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To conclude this section, we ask a supremely important question: how should we respond to the risk of a catastrophe that would bring about the extinction of our species? If, with Sidgwick, we agree that ‘life on the average yields a positive balance of pleasure over pain’—or if we are not hedonists, but agree that on average it has more positive than negative value of some other kind—we are likely to think that human extinction would be a very bad thing. One reason for not drawing this conclusion would be that the suffering humans cause, and will continue to cause, animals outweighs the value of human existence. But animals also suffer greatly when they live naturally, without human interference, and if humans become extinct, there is no hope of that situation changing, whereas the continued existence of human beings does offer the hope that eventually we will be both intelligent enough and compassionate enough to reduce that suffering.

How bad, though, would human extinction be? That question is not merely theoretical, because there are things that we can do to reduce the risk of human extinction. There is, for example, a small chance that our planet will be hit by an asteroid large enough to wipe us out. We are already tracking such objects in space and seeing if they pose a risk to us. It is probably within our capabilities, if we were willing to devote enough resources to it, to build a rocket that would intercept any asteroid that is on a collision course with us and deflect it from that course. If the chances of a doomsday asteroid hitting Earth during the next century are around one in a million, how much should we be prepared to spend on such a project?52 To reach a sound answer to that question we would need answers to many relevant factual questions, including whether we could spend the resources better combating other risks of extinction (nuclear war, a pandemic, global warming speeding up to the point at which it makes our planet uninhabitable, and so on). But the philosophical issue we have been discussing is also relevant. Parfit shows this by asking his readers to imagine three possible scenarios for the future of our planet:

Estimated Cultured Ground Meat Timelines by Leaders in the Cultured Ground Meat Field

Our understanding is that culturing ground meat products involves providing the necessary environment (e.g., a suitable temperature, gas mixture, and growth medium) needed for animal cell replication to occur outside of its normal biological context, and that culturing techniques can derive many millions of muscle cells from as little as one cell. Cultured muscle cells can then be grown into muscle fibers—each only a few millimeters thick— and these muscle fibers can then be arranged to form ground meat products.

The next time you’re about to bite into a hamburger, take a moment to consider the resources that went into making it. In a recent Solve for X talk, Andras Forgacs laid out all the statistics, and explained how tantalizingly close we are to a more sustainable method of meat production. Basically, humanity may soon be 3D printing meat instead of growing it in an animal.

Forgacs starts by explaining just how costly a single quarter-pound beef patty is to produce. For that one serving, 6.7lbs of grains, 600 gallons of water, and 75 square feet of grazing land were used. Now multiply that by 1000 to find your (approximate) impact — the average American eats over 220lbs of meat each year. Additionally, at least 18% of greenhouse gas emissions are due to meat production. All this for one burger?

Startups are making home cooking more automated, customized, and health-conscious than ever.

Smart Sous-Vide Machine from Mellow

In today’s world, both farmed and wild animals outnumber humans by far. There are about 3-4 times more farmed land animals and about 13 times more farmed fish[6] than humans alive. Wild animals prevail over farmed animals, with about 10 times more wild birds than farmed birds and 100 times more wild mammals than farmed mammals alive at any point. Moving on to smaller wild animals, the numbers increase again, with 10 000 times more vertebrates than humans, and between 100 000 000 - 10 000 000 000 times more insects and spiders than humans[7].

In the future, the relative number of animals compared to humans will likely decrease considerably.

In Steven Pinker’s new book out this month, Enlightenment Now, the Harvard professor catalogs reams of data to show that the world has actually gotten much better over time, despite what you hear on the news. The book looks at increased life spans, decreased inequality, and even a 37-fold reduction in deaths from lightning bolts as cause for optimism in humanity. After more than 500 pages, it’s hard not to be convinced.

But the question remains whether Pinker’s seemingly exhaustive treatment is neglecting some entire category of negative trends, such as the experiences of nonhuman animals who share this planet with us. The human population is around seven billion today, and will perhaps be ten billion by 2050. Yet here are over 100 billion domestic animals (the vast majority of whom are in the food system) and a quadrillion wild vertebrates (with many more invertebrates).

Even more, perhaps justice obliges us to overcome not just past human suffering, but past and ongoing suffering that humans have caused to non-human organisms. Consider that we are the number one driver of global biodiversity loss, which has resulted in the sixth mass extinction in life’s 3.8-billionyear history. As Jennifer Jacquet (2017) observes, humanity has probably changed the biosphere more than any other organism since cyanobacteria brought about the Great Oxygenation Event ~2.45 billion years ago. This yields a view according to which, to quote R. Slaughter (1994), “the global commons has been compromised by human activity and restorative actions are necessary.” Thus, it behooves humanity to continue existing in order to undo some or all of the damage that we have inflicted upon the natural world, an act that could be accomplished given (a) ongoing attitudinal shifts about sustainability, as well as (b) future technological possibilities, such as carbon removal and de-extinction techniques, that could restore climatic and ecological systems. An even grander point stems from the fact that the sun will eventually sterilize this planetary spaceship, thus destroying all life on Earth. It follows that, since humans are the only species with the capacity to migrate to and terraform exoplanets in the foreseeable future, and if one values the continued existence of Earth-originating life, then one should work to ensure that humanity doesn’t go extinct so that Earth-originating life doesn’t go extinct either.19 Along these lines exactly, humans are the only species with the capacity to intervene in the Darwinian “struggle for existence” and reduce the truly enormous amount of suffering among wild animals. In fact, this is the central aim of David Pearce’s “abolitionist project,” which imagines a world in which “our descendants will be animated by gradients of genetically preprogrammed well-being that are orders of magnitude richer than today’s peak experiences” (Pearce 2007). Thus, even if one believes that humanity has so far been a great evil in the world—towards ourselves and other organisms—if one also believes in moral progress and cares about “cosmic justice,” so to speak, then one could still come to the conclusion that we ought to prioritize our long-term survival.

The more environmentally conscious have all had the thought, whether they admit it or not: what would the world be like if there were no humans here?

That question is at the heart of a wonderful, relevatory book by Alan Weisman titled The World Without Us.

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?

At a time when humans are threatening the extinction of so many other species, it might not seem so surprising that some people think that the extinction of our own species would be a good thing. Take, for example, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, whose founder believes that our extinction would put an end to the damage we inflict on each other and ecosystems more generally.

Or there’s the South African philosopher David Benatar, who argues that bringing people into existence always does them harm. He recommends we cease procreating and gradually desert the Earth.

The possible catastrophes examined by the assessors were not limited to a strangelet disaster. They included creating a black hole that would swallow the earth and maybe the rest of our solar system as well, and destroying the entire universe by causing a phase transition. What we call "space" may conceivably "exist in different 'phases,' rather as water can exist in three forms: ice, liquid, and steam. . . . Some [physicistsl have speculated that the concentrated energy created when [subatomic] particles crash together could trigger a 'phase transition' that would rip the fabric of space itself,'1 destroying all the atoms in the entire universe.48 However, these consequences seem much less likely even than a strangelet disaster. One minor though intriguing reason for thinking this is that if there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, as seems highly likely from the sheer number of planets (see the introduction), some civilization more advanced than our own would already have built a particle accelerator as powerful as RHIC, precipitating a phase transition that would have destroyed the universe.

At the other end of the philosophical spectrum, I met with Don Page, a physicist and evangelical Christian at the University of Alberta in Canada, noted for his early collaboration with Stephen Hawking on the nature of black holes. To Page, the salient point is that God created the Universe ex nihilo – from absolutely nothing. The kind of cosmogenesis envisioned by Linde, in contrast, would require physicists to cook up their cosmos in a highly technical laboratory, using a far more powerful cousin of the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva. It would also require a seed particle called a ‘monopole’ (which is hypothesized to exist by some models of physics, but has yet to be found).

The idea goes that if we could impart enough energy to a monopole, it will start to inflate. Rather than growing in size within our Universe, the expanding monopole would bend spacetime within the accelerator to create a tiny wormhole tunnel leading to a separate region of space. From within our lab we would see only the mouth of the wormhole; it would appear to us as a mini black hole, so small as to be utterly harmless. But if we could travel into that wormhole, we would pass through a gateway into a rapidly expanding baby universe that we had created. (A video illustrating this process provides some further details.)

Anyone glancing at a newspaper these days finds a litany of woes: war, crime, disease, terrorism, and environmental disasters, all sandwiched between predictions of the coming collapse of market capitalism and liberal democracy. U.S. politicians on both the right, such as President Donald Trump, and the left, such as Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, warn that the United States and the world are sliding toward calamity. Pessimism rules the day.

The world does indeed face challenges. Yet by almost any measure, life for most people has been getting better in almost every way. Levels of war and conflict are near historic lows. People are living longer and healthier lives and are better educated than ever before. Incomes for most families are higher than at any time in history. One billion people around the world have been lifted out of extreme poverty in the last two decades, and although income inequality has worsened within many Western countries, across the globe, income is more equal than it has been in centuries. Far fewer people than ever go hungry, and the world now grows more food than it needs. Women have more opportunities, democracy has expanded, and basic human rights are more widely respected than ever before. Electricity, automobiles, the Internet, modern medicines, and simple conveniences have made most people’s lives far easier than their great-grandparents could have imagined. And after centuries of being largely confined to the West, since the 1980s, such benefits have spread across the world—not just to China and India but also to Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Ghana, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Mozambique, Peru, South Africa, South Korea, and dozens of other countries.

From a philosophical perspective, human extinction is just about the worst thing we can imagine… and it’s a fairly recent fear, too, with our conception of existential risk kick-started by the threat of mutually assured destruction. But what about a slow slide back into an animal state from our current civilisational peak? An evolutionary regression triggered by the impoverishment of the environment we mastered momentarily? [via BigThink]

Civilization obscures our similarity to other animals. We tend to hold ourselves to different standards because we see ourselves as above nature. Many people find the slaughter of food animals objectionable. Yet no one is advocating intervention to save the gazelles from the lions or the rabbits from the foxes. Is the suffering of animals in the wild less important? Should we venture out in search of prey animals to rescue from their predators, and sick or injured animals in need of medical care? No, it would seem. It’s okay when nature imposes suffering on animals, but not when we do it. Similarly, it’s not okay when we are the subjects of nature’s cruelty.

THE universe is doomed to end up a barren, dark and empty void with no stars to light up the gloom.

That's the prediction from Professor Brian Cox, who told The Sun Online that the universe will end its days in a grim process called "heat death".

Tipler’s idea of an infinite frolic just before the Big Crunch was seductive to me—more so, at least, than Dyson’s vision of a community of increasingly dilute Black Clouds staving off the cold in an eternal Big Chill. But if the universe is in a runaway expansion, both are pipe dreams. The only way to survive in the long run is to get the hell out. Yet how do you escape a dying universe if—as little Alvy Singer pointed out—the universe is everything?

A man who claims to see an answer to this question is Michio Kaku. A theoretical physicist at City College in New York, Kaku looks and talks a bit like the character Sulu on Star Trek. (He can be seen in the recent Michael Apted film about great scientists, Me and Isaac Newton.) He is not the least bit worried about the fate of this universe. “If your ship is sinking,” he said to me, “why not get a lifeboat and leave?” We earthlings can’t do this just yet, Kaku observed. That is because we are a mere Type 1 civilization, able to marshal the energy only of a single planet. But eventually, assuming a reasonable rate of economic growth and technological progress, we will graduate to being a Type 2 civilization, commanding the energy of a star, and thence to being a Type 3 civilization, able to summon the energy of an entire galaxy. Then space-time itself will be our plaything. We’ll have the power to open up a “wormhole” through which we can slip into a brand new universe.

Billions of years from now, the universe as we know it will cease to exist. The good news is, that gives us a lot of time to prepare, and maybe even figure out a way to cheat cosmic death. Here are some possible ways our descendants might survive a cosmological apocalypse.

The Universe, like the organisms that reside within it, is a mortal entity. Born in the Big Bang, it will eventually meet its fate through an equally cataclysmic process, whether it be in the form of a Big Rip, a Big Crunch, or an eternal deep freeze. Regardless, all life as we know it will be extinguished.

We are doomed. Our best efforts to reproduce, to conserve, protect and survive will, in the end, come to nought. We could sort out climate change, dispose of our nuclear arsenals, ban research into killer AIs, and still the end would come, as surely as night follows day.

The problem is physics itself. Our home – our planet, our Solar System and indeed our entire Universe – has a finite lifespan. All that is will be destroyed, either in fire or, as observations suggest now seems more likely, in a lingering, depressing ‘heat death’. The stars will all go out, and the expanding cosmos will be no more than a colossal, black and freezing void in which nothing of interest ever happens again. The laws of nature insist upon it.

The spatiotemporal details of any extinction process would be of great ethical significance. The tens of millions of deaths in the Second World War and how they were distributed among the warring parties would be far less significant, I'd say, than whether half a billion humans managed to live onwards for a century when an unstoppable slide towards extinction had begun, and whether the process started with the swift extinction of those nations which had done least to cause the fatal nuclear exchange, greenhouse calamity or whatever. All the same, I suggest the following. Whether the extinction process took only a fraction of a second, spreading outward at almost the speed of light from a single centre (once again read onwards), or was instead a matter of many decades and much geographical complexity, would be far less important than the fact that humans would be dying out before beginning serious efforts to spread across their galaxy.

This is because such efforts would probably succeed; because the number of human lives which would then be lived would probably be in the hundreds of trillions, assuming that our much modified descendants could be counted as 'humans'; and because most of the lives would probably be more worth living than ones in our technologically primitive era. The weightiest of all ethical imperatives could be Spread Through The Galaxy! The extinction of the human race before galactic colonization could begin would be immensely tragic because of the vastly many worthwhile lives that would then have no possibility of being lived.