it seem as if am I discounting the ability for the deployment of forethought by other animals. There is, however, the issue of any 'horizon of time'. Bees can work to restore a hive in the middle of winter because it is potentially conceptualized, in some fashion, to be necessary. A crow can interface with multiple interlocking scenarios in order to achieve an outcome (usually food). We have cooperative behavior: one monkey distracts the tourist, the other steals the food, etc. However, there seems to be little evidence for any other species having such a notion of time as to extend much more beyond immediate concerns in an active sense. Longer phenomena, such as the reproductive cycles of cicadas, is more linked to environmental factors and internal molecule clocks than it is to what could be defined as conscious relations.
This is not also to say that some species may also have (or in the future have) undergone convergent evolution with regards to this type of mental processing, just that it doesn't generally seem to be the case.
Maybe there are situations where the best thing for the reproduction of our species is an individual deciding to not reproduce.
If you live in a developed nation, you probably feel secure that humanity will not perish without you having kids. You are allowed to simply enjoy life as you wish and not have kids if you choose (at least, that is my ideal).
