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When independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy is included, the poll found that Harris overtakes Trump and has a slight lead, 45 percent to 44 percent. Kennedy was the choice of only 4 percent of respondents, while 5 percent were undecided.

President Joe Biden, who dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris on July 21, was losing to Trump by 6-point margins in both head-to-head and multi-candidate versions of the Wall Street Journal poll taken earlier this month.

The protest movement that sought to use the Democratic primaries to pressure Joe Biden to shift his policy on Israel and Gaza breathed a sigh of relief when he ended his bid for re-election. But they’re not ready to promise they’ll support Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee. More than 700,000 Americans voted “uncommitted”, or its equivalent, in state primaries as a message to Biden that he risked losing significant support in November if he did not shift away from his support for Israel. As next month’s Democratic national convention inches closer, the movement has turned its sights to pressuring Harris to shape a new course on Gaza policy. Its demands of Harris include an arms embargo on Israel and support for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, where more than 39,000 Palestinians have been killed since the 7 October attack on Israel by Hamas, according to health officials. Vice-president Kamala Harris speaks following a meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington in which she pressed him on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Kamala Harris says ‘I will not be silent’ on suffering in Gaza after Netanyahu talks Read more Uncommitted voters say that their message to the White House is clear: stop funding Israel’s war, or lose our votes. “[Harris] could get my vote, but it’s going to be a difficult journey. We actually need to see action,” said Fadel Nabilsi, a Palestinian American attorney who voted uncommitted in Michigan’s Democratic primary. Biden won the swing state, where 278,000 Arab Americans live, by just 154,000 votes in 2020. “You need to get on the same page with all of us,” Nabilsi said, “if you’d like to get our support and our backing.” Harris has spoken more forcefully about Palestinian suffering than her boss, and in remarks on Thursday after meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, she used sharp terms to call for a ceasefire and the protection of Palestinian civilians. “What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating. The images of dead children and desperate hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time.” She acknowledged that “Israel has a right to defend itself” and denounced Hamas, but also added: “We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies [in Gaza]. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent.” But despite a difference in tone, she has not signaled how or whether her politics on the region would break from Biden’s – the departure that uncommitted activists are looking for. “The White House’s policy to continue to supply American bombs to Netanyahu is like a bartender serving drinks to an alcoholic while repeatedly urging them to stay sober,” Waleed Shahid, a progressive Democratic strategist and an adviser to the Uncommitted National Movement, said after Harris spoke on Thursday. “Empathy for Palestinians from the vice-president is a step in the right direction but people just want a policy change to stop the supply of American bombs to Israel’s war.” Vice-president Kamala Harris speaks following a meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington in which she pressed him on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Kamala Harris says ‘I will not be silent’ on suffering in Gaza after Netanyahu talks Read more The uncommitted movement gained ground in March following a campaign called Listen to Michigan, which succeeded in persuading more than 100,000 voters to mark their ballots “uncommitted” during the state’s Democratic primary in February. The grassroots effort spread to more than two dozen states, ultimately earning the movement 30 delegates who will travel to the Democratic national convention next month. The movement is urging delegates outside of the uncommitted camp to support their policy demands during the convention. Harris delegates “can help push for an arms embargo”, said Shahid. “They don’t need to become uncommitted delegates.” Abbas Alawieh, an uncommitted delegate from Michigan, said that people close to the Harris campaign have reached out to uncommitted activists in recent days, but declined to share specifics. “We need her to meet with members of our community. We need her to meet with uncommitted delegates,” Alawieh said. “We need to hear from her and her team how she will embrace an approach that prioritizes and values Palestinian lives and the lives of every civilian.” More than 600 people joined an uncommitted national organizing call on Monday night for the movement’s recently launched Not Another Bomb campaign, which urges US leaders to end financial and military support for Israel’s war. Chloe Lundine, a Detroit, Michigan, resident and uncommitted voter, joined a protest near the Capitol building in Washington DC during Netanyahu’s visit. Earlier this week, she said, she was pressured to resign from her position as an analyst at Wayne State University after posting pro-Palestinian art outside her office. While she was “cautiously optimistic” that Harris would change course on Gaza policy, she added that she’d “love to see her speak with Netanyahu and plainly say that she supports a permanent ceasefire at the very minimum”. Uncommitted voters are torn on whether they’ll vote for the Democratic candidate if their demands aren’t met – they recognize that Donald Trump is not likely to bring peace to Gaza but are resistant to pressure from Democrats to vote against their conscience. Some said they would be dissatisfied if Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania governor, were picked as Harris’s running mate, citing his efforts to quash pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses. For Ghada Elnajjar, a Palestinian American organizer based in Georgia, the decision of whether to vote for Harris or a candidate like the Green party’s Jill Stein keeps her up at night. “On the one hand, I do consider that it is time for this country to break shackles from a two-party system and introduce a third party,” said Elnajjar. “On the other hand, I understand there’s so many other policies that we need to support: the economy, education, the environment.” A separate anti-war movement has also started mobilizing. On Thursday, Pennsylvania activists launched a campaign to collect pledges from voters refusing to vote for Harris unless she breaks more sharply from Biden policies. “President Biden lost the support of hundreds of thousands of voters because he refused to stop funding genocide in Gaza,” said Reem Abuelhaj, an organizer with the No Ceasefire No Vote campaign. “Vice-president Harris now has a unique opportunity to win back those votes. But that will only happen if she does everything in her power to bring about a ceasefire.” Other activists may not be pressuring people to withhold their votes, but they warn that Harris shouldn’t take their support for granted. “Instead of trying to stop support for Harris, our strategy is going to focus on holding her accountable to values and demands of the majority of the Democratic party base and electorate, which includes a lasting and permanent ceasefire via an arms embargo on Israel,” said Lexis Zeidan, a Palestinian American activist with the uncommitted movement from Dearborn, Michigan. A recent Gallup poll found that more Americans oppose Israel’s war on Gaza than support it: 48% compared with 42%. Just 23% of Democrats said they approve of Israel’s military campaign. “This could look two ways,” said Shahid, the Democratic strategist. “Either the 700,000 uncommitted voters could actively mobilize for vice-president Harris, if they felt like she had shifted significantly on Gaza from Biden. “If she doesn’t shift on Gaza, I think people will be much more reserved about their enthusiasm, in terms of knocking on doors, donating, telling their friends and family and their community to vote for Harris, even if they don’t like Trump.”

A growing number of House Democrats are telling Kamala Harris that she should pick Sen. Mark Kelly as her vice president, believing he would offset her biggest current weakness: the border. Kelly — a former Navy pivot, astronaut and now a senator from Arizona — has pushed the Biden administration to take a tougher position on border security and aligned more closely with other border-state Democrats, some of whom have either withheld endorsements for Harris’ presidential bid or openly condemned her handling of the border. Three such Democrats — Reps. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas), Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) and Lou Correa (D-Calif.) — are all publicly pushing for Kelly. Shortly after voting for a bill that denounced Harris’ handling of the border, Cuellar said Kelly was Harris’ best potential pick for a no. 2, saying he “knows the border well.” “He would add a lot of value,” Gonzalez echoed, gushing about Kelly’s military background and his clear grasp of border issues. Kelly, along with Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, are Hill Democrats’ two top picks to join Harris on the ticket, according to interviews with 30 Democratic lawmakers and senior aides. They both have won multiple elections in swing states, and lawmakers believe they have the most to offer in helping the party beat Donald Trump. Still, while there’s a sense that Shapiro would bring executive experience to the ticket that Harris lacks, others — including in Harris’ own orbit — think Kelly would be critical to addressing Harris’ weakness on immigration. Hailing from a battleground and border state, Kelly backs improved security and voted in favor of the Senate’s bipartisan border deal earlier this year. Five days before President Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy, Kelly was in Mexico City meeting with that nation’s president and pushed him on security and management of their shared border. Correa, who had joined Kelly on the trip, recalled thinking of the Arizona senator: “Wow, man, this guy knows what he’s talking about.”

About half of registered voters in the United States say this year’s elections will have a “major impact” on access to abortion, and about 1 in 8 voters says that abortion is the most important issue driving their vote, according to a new . Abortion is a particularly motivating issue for Black women, with more than a quarter of voters in this group saying it is the most important issue to them ahead of the 2024 elections. It is also the driving issue for larger-than-average shares of Democratic women (22%), women who live in states with abortion bans (19%) and women of reproductive age, or adult women under 50 (17%). The majority of voters who named abortion as the most important issue to them say it should be legal in all or most cases. About half (48%) said they would vote for President Joe Biden if the election were held today, while 26% said they would back former President Donald Trump. One in eight isn’t a majority of voters, and it’s down from the midterms, but it is still a share that could be decisive in tight elections,” said Ashley Kirzinger, director of survey methodology and associate director of public opinion and survey research with KFF. Black women, in particular, are a key voting group that tends to vote Democratic and tends to have high turnout, she said. Abortion is still a politically polarizing issue. Overall, a little over half of adults say they would like to see the federal government pass laws to protect abortion nationwide, compared with about 1 in 5 who say they would rather see the federal government prohibit abortion, according to the KFF survey.

About half of registered voters in the United States say this year’s elections will have a “major impact” on access to abortion, and about 1 in 8 voters says that abortion is the most important issue driving their vote, according to a new KFF survey. ‘Fleeing under the cover of darkness:’ How Idaho’s abortion ban is changing pregnancy in the state. Jennifer Adkins. Related article ‘Fleeing under the cover of darkness’: How Idaho’s abortion ban is changing pregnancy in the state Abortion is a particularly motivating issue for Black women, with more than a quarter of voters in this group saying it is the most important issue to them ahead of the 2024 elections. It is also the driving issue for larger-than-average shares of Democratic women (22%), women who live in states with abortion bans (19%) and women of reproductive age, or adult women under 50 (17%). The majority of voters who named abortion as the most important issue to them say it should be legal in all or most cases. About half (48%) said they would vote for President Joe Biden if the election were held today, while 26% said they would back former President Donald Trump. “One in eight isn’t a majority of voters, and it’s down from the midterms, but it is still a share that could be decisive in tight elections,” said Ashley Kirzinger, director of survey methodology and associate director of public opinion and survey research with KFF. Black women, in particular, are a key voting group that tends to vote Democratic and tends to have high turnout, she said. KFF, formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation, is a nonprofit health polling, research and journalism organization. During the 2022 midterm elections, just months after the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, CNN exit polls found that 27% of voters named abortion as the most important issue to them – second only to inflation. The new survey didn’t compare how abortion ranks against other issues. 20240718-abortion-map-card___exlargetease.png Related article See where abortions are banned and legal — and where it’s still in limbo Abortion is still a politically polarizing issue. Overall, a little over half of adults say they would like to see the federal government pass laws to protect abortion nationwide, compared with about 1 in 5 who say they would rather see the federal government prohibit abortion, according to the KFF survey. The New York Times reported last month that former President Donald Trump has privately expressed support for a 16-week abortion ban, but the KFF survey found that most adults – nearly 60% – say they oppose a policy like this. Underneath the overall majority in support of federal protection of abortion and against a 16-week ban is a deep partisan divide. More than three-quarters of Democrats want the federal government to legally protect abortion, compared with about a quarter of Republicans, the KFF poll found. And 75% of Democrats are against a 16-week ban, while 63% of Republicans would support it. Biden has a slight advantage over Trump when it comes to reaching voters on abortion policy: 38% of voters said they trust Biden more to “move abortion policy in the right direction,” compared with 29% who said they would trust Trump more. However, a significant share of voters – more than 1 in 5 – say they don’t trust either candidate on the issue. “In an election with two unpopular candidates, the issues could be driving voters more than the candidates,” Kirzinger said. Certain abortion policies bridge partisan divides. An overwhelming majority of adults – 86% – want to protect access to abortion for people who have pregnancy-related emergencies, such as miscarriages. Large majorities of Democrats, independents and Republicans say they support these policies, according to the KFF poll. Follow CNN Health on Facebook and Twitter See the latest news and share your comments with CNN Health on Facebook and Twitter. And more than 60% of the public opposes policies that would criminalize mailing abortion pills to people in states with bans and policies that would prohibit clinics that receive federal funds from providing abortions. Relatively narrow majorities of Republicans support these policies, KFF found. It’s hard to say how much the abortion issue will motivate voters to turn out on election day until there is a more complete picture of the election landscape, including state ballot measures, Kirzinger said. “What we’ve seen is that when it is on a ballot, it’s always gone in the pro-abortion direction and seems to be a motivating force,” she said. “So it could rise in terms of importance, but where we are now, this is where it exists for just a candidate election.” The KFF poll was conducted by phone and online from February 20 to 28 among 1,316 US adults, including 1,072 registered voters. Results for the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points; among registered voters, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Of all the reasons Kamala Harris is better equipped than Joe Biden to defeat Donald Trump in November—her relative youth, the fact that she’s a former prosecutor challenging a convicted felon—her biggest advantage may be her record on abortion. Harris served as the Biden administration’s de facto advocate for reproductive rights; it is her voice, not Biden’s, that’s been loudest in objecting to abortion bans and conservative efforts to curtail IVF and contraception. According to the White House, she is the only vice president to have paid an official visit to an abortion clinic. As a senator, she famously grilled the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on abortion, asking him, “Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?” (He could not.)

As California’s attorney general, Harris investigated the anti-abortion activists who pretended to be researchers from a biologics company and illegally recorded videos that were edited to suggest that Planned Parenthood sold fetal parts. (After Harris left the AG’s office for the Senate, her successor brought criminal charges, and Planned Parenthood eventually won more than $2 million in damages from a lawsuit against the activists.) It also doesn’t hurt that Harris is running against a notorious misogynist who selected for his running mate a man who said as recently as 2022 that he would support a nationwide abortion ban.

When Joe Biden announced his decision to end his reelection bid amid mounting concerns about his ability to beat Donald Trump, many Democrats were relieved. The prospect of Trump defeating Democrats in November, which for a time felt like a foregone conclusion, no longer seemed so certain.

Arab Americans, many (though not all) of whom have historically aligned themselves with the Democratic Party, were relieved for another reason. To them, Biden has been the single-biggest cheerleader of Israel’s punishing and relentless assault on Gaza, which has over nearly 10 months claimed the lives of at least 39,000 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-led Gaza Health Ministry, whose figures are considered reliable by the U.S. and the U.N. While the president has shown deep empathy with Israelis since Hamas’s deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which killed some 1,200 people, he has struggled to convey the same level of sympathy towards Palestinians—and, at one point, even cast doubt on the extent of the Palestinian death toll in Gaza.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris, the likely Democratic nominee for president, is attempting to bridge divides within the party over the war in Gaza, emphasizing Israel’s right to defend itself while also focusing on alleviating Palestinian suffering.

She delivered remarks after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday that reflected a delicate balancing act on one of the country’s most divisive political issues. Some Democrats have been critical of President Joe Biden’s steadfast support for Israel despite the increasing death toll among Palestinians, and Harris is trying to unite her party for the election battle with Republican candidate Donald Trump.

The protest movement that sought to use the Democratic primaries to pressure  to shift his policy on  breathed a sigh of relief when he ended his bid for re-election. But they’re not ready to promise they’ll support , the presumptive Democratic nominee.

More than 700,000 Americans voted “uncommitted”, or its equivalent, in state primaries as a message to Biden that he risked losing significant support in November if he did not shift away from his support for Israel. As next month’s Democratic national convention inches closer, the movement has turned its sights to pressuring Harris to shape a new course on Gaza policy. Its  of Harris include an arms embargo on Israel and support for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, where more than  have been killed since the 7 October attack on Israel by Hamas, according to health officials.

Kamala Harris is now leading Donald Trump in a number of polls.

In a survey conducted by Morning Consult between July 22 and 24, Harris is leading Trump by one point, 46 percent supporting her, above the former president's 45 percent. The poll surveyed 11,297 registered U.S. voters and has a 1 percent margin of error.

A  released on Friday by The Wall Street Journal found that Harris had all but eliminated Trump's lead, with the vice president trailing the former president by a 49 percent to 47 percent margin in a head-to-head matchup. The poll has a 3.1 percent margin of error.

When independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy is included, the poll found that Harris overtakes Trump and has a slight lead, 45 percent to 44 percent. Kennedy was the choice of only 4 percent of respondents, while 5 percent were undecided.

Vice President Kamala Harris opened up a marginal two-percentage-point lead over Republican Donald Trump after President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign and passed the torch to her, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found.

That compares with a marginal two-point deficit Biden faced against Trump in last week's poll before his Sunday exit from the race.

Allan Lichtman, the  who has successfully predicted the last nine out of 10 White House races, has made his preliminary projection for the November contest:  is expected to win, he said Friday.

Lichtman said his final prediction for the White House contest will come in , but as of Friday, Harris appears to be the winner based on the formula he uses to forecast the election outcome.

We should be more pessimistic when we review how nonhuman animals have fared in the last century. At present around 50 billion animals are raised and killed each year to feed humanity. (Many million animals are used for clothing, product testing, research, and entertainment, but their numbers are insignificant by comparison.) Since World War 2, with the invention of "factory farming," farm animals’ welfare has significantly deteriorated, as they now live in conditions that frustrate their most basic instincts (Singer, 2002, chapter 3). At the same time, we’re probably the only animal on Earth that routinely demonstrates compassion for other species. Such compassion is nearly universal in developed countries but we usually know too little, too late, for deeply ingrained habits, such as diets, to change. If improvements in other public morals were possible without any significant biological change in human nature, then the same should be true for our treatment of nonhuman animals, though it will take some time.

Even without any change in public morals, it seems unlikely we will continue to use animals for very long – at least, nowhere near 50 billion per year. Our most brutal use of animals results not from sadism but from old appetites now satisfied with inefficient technologies that have not fundamentally changed in 10,000 years. Ours is the first century where newer technologies -- plant or in vitro meats, or meat from brainless animals -- could satisfy human appetites for meat more efficiently and safely (Edelman et al, 2005). As these technologies mature and become cheaper, they will likely replace conventional meat. If the use of sentient animals survives much beyond this century, we should be very surprised. This thought is a cure for misanthropy. As long as most humans in the future don't use sentient animals, the vast number of good lives we can create would outweigh any sins humanity has committed or is likely to commit. Even if it takes a century for animal farming to be replaced by vegetarianism (or in vitro meats or brainless farm animals), the century of factory farming would represent around 10^12 miserable life-years. That is one-billionth of the 10^21 animal life-years humanity could save by protecting Earth from asteroids for a billion years. The century of industrialized animal use would thus be the equivalent of a terrible pain that lasts one second in an otherwise happy 100-year life. To accept human extinction now would be like committing suicide to end an unpleasant itch. If human life is extinguished, all known animal life will be extinguished when the Sun enters its Red Giant phase, if not earlier. Despite its current mistreatment of other animals, humanity is the animal kingdom’s best long-term hope for survival.

In contrast, I assume here that moral value is a function of both the quality and number of lives in a history. This view is consistent with most people’s intuition about extinction (that it’s bad) and with moral theories under which life is considered a benefit to those who have it, or under which life is a necessary condition for producing things of value (Broome, 2004; Hare, 1993; Holtug 2001, Ng, 1989; Parfit 1984; Sikora, 1978). For instance, some moral theories value things like experiences, satisfied preferences, achievements, friendships, or virtuous acts, which take place only in lives. On this view, an early death is bad (at least in part) because it cuts short the number of these valuable things. Similarly, on this view, an early extinction is bad (at least in part) because it cuts short the number of these valuable things. I think this view is plausible and think our best reasons for believing an early death is bad are our best reasons for believing an early extinction is bad. But such a view is controversial and I will not settle the controversy here. I start from the premise that we ought to increase moral value by increasing both the quality and number of lives throughout history. I also take it, following Singer (2002), this maxim applies to all sentient beings capable of positive subjective feelings. Life’s prospects The human population is now 6 billion (6 x 109). There are perhaps another trillion (1012) sentient animals on Earth, maybe a few orders more, depending on where sentience begins and ends in the animal kingdom (Gaston, Blackburn, and Goldewijk, 2003; Gaston and Evans, 2004). Animal life has existed on Earth for around 500 million years. Barring a dramatic intervention, all animal life on Earth will die in the next several billion years. Earth is located in a field of thousands of asteroids and comets. 65 million years ago, an asteroid 10 kilometers in size hit the Yucatan , creating clouds of dust and smoke that blocked sunlight for months, probably causing the extinction of 90% of animals, including dinosaurs. A 100 km impact, capable of extinguishing all animal life on Earth, is probable within a billion years (Morrison et al., 2002). If an asteroid does not extinguish all animal life, the Sun will. In one billion years, the Sun will begin its Red Giant stage, increasing in size and temperature. Within six billion years, the Sun will have evaporated all of Earth’s water, and terrestrial temperatures will reach 1000 degrees -- much too hot for amino acid-based life to persist. If, somehow, life were to survive these changes, it will die in 7 billion years when the Sun forms a planetary nebula that irradiates Earth (Sackmann, Boothroyd, Kraemer, 1993; Ward and Brownlee, 2002). Earth is a dangerous place and animal life here has dim prospects. If there are 1012 sentient animals on Earth, only 10^21 life-years remain. The only hope for terrestrial sentience surviving well beyond this limit is that some force will deflect large asteroids before they collide with Earth, giving sentients another billion or more years of life (Gritzner and Kahle, 2004); and/or terrestrial sentients will colonize other solar systems, giving sentients up to another 100 trillion years of life until all stars begin to stop shining (Adams and Laughlin, 1997). Life might survive even longer if it exploits non-stellar energy sources. But it is hard to imagine how life could survive beyond the decay of nuclear matter expected in 1032 to 1041 years (Adams and Laughlin, 1997). This may be the upper limit on the future of sentience. Deflecting asteroids and colonizing space could delay the extinction of Earth-originating sentience from 109 to 10^41 years. Assuming an average population of one trillion sentients is maintained (which is a conservative assumption under colonization), these interventions would create between 1021 and 1053 life-years. At present on Earth, only a human civilization would be remotely capable of carrying out such projects. If humanity survives the next few centuries, it’s likely we will develop technologies needed for at least one of these projects. We may already possess the technologies needed to deflect asteroids (Gritzner and Kahle, 2004; Urias et al., 1996). And in the next few centuries, we’re likely to develop technologies that allow colonization. We will be strongly motivated by self-interest to colonize space, as asteroids and planets have valuable resources to mine, and as our survival ultimately requires relocating to another solar system (Kargel, 1994; Lewis, 1996). Extinction risks Being capable of preserving sentient life for another 10^41 years makes human survival important. There may be nothing more important. If the human species is extinguished, all known sentience and certainly all Earth-originating sentience will be extinguished within a few billion years. We ought then pay more attention to what Bostrom (2002) has called “existential risks” -- risks “where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential.”

First, the big picture. We've got hundreds of millions of years left on Earth if nothing very bad happens first. If we can keep our civilization going, we've got much, much more time ahead of us in space colonization. But humanity may be Earth-originating life's only shot at colonization. Given the apparent lack of other intelligent life out there (the Fermi paradox), the fate of life in the universe may well be in our hands. I'd say everything else we could concern ourselves with simply pales in comparison to the fate of life in the universe! Given the many non-trivial threats to our survival we currently face, I recommend focusing on protecting our survival until we drive the risk of our extinction down to right around zero.

Political Ideologies

Now, some philosophers have argued that we have no obligations to human beings who are not even born, but that is surely mistaken.14 Otherwise we would have no obligation, say, to prevent the accumulation of dangerous materials next to the new-born wing of a hospital, on the grounds that those materials will not reach a critical stage in less than ten years. A possible explosion then will kill people not yet born now. And there might even be some who think that humanity is not worth saving. Making a case for what is right amounts to providing reasons for action, compelling reasons for those who might be called upon to make great efforts.15 And it is difficult to imagine that humanity as a whole will come to hate itself to the degree of accepting extinction. As for those who love spiders and ragweed more than their fellow humans, they might consider that large cosmic collisions in the past may have wiped out between 75% (65 M years ago) and 96% of marine species on Earth (presumed collision at the end of the Permian, 252 M years ago).16 We will not be saving just ourselves. And, incidentally, by colonizing space we will also be taking other terrestrial life with us into the heavens, for we will need plants and at least small animals for food, just as we will want flowers and other ornamental vegetation. Some insects and many bacteria will be essential to the survival of the other terrestrial life, and so they must also accompany us. In the case of a final disaster, it is likely that people would try to save as much of terrestrial life as they could place in space.

I often hear people entertaining the thought of making humanity disappear from the universe because, as a species, we are causing a lot of suffering, to ourselves and other sentient beings and the planet. One thought experiment goes like this: if you could make humanity painlessly disappear with the pressing of a button, would you press it? Or, slightly reframing the experiment so that you can make an abstraction of your own responsibility: would you stop someone else from pressing the button?

In the animal rights/vegan movement, more people seem to be in favor of human extinction than among the general population (just my anecdotal experience). That’s not hard to understand. People become animal rights activists and/or vegans because they have learned about the horrible suffering humans inflict on animals, for food, clothing, research or entertainment. It is tempting to think that the planet would be a better place without Homo sapiens, and given that in our thought experiment, no humans would really suffer (it’s just a matter of an instant, and no humans are left to deplore the new situation), we might say: where’s the harm?

When a friend of the American composer John Cage asked, "Don't you think there's too much suffering in the world?", Cage answered, “No, I think there's just the right amount”. Few ethicists openly express such Zen-like equanimity at the suffering of other sentient beings; but until recently all ecologists shared Richard Dawkins' assumption of its inevitability. However, the living world is on the brink of a technical and ethical revolution - and a major evolutionary transition in the development of life. Humanity will shortly be able to decide the optimal level of suffering both for members of our own species and across the tree of life itself. Not least, CRISPR-driven gene drives can cheaply, rapidly and dramatically reduce suffering in all species of sexually reproducing organism.

Until 21st century biotechnology, the sheer cost, computational complexity and technical obstacles to tackling suffering in free-living non-human animals seemed daunting to anyone who cared about nonhumans. A pan-species welfare state was inconceivable. Cross-species fertility-regulation via immunocontraception, neurochipping, GPS-tracking and monitoring, and rudimentary healthcare services would be prohibitively costly even for large, long-lived vertebrates in human wildlife parks. How could we possibly hope to tackle suffering in marine ecosystems or the Amazon rainforest, short of invoking molecular nanotechnology and what critics would call Drexlerian sci-fi? Actively helping free-living non-humans in an era when millions of people still lack adequate nutrition and healthcare, and when humans still systematically hurt, harm and kill billions of sentient beings in factory-farms and slaughterhouses, has made such a project seem sociologically fanciful as well. Evolution didn't design Homo sapiens to be impartially altruistic.

It’s possible technological improvements will make radical interventions in wild animal welfare feasible. Artificially intelligent flying drones could replace and extend the activities park rangers have typically filled in animal reserves, for instance delivering medication via dart guns to animals that would cure misery-causing intestinal worms or provide vaccinations. Further, if we believe the zebra’s experience of being killed in truly terrible, we could also fill such zebras with amphetamines or opiates prior to letting the lions kill it. In the (far) future, once many other problems have been solved, this may be a cost-effective way to increase happiness compared to the alternatives.