Their investment in “extinction politics” sidelines discourse of suffering and social or political structures while allowing them to continue unquestioned.

WHAT DOES EXTINCTIOPOLITICS DO? In the previous section, I refrained from critically analysing extinctiopolitics. However, even from a cursory overview of the field of existential risk studies, serious limitations are apparent. Building on the critical accounts of the field published in recent years, several key points should be highlighted. Normatively speaking, the total utilitarianism advanced by Bostrom and Ord appears to prioritise the survival of the human species over the wellbeing of actually existing people (The Dangerous Ideas; Democratising Risk). Karin Kuhlemann, adapting Parfit's example above, instructively contrasts two possible scenarios: one in which 'a global catastrophe causes ninety-nine per cent of the human population to slowly starve to death' and the second in which 'the human lineage gently dwindles into extinction without any suffering (e.g. because individuals lose interest in procreation)'. (33) On the logic of existential risk studies, the former scenario is preferable because, despite causing a huge amount of suffering to living people, it safeguards the future of the species. The utilitarian logic of extinctiopolitics sidelines the suffering of actual people and, worse, could be used to justify inflicting suffering in the name of protecting the future of humanity (Calamity Theory, p24, p52). (34) If it is the case that space colonisation is one of the best strategies for protecting the future of the species, any exploitation and oppression associated with initiatives like Musk's SpaceX are legitimate; they are a small price to be paid for reducing existential risk. The empirical account of the threats facing humanity can also be questioned. In particular, as discussed further below, since there is only a small possibility that climate change will totally eliminate humanity, it is deprioritised by philosophers associated with existential risk (see The Dangerous Ideas). Furthermore, while there is a particular focus on the risks posed by technology, such as nuclear weapons, synthetic biology and artificial intelligence, there is very little attention to the social and political structures that shape these technologies and how they are used. (35) Systematic discussions of capitalism, colonialism, racism, patriarchy and so on are entirely absent in the writings of Bostrom and Ord. Moreover, the field obscures the differential effects of catastrophes; the combined and uneven consequences of extinction across space and time are flattened. For instance, there is no acknowledgement that, for many Indigenous peoples, the end of the world is not something for the future but, instead, an event that has already happened (I return to this point in the final section). Finally, it is unclear whether the solutions posited by existential risk studies are adequate. Bostrom and Ord, against Gunther Anders' pessimistic claim in the face of nuclear disaster that 'the possibility of our self-extinction cannot end--except through the end itself', assert that humanity will eventually escape the age of existential risk. (36) In the utopian world imagined, preventing extinction is no longer a priority; existential risk will have been conquered. However, as others stress, the utopian ambitions of the field may increase rather than reduce existential risk. (37) For example, the advanced technologies required for space colonisation could be easily refunctioned for destructive ends and trigger what Daniel Deudney calls an 'astrocide', or 'the extinction of humanity caused directly or indirectly by largescale human space expansion' (Dark Skies, p362). Moreover, just as the social causes of catastrophe are obscured, the social relations of the future utopia are vaguely described; it appears that the future world of liberation will leave the structures of the present untouched. Indeed, the positive content of the transhumanist utopia imagined by Bostrom reflects and reinforces social inequalities. As Claire Colebrook notes, the lionisation of cognitive activity as the sine qua non of the future world is 'bound up with the "man" of Western reason', a figure that is strongly associated with many forms of oppression and violence (especially in relation to race, disability, gender and sexuality) (Lives Worth Living, p167). In the light of the dubious normative consequences, skewed empirical account of the threats to humanity and flawed vision of the liberated future, it is difficult to affirm extinctiopolitics. However, these criticisms do not examine why extinctiopolitics has emerged in the current conjuncture. What is the relationship between, on the one hand, thinking the future in terms of threats to human extinction and, on the other, the social struggles, political crises and cultural anxieties of the last two decades? What is it about existential risk studies that resonates with philosophers at prestigious universities and billionaires in the tech industry? As David Sepkoski argues more generally, there is a close association between, on the one hand, discourses of extinction and, on the other, the social and political context in which they are elaborated. (38) For instance, the theory that the dinosaurs were annihilated by an asteroid that triggered huge climatic changes, which was first proposed in the 1980s, can be understood in terms of broader Cold War anxieties about the threat of a nuclear winter. The past end of the dinosaurs and the future end of humanity were bound together by widespread fascination with 'sudden, cataclysmic events capable of obliterating life in the flash of an atomic blast or an asteroid impact' (Catastrophic Thinking, p298). Given this, are there similar resonances at play in the popularity of existential risk studies in the contemporary moment? It should first be stressed that this is a subversive question to pose to extinctiopolitics. For existential risk studies, we need to abstract ourselves from the immediate concerns of the contemporary moment. The object of extinctiopolitics is the long-term trajectory of humanity; it traces the entire history of the species from its origins to its multiplanetary and transhumanist future. From this perspective, the political and social concerns of the present moment, especially those that are deemed non-existential in their stakes, are insignificant. For instance, Leigh encourages us to place ourselves in the grand arc of human history: 'Suppose humanity's potential time on the planet was shrunk down to a single eighty-year life span. In that event, we would now be a newborn baby--just nine days old' (What's the Worst, p10). Indeed, scholars associated with existential risk studies voice frustration with politicians for their short-term perspective; they respond to today's headlines rather than the long-term interests of the species. Ord recounts that: 'When I have raised the topic of existential risk with senior politicians and civil servants, I have encountered a common reaction: genuine deep concern paired with a feeling that addressing the greatest risks facing humanity was "above my pay grade"' (The Precipice, p35). Similarly, William MacAskill, another proponent of existential risk studies, recalls the response when he talked about future pandemics at a meeting with Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, in 2017: 'Everyone laughed, and the host of the dinner, Sir Tom Hunter, joked that I was "freaking everyone oot"'. (39) However, the disavowals of presentism amongst the proponents of existential risk studies should not be taken at face value. There are resonances between extinctiopolitics and the conjuncture in which it emerged; it is entangled with a set of concerns that are specific to the moment of the 2000s and 2010s. Extinctiopolitics chimes with the broader feeling of crisis and catastrophe that has emerged since the turn of the millennium. It is perhaps no accident that 2002 witnessed the publication of Bostrom's foundational paper on existential risk and the establishment of Musk's aerospace company SpaceX. The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, as Phillip E. Wegner notes, marked the decisive end of the long 1990s in the American context. (40) Like the extinction risks highlighted by Bostrom, the event of 9/11 inaugurated a new understanding of the future in which it is defined not by endless peace and prosperity but instead decisive caesuras and disastrous failures. Furthermore, the catastrophic consciousness fostered by existential risk studies has found succour in a range of events in the decades that have followed 9/11, including the global financial crisis of 2007/08, the rise of authoritarian populist governments across Europe and North America in the 2010s, the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. However, extinctiopolitics has a particular affinity with the apocalyptic mood that surrounds the current climate crisis, something captured by Greta Thunberg's declaration that the world is on fire and Extinction Rebellion's claim that we are living in a climate emergency. (41) The 'Anthropocene is the Apocalypse', its arrival marking the end of the relative stability of the Holocene era and a beginning of a new world of radical ruptures and unprecedented events. (42) In this context, images of human extinction become convincing. In the face of the revenge of Gaia, what hope is there for humanity? The power of extinctiopolitics partly derives from its elaboration of the catastrophic consciousness of the current conjuncture; it takes up anxieties about destruction and brings them to their conclusion with the vision of an Earth absent of humanity. Here, it is instructive to contrast existential risk studies to the new optimists, a group of writers including Steven Pinker, Hans Rosling and Johan Norberg, who claim that history is a story of unending progress. (43) By virtue of the free market and Enlightenment philosophy, people are richer and healthier than at any other point in history. Moreover, the new optimists see no reason why this should not continue into the future; however severe the problem, capitalism will find a solution. It is easy to see why this idea might appeal to those committed to the current social order and, like existential risk studies, it has been promoted by billionaires such as Bill Gates. (44) However, given the crises of the contemporary moment, it is unsurprising that even billionaires have found the sunny optimism of Pinker, Rosling and Norberg insufficient; something more is required than the declaration that everything will work out for the best in the end. In contrast to existential risk studies, which foregrounds the dangers and threats to the human species, the declaration that the twenty-first century will bring unending progress rings hollow, masking over rather than responding to the catastrophic consciousness inaugurated by the financial crisis, the pandemic and climate change. Scholars associated with existential risk studies both affirm and critique the new optimist account of history. For extinctiopolitics, the future will be better than the past; if the species succeeds in not extinguishing itself, then it is almost inevitable that utopia will be established. Ord, explicitly invoking the new optimists, states that 'at the largest scales of human history ... the trends toward progress are clear' (The Precipice, p18). At the same time, extinctiopolitics cannot entirely accept the image of the future painted by the new optimists, with Emile P Torres making it clear that it offers, at best, a partial account: '... this cluster of encouraging trends is only half of the diachronic picture of humanity, so to speak. The human condition is indeed better overall today than in the past, but the contemporary world also contains far more risk potential than any previous moment in anthropological history' (Facing Disaster, p6, emphasis in original). (45) Extinctiopolitics, in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's terms, posits a dialectic of enlightenment; the forces that appear to guarantee the advancement of humanity react back on themselves to deliver intensified forms of destruction. (46) A phenomenon like climate change is thus, in principle, entirely explicable on the logic of existential risk. The huge increase in carbon emissions over the past few centuries is simultaneously a symptom of human control over nature and produces uncontrollable forces that threaten the current social order. Yet, extinctiopolitics, despite evoking the catastrophic tendencies of the contemporary moment with its talk of annihilation, does not directly address them. The speculative account of future human annihilation is an analogy for the problems of the present. Existential risk is marked by the social and ecological tensions of capitalist society but it does not offer a determinate conceptual account of them. This is especially evident in the place of climate change in discourses of existential risk. On the one hand, the ecocidal movement of contemporary capitalism is too big to entirely ignore, with accounts of existential risk habitually devoting some attention to environmental issues (see Existential Risk, p9; The Precipice, pp53-58; What's the Worst, pp36-54; What We Owe, pp134-140). On the other hand, as Torres stresses in their critical account, climate change is consistently devalued as an existential risk (The Dangerous Ideas). For instance, Ord suggests that global warming is an 'immense human tragedy' but, given that it is unlikely to cause the annihilation of the species (even on the gloomiest predictions), it does not 'pose a direct existential risk to humanity' (The Precipice, p56). MacAskill concurs with this assessment, noting that 'climate change does not drastically increase the risk of civilisational collapse' (What We Owe, p136). Like the nuclear war that kills ninety-nine per cent of the population, a recovery from climate change, even if it takes thousands of years, is possible. Tallinn, one of the billionaire funders of the field, makes a similar argument: 'Climate change is not going to be an existential risk unless there's a runaway scenario'. (47) In fact, Tallinn, channelling Donald Rumsfeld, states that a more important risk is 'unknown unknowns', or 'things that we can't perhaps think about right now' (quoted in 3 Existential Risks). On the typological approach of extinctiopolitics, climate change is relegated to a second-order risk; it is like, but not quite, an existential challenge. To borrow a notion from Sigmund Freud, extinctiopolitics cultivates a form of screen memory. This concept refers to a phenomenon whereby 'the mnemic image which would have been justified by the original event' is 'associatively displaced' by another image, the latter repressing and masking the former. (48) The substitution of one image by another has a mollifying function, protecting the subject from the full force of a destructive event. The presence of certain images of catastrophe can exclude and displace other threatening and troublesome processes. For instance, Michelle Bratu Hansen, reflecting on the place of the Holocaust in American society, suggests that the genocide of the Jews 'could be read as a kind of screen allegory behind/through which the nation is struggling to find a proper mode of memorialising traumata closer to home', whether this be the enslavement of African Americans, the genocide of Indigenous peoples or recent imperialist wars. (49) Similar processes are at work in extinctiopolitics. Unlike the new optimists, who largely dismiss the dangers of the present, the anxiety associated with ecocide is acknowledged through the analogy of human extinction; the latter summons a sense of the unfolding catastrophes of the present. However, extinctiopolitics, which focuses on the history of the species across hundreds of thousands of years, soothes the angst associated with contemporary threats by displacing them into the long-term history of humanity. The traumatic feelings associated with climate change are immanent in the understanding of existential risk but, at the same time, they are camouflaged by reference to speculative disasters in the future. (50) Extinctiopolitics, in Fredric Jameson's terms, involves 'transformational work on social and political anxieties and fantasies', such that they are 'subsequently "managed" or repressed'. (51) Tallinn's unknown unknowns, a destructive event of immense scale that cannot yet be described, contains the ecological catastrophe but also deflects the gaze away from it. Existential risk studies is defined by a tension. On the one hand, with Walter Benjamin, it acknowledges that there is something destructive at the heart of the contemporary world: 'The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are "status quo" is the catastrophe'. (52) On the other hand, extinctiopolitics obscures the stakes of this unfolding catastrophe; it depoliticises disaster, pacifying the anxieties produced by financial, political and climatic crises. (53) The tension at the heart of existential risk studies is symptomatic of a real contradiction for billionaires in capitalist society: between the desire for the continuation of the capitalist mode of production and an awareness of its destructive consequences for nature (both human and non-human). Extinctiopolitics is a means by which to respond to the disruptions and dangers associated with the spread of capitalism across the globe but in such a way that the social and political relations of the current moment are untouched and unquestioned. Extinctiopolitics, to quote Jameson again, invents 'imaginary or formal "solutions" to unresolvable social contradictions'. (54) The desire to escape from the bounds of the Earth is one such solution; it stages and resolves a genuine tension. To return to Adorno and Horkheimer's terms, it suggests that it is possible to accelerate away from the dialectic of enlightenment, leaving behind the contradictions of the present social order through new technological developments. The dream of a multi-planetary humanity is thus a technofix; it stimulates a feeling for the tragic arc of history and renders invisible the social forces underlying the movement toward catastrophe. Utopian accounts of a spacefaring humanity are a masquerade, mimicking the shape of a radical response to a serious crisis while being devoid of the social and political content required to address it. A possible concern can be raised here. Reading existential risk studies in terms of the Freudian notion of the screen image might imply that the dangers highlighted can be dismissed as mere fantasies. However, recent events suggest the value of the warnings advanced by Bostrom and Ord. For instance, MacAskill's What We Owe the Future (2022), another addition to the growing corpus of texts concerned with existential risk, states: 'Russia's invasion of Ukraine reminds us that war can all too quickly return to regions that have enjoyed peace for decades, and that initially more limited disputes can push the world's largest nuclear powers dangerously close to the brink of a direct confrontation' (What We Owe, p113). If, prior to the war in Ukraine, nuclear conflict seemed like a distant possibility, it is now a much more pressing concern. However, even if existential risk studies is right to identify nuclear conflict as a major danger to humanity, this does not change the underlying logic of the field. Nuclear war remains subject to the high bar of human extinction. As long as the current conflict does not annihilate humanity as a whole, it is a second-order risk. Extinctiopolitics, in a familiar pattern, evokes the disastrous consequences of the war for the people of Ukraine and its deleterious effects elsewhere, especially in terms of fuel and food prices, while also masking over these tensions by focusing on human extinction and placing the war in the long arc of human history. The conflict is thus abstracted from social and political context, with questions of inter-imperial rivalry, shifts in the global economy and revivification of nationalist forces side-lined in favour of a focus on the capacities of atomic technology itself.