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If humanity were to go extinct, how bad would that be? How should we prioritize research and resources across many different threats to the long-term future of our species? How can we make trade-offs between the number of people who are alive now and the number who will ever be born? These are the ethical questions that form the backbone of my research.

Existential risk research aims to promote the long-term interests of humanity by better understanding the threats to our future and how we might respond to them. It owes its existence in no small part to the field of Population Ethics since it was in the writings of people like Henry Sidgwick and Derek Parfit on this subject that people first began to engage with the mismatch between the limited efforts being taken to mitigate the risk of human extinction and the enormous ethical costs that such a catastrophe would bring.

We won’t try to address those questions here. Instead, we’ll focus on this question: How bad would human extinction be?

One very bad thing about human extinction would be that billions of people would likely die painful deaths. But in our view, this is, by far, not the worst thing about human extinction. The worst thing about human extinction is that there would be no future generations.

Would it be wrong if humanity were to go extinct like most species that have so far existed? If so, how wrong, and for what reasons? The present paper aims to synthesize a wide range of arguments for why human extinction would be very bad, if not one of the worst things that could possibly happen. We will call this “Conclusion C.” Although there are some moral and axiological positions that see the extinction of humanity as desirable, such as Benatarian anti-natalism, our aim will be to show that there are multiple independent lines of reasoning that all converge upon Conclusion C, and thus imply that humanity ought to make the avoidance of extinction a top global priority this century and beyond. Here it is useful to distinguish between (E) the event or process of going extinct, and (S) the state or condition of being extinct. At the very least, all of the most prominent moral theories identify (E), if caused or allowed by moral agents, as wrong; other theories, however, affirm the moral badness of both (E) and (S), even going so far, in certain cases, to assert that most of what is bad about human extinction is the subsequent loss of value that could have been realized if only we had survived.

This topic is not one of mere philosophical curiosity. As one of us has elsewhere shown, the very idea of human extinction is a quite recent addition to our shared conceptual repertoire; e.g., not even Charles Darwin entertained the idea in his work on human evolution. Consequently, very little scholarly 3 attention has focused on the ethical implications of either (E) or (S). Yet the most informed probability estimates of human extinction occurring this century suggest that this could be the most dangerous moment of our species’ 200,000-year history. For example, Nick Bostrom (2005) estimates that the likelihood of extinction before 2100 is not less than 20 percent; an informal survey of experts at the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) yields a median probability of 19 percent (Sandberg and Bostrom 2008); and Toby Ord conjectures a 1-in-6 chance of extinction before 2100 (see Wiblin 2017; author). For ease of discussion, we can call this the “unique hazards hypothesis,” defined as follows:

But claiming that there should not be any more people does not imply that the population should be zero. As already stated: life-extension technologies could enable people to live indefinitely long lives – that is, to attain what I call “functional immortality”, whereby one lives until she either succumbs to injury, commits suicide, or perishes due to the heat death of the universe.8 This gestures the “dual policy” at the heart of no-extinction anti-natalism: first, we should stop procreating entirely (anti-natalism), and second, we should develop safe and effective life-extension technologies (pro-immortalism). This should appeal to Benatar himself given his anti-Epicurean view that death is (often) bad and, as such, one ought to (typically) avoid it. The reason is that, when evaluating an outcome, any harm at all “will be decisive”. Since “we (usually) have an interest in continuing to exist…death may be thought of as a harm, even though coming into existence is also a harm” (Benatar 2006, 213). This links to an important distinction between “lives worth starting” and “lives worth continuing”. Although life is much worse than most of us realise, many lives are not so bad as to warrant suicide. Thus, they are worth continuing even though they were not worth starting, much like a movie that is worth finishing but not having started. (If only you had known the movie was bad, you would have stayed home rather than venturing out to the theatre.)

But just as there are human lives worth continuing, there are arguments for why human existence is worth continuing, even if it would have been better for our evolutionary lineage never to have been. The strongest argument against human extinction, if sound, comes from total utilitarianism. The first to articulate this idea was Henry Sidgwick [1874] 1962, although more recent versions proceed by calculating how many people could come to populate Earth or our future light cone, with some claiming that up to 10^46 “human lifetimes” could exist per century within our galactic supercluster (Ćirković 2002). Since people are the substrate or “containers” of well-being (or value), the more people there are with net positive amounts of well-being, the better things will go from the “point of view of the universe”. But creating new lives is incompatible with anti-natalism, so this line of argumentation is a non-starter in the present context. There is, however, an alternative approach that focuses not on the total number of people but on the quality of their lives – rather than merely “lives not so bad as to warrant suicide”, there could exist future life conditions that are extremely good and hence very much worth continuing.

Hard to imagine. Just to get a gut-feeling. Our milky way galaxy has between 100 and 400 billion stars. The current consensus is that the average star count is about 100 billion (10^11) stars per galaxy (somewhere between dwarf galaxies with a few billion stars and supergiant galaxies like IC1101 that has 100 trillion (10^14) stars). Now if the galaxy count of the Hubble extreme deep field is extrapolated over the entire celestial sphere, one comes to 100 billion galaxies, however there are recent findings that the estimate may be out be a factor of 10 so there may be 1 trillion (10^12) galaxies in the OBSERVABLE universe. So if you make the sums, it is estimated that there may be about 10^11 X 10^12 = 10^23 stars only in the OBSERVABLE universe. Also the estimated size of the observable universe is 93 billion light years in diameter (46.5 billion light years radius), giving a volume of 4.2X10^32 cubic light years!

Now given the unimaginable feat of destroying even one star, can you imagine this tribe of hairless apes destroying 10^23 stars spread over a volume of 4.2X10^42 cubic light years?! Oh yeah, and even if they can destroy stars and travel at the speed of light, after traveling 46 billion years to get to the edge of the observable universe, it would have expanded by another few billion light years.

Theoretically or in practical humans do not have the energy enough to destroy the whole universe . All the nuclear weapons on earth can't even destroy the Jupiter.

But there can be many natural events that can cause the extinction of the universe . First of them can be a super super massive black holes .

Stephen Hawking’s recent remarks regarding the possibility that our descendants might one day destroy the universe by disrupting the Higgs field with a larger-than-Earth supercollider has gotten people thinking: is there anything we could do now that would destroy the universe?

The answer to that question is, by all appearances, a pretty clear no. Here are two good reasons why:

Mr. Mossoff is Professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia School of Law. He is founder and past-Executive Director of the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property. His academic research has been cited by the Supreme Court, by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and by federal agencies.

Professor Mossoff has been invited to testify several times before the Senate and the House on proposed patent legislation, and he has spoken at numerous congressional staff briefings.

And this isn’t 2020. The domestic and global situation Biden inherited from the Trump administration has changed radically, with significant economic, technological, environmental and global political developments that are only accelerating. Biden continues to say “We need to do more,” but what he hasn’t said is more what.

Biden’s first term has seen significant achievements on climate, the economy and infrastructure. But tying up loose ends on Biden’s first term isn’t enough to rouse Democrats, independents and Never Trump Republicans, regardless of whether Biden is the party’s candidate.

It is now a Presidential election year, which means a lot of policy proposals coming out of the major parties. Usually, the parties synthesize their views more broadly into a document called a Platform. It typically covers the main bases, such as broader economic concerns, major tentpole policies the party would pursue if it won, and geopolitical concerns. Patents are , yet despite the bipartisan desire to expand productivity, it often gets short shrift. And it is a shame given that the patent office is one of America’s longest standing institutions.

Although the  does not address patents, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which is the unofficial but influential Republican shadow platform prepared by former Trump aides, does have a lot to say in its . This is particularly interesting given that there have been several important patent bills introduced this term, like  and . So perhaps it is unsurprising that the detailed version of the plan has a lot to say about how it would approach these issues, as well as other priorities. This week in Nonobvious, we’re going to go over what the Republicans may have planned for the patent system.

Examples of political backlash abound in the literature. A challenged regime may respond in several non-mutually exclusive ways. 25 First, it may ignore the judicial decision. Second, it may overrule the judicial decision, either by enacting statutory legislation or reforming the constitution. Third, it may punish the individual judges and assert its control over the courts with a variety of tactics, including substituting judges, curbing courts' authority, initiating impeachments, reducing judges' remunerations, cutting the judicial budget (or not increasing it with inflation), and so on. Regimes can also deploy these strategies prospectively, before judges become a threat to them.

Subtler means and informal practices also exist. These generally involve threats, bribery, or pressure, including "telephone law" practices in which influential politicians without formal authority over judges ask them to decide cases in certain ways. 26Informal practices such as disregarding judges' tenures can make even formal guarantees of judicial independence irrelevant. 27In Argentina, these practices became the norm in the 1950s and 1960s as the political branches coordinated to punish judges and push the courts not to challenge the president. 28A regime may also use informal practices in conjunction with formal action against the judiciary. For example, several Argentinian Supreme Court judges also became the targets of impeachment trials after issuing unfavorable rulings. 29

Humans need water. If it is in short supply, conflicts can arise. Contrary to popular belief; however, these types of conflicts almost never lead to war, but rather to cooperation.

Fresh water is one of the most precious of natural resources. Water is available in huge quantities throughout the world, but scarcities can arise on a local level, since rainfall, natural water reservoirs, and demand create an uneven distribution across the globe. A shortage of water can cause conflicting needs to emerge within and between countries.

The framers were far more concerned with Congress or the President exceeding their powers than they were of the Supreme Court doing so. 17 In any event, the standing doctrine is a ridiculously poor device for ensuring separation of powers because it is essentially random in nature. Standing doctrine instructs federal judges not to decide a subset of cases, but that subset of cases bears no direct relationship with the very different subset of cases that could induce an unwary court to expand its powers illegitimately. In other words, the Judicial Branch already has every opportunity it could ever ask for to aggrandize power unto itself simply by deciding on the merits cases in which an actual injury exists. Carving out an unrelated subset of cases from judicial cognizance has no more effect on the overall separation of powers than if judges were to roll dice for each constitutional case and dismiss the action when snake eyes turn up. Policy arguments that standing is necessary for an adversarial process that sharpens the issues and allows for introduction of the best available evidence simply fails in light of the fact that, historically, many plaintiffs who do have traditional standing litigate the constitutionality of acts or laws for purely ideological purposes and make quite good adversaries for the government. As for the floodgates argument, the time and money involved in shepherding a case through the American legal system is enough to deter all but the most determined litigants, regardless of a standing requirement. Even for wealthy or persistent litigants, courts would retain their traditional ability to dismiss frivolous or vexatious claims. The cases that would make it through are cases in which a serious, arguable claim exists that a statute or governmental act violates the Constitution. Those are the types of cases federal courts should want to hear, as they go to one of the fundamental reasons for the courts' existence.

Now, it is important to recognize that counseling Courts against considering caseload volume in this kind of decision making does not mean that there is no recourse when it comes to docket concerns. Our system provides several ways to relieve caseload pressure short of the courts not recognizing causes of action or deciding not to hear particular sets of cases. Specifically, our constitutional system gives Congress the authority to adjust laws so as to stem that flow. 305 And Congress has indeed exercised that power. As noted earlier, Congress passed the Supreme Court Case Selections Act 306 to alleviate the Court's then "unmanageable workload" by eliminating most of the Court's mandatory jurisdiction. 307 With respect to the rest of the federal court docket, Congress has repeatedly enacted targeted legislation to reduce frivolous filings. For example, Congress passed the PLRA precisely as a way of "addressing a flood of prisoner litigation in the federal courts." 308 Similarly, part of the purpose of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 309 was to limit frivolous securities claims. 310 This is not to suggest that Congress could not do more in this vein; rather the point is simply that there is still a branch of government that has the clear authority to take the courts' caseload into account in substantive decision making and has done so repeatedly in the past.

To be sure, judicial workload is a critical concern. As noted earlier, the lower courts have faced rising caseloads over the last several decades 285 - a fact the justices have emphasized. 286 Today, both federal district and appellate judges must contend with hundreds of filings per year, 287 meaning that their ability to give attention to individual cases is greatly reduced. Employing the tools at hand, district judges have come to rely more heavily on the aid of magistrate judges, 288 and appellate judges have come to rely on the assistance of staff attorneys and other case-management tools to cope with their workload. 289 Still, judges and scholars alike have called for an expansion of the bench 290 and limiting the flow of cases 291 to alleviate the strain on the federal courts. Thus, when the justices express their desire to avoid inviting new claims into federal courts, the underlying concern is not a trivial one. 292 The critical question, though, is [*1066] whether considerations of judicial workload can stand as an independent factor in shaping the Court's interpretation of substantive law.

Justice Scalia's dissent is one version of a familiar judicial trope: that the recognition of a particular type of claim will "open the floodgates," potentially overwhelming lower courts and perhaps even the Supreme Court itself. 281 Recent scholarship, however, has persuasively argued that the particular version of the "floodgates argument" offered up by Justice Scalia is, in fact, the least normatively defensible one.

Professor Marin Levy recently offered a taxonomy of floodgates arguments made by Justices since the 1940s. She generally classifies them as expressing (1) "interbranch concerns"; (2) "intersystemic concerns"; and (3) "court-centered [concerns]." 282 She further subdivided interbranch concerns into those that worry about burdening the executive branch 283 and those that have the courts encroach on the legislative branch. 284 Intersystemic concerns she also subdivided into concerns about taking too many cases from state courts 285 and placing too many cases or obligations in or on state courts. 286 Finally, she distinguished between [*140] court-centered concerns in which the Court worries that "a given holding will unleash a flood of new claims - particularly frivolous claims," 287 and those that could flood the courts with what she terms "standard claims," 288 or those "cases in which the merits of the claims in the flood were not in doubt." 289

First, as previously discussed, there is reason to be skeptical about the efficacy of the CAP rule in terms of reducing the overall number of cases in the federal courts. 315 Moreover, in addition to the fact that the CAP rule likely does little to reduce the overall number of opportunities for federal courts to judge the behavior of coordinate branches, there is reason to believe that the opening-the-floodgates worry itself is overblown. 316 Not only is the floodgates argument in support of the CAP rule lacking in empirical support, 317 but it may also be lacking in a clear, germane, and substantive content when used by various members of the Court. 318F or example, Professor Marin Levy has observed that "recent cases show the justices vacillating between providing assurances that their decision will not result in a deluge of new claims, and accusing each other of being driven by an improper desire to stave off such a deluge." 319 The floodgate alarm has been used in diverse and internally inconsistent contexts without the mooring benefit of evidentiary support, such that it has taken on more the character of epithet than of a serious constitutional obstacle. 320Justice Ginsburg, writing in dissent, has succinctly summarized this development, stating: "The 'floodgates' argument the Court today embraces has been rehearsed and rejected before." 321

The fact that the floodgate rationale is frequently used to support both sides of a contested determination by the Court suggests that it may lack a stable normative content. 322 The floodgate rationale is, at heart, a prediction about how future litigants will behave if the Court adopts a new rule. Yet the ordinary norms of prediction with their attendant empirical safeguards seem not to obtain. 323 Those invoking the floodgate alarm have not felt obliged to supply evidence of past instances in which the federal courts were in fact "flooded" as the result of similar rule changes, and that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were inadequate to address the "flood." 324 Given that members of the Court have so frequently predicted a litigatory deluge as a consequence of a rule change, it would seem a simple matter to confirm that a deluge has, in fact, occurred. 325 However, evidence of past flooding has yet to emerge within the floodgate discourse. 326

A direct by-product of the current limited thinking has been the increasing focus on ‘water wars’ between countries because of lack of water. This thinking is both linear and wrong. Simply put, the thinking goes that as countries run out of water because of steadily increasing demand, they may go to war over water over the uses and allocations of transboundary river waters. This unwarranted preoccupation with water wars can be seen by simply referring to Google. As of 20 June, ‘water scarcity’ produces 34.2 million results, and ‘water wars’, 654 million – almost 20 times as many. In fact, an eminent development expert, Ismail Serageldin (2009/2010), former vice president of the World Bank and chairman of the Global Water Partnership, predicted in 1995 that ‘the wars of the next century will be about water.’

The fact is that in the entirety of human history, no two countries have ever gone to war over water. The price of water all over the world is very low, and there is no global market or trade for water, unless one considers bottled water, which represents a miniscule fraction of global water use. All countries are steadily realizing that they have to significantly improve their management practices to reduce the demand for all types of water uses and to control water contamination. No country can increase water availability progressively, constantly and cost-effectively ad infinitum. If countries make determined and sustained efforts to improve water management practices, and there are signs that some are gradually doing so, their water problems can be solved. As Biswas (2006) noted in his Stockholm Water Prize Lecture, ‘if ever there is a war between two countries, it will never be because of water. Perhaps the 10th or 15th reason for the war could be water, but not the first three’. In the future, countries will have to manage their water significantly better, because they will have no other choice. ‘Water wars’ is a myth that has been around for at least four decades. There are no signs that they will occur in the foreseeable future anywhere in the world.

The U.S. economy grew at a surprisingly robust 2.8 percent annualized rate in the second quarter, capping two years of solid expansion, despite some signs of softening.

Growth in the gross domestic product for the quarter ending in June was double the 1.4 percent reading in the previous quarter, but it reflects a general cool-down from last year’s brisk pace, according to Commerce Department data released Thursday morning.

If the United States’ economy were an athlete, right now it would be peak LeBron James. If it were a pop star, it would be peak Taylor Swift. Four years ago, the pandemic temporarily brought much of the world economy to a halt. Since then, America’s economic performance has left other countries in the dust and even broken some of its own records. The growth rate is high, the unemployment rate is at historic lows, household wealth is surging, and wages are rising faster than costs, especially for the working class. There are many ways to define a good economy. America is in tremendous shape according to just about any of them.

The American public doesn’t feel that way—a dynamic that many people, including me, have recently tried to explain. But if, instead of asking how people feel about the economy, we ask how it’s objectively performing, we get a very different answer.