Infinite future gens balances out infinite suffering.

This leads Bostrom to argue that “the loss in expected value resulting from an existential catastrophe is so enormous that the objective of reducing existential risks should be a dominant consideration whenever we act out of an impersonal concern for humankind as a whole.” In other words, we should behave according to the following “rule of thumb for such impersonal moral action,” dubbed Maxipok:

Maximize the probability of an “OK outcome,” where an OK outcome is any outcome that avoids existential catastrophe.64

One can think of our predicament as follows: the present moment—a century that the Long Now Foundation writes as “02000” to encourage “deep time” thinking—is a narrow foundation upon which an extremely tall skyscraper rests.65 The entire future of humanity resides in this skyscraper, towering above us, stretching far beyond the clouds. If this foundation were to fail, the whole building would come crashing to the ground. Since this would be astronomically bad according to the above thesis, it behooves us to do everything possible to ensure that the foundation remains intact. The future depends crucially on the decisions we make today, just as the present depends on the decisions made by our ancestors, and this is a moral burden that everyone should feel pressing down upon their shoulders.66

While one might accept that every human perishing tomorrow would be an unthinkable catastrophe, one might also object that there is no particular reason to value the lives of people who do not yet exist. Why should current people care about generations that are born 100, 10,000, or even 100 million years from today? What obligations do we really have to future people in some far-off, exotic futureland? Many moral philosophers respond that when one exists should be irrelevant to that person’s moral status. By analogy, where one exists should be—it appears correct to assert—irrelevant to whether or not one matters ethically: e.g., the suffering of a child in Johannesburg is just as bad as the suffering of a child in Copenhagen, Beijing, or Honolulu. And since modern physics reveals that space and time form a unified four-dimensional continuum (called “spacetime”), there don’t appear to be any fundamental reasons for privileging one dimension over another, meaning that “affecting a temporally distant individual in the future is similar to affecting a spatially distant individual” right now.67 If one rejects “space discounting” (or devaluing the lives of people who are spatially distant from us), one should also reject “time discounting” (or devaluing the lives of people who are temporally distant from us).

Furthermore, as the risk expert Jason Matheny observes, time discounting future lives yields conclusions that “few of us would accept as being ethical.”68 For example, if one were to discount future “lives at a 5% annual rate, a life today would have greater intrinsic value than a billion lives 400 years hence”—i.e., a single person dying this evening would constitute a worse moral tragedy than a global catastrophe that kills 1 billion people in four centuries.69 Similarly, a 10 percent annual discount rate would entail that one person today is equal in value to an unfathomable 4.96 x 1020 people 500 years from now.70 This line of reasoning appears to be not only misguided but outrageously wrongheaded, from which it follows that discounting human lives is deeply problematic.71

The futurist Wendell Bell offers seven additional reasons that contemporary generations have obligations to future generations. These are:

(1) A concern for present people implies a concern for future people. There is no “clear demarcation … between one generation and the next,” meaning that “a concern for people living now carries us a considerable way into caring about future people.” Imagine that you have children who have children. You care about your grandchildren, who will one day care about their own grandchildren. The result is an unbroken chain of caring that extends indefinitely into the future.

(2) Thought experiments in which choosers do not know to which generation they belong rationally imply a concern for both present and future people. If one knows nothing about which generation one will live and is asked “to choose how each generation ought to behave, consuming now or saving and preparing for the future,” rational choosers will “allow for the well-being of both present and future generations.” (This thought experiment borrows from John Rawls’s idea of the “original position,” in which people select principles upon which society will be based without knowing anything about their gender, ethnicity, social status, and so on.72) It follows that “we ought to care about the well-being of future people because that is what rational people would choose to do if they did not know what generation they were in.”

(3) Regarding the natural resources of the earth, present generations have no right to use to the point of depletion or to poison what they did not create. Since natural resources were not produced by any human, “everyone has a right to their use, including members of future generations.” Therefore, “the members of the present generation have an obligation to future generations of leaving the earth’s life-sustaining capacities in as good a shape as they found them or of providing compensating benefits of life-sustaining worth equal to the damage that they do.”

(4) Past generations left many of the public goods that they created not only to the present generation but to future generations as well. This suggests that “no generation has the right to use up, totally consume, or destroy the existing human heritage, whether material, social, or cultural, so that it is no longer available to future generations.”

(5) Humble ignorance ought to lead present generations to act with prudence toward the well-being of future generations. We are only beginning to understand the universe, and we have only the vaguest sense of “what the human destiny is or might become.” Thus, “weighted with such ignorance, the present generation ought to act prudently so as not to threaten the future survival and well-being of the human species.”

(6) There is a prima facie obligation of present generations to ensure that important business is not left unfinished. The term “important business” here refers to “human accomplishments, especially exceptional ones in science, art, music, literature, and technology, and also human inventions and achievements of organizational arrangements, political, economic, social, and cultural institutions, and moral philosophy.” Both this and the previous point clearly connect to the transhumanist goal of reaching new and better modes of being.

(7) The present generation’s caring and sacrificing for future generations benefits not only future generations but also itself. One way to give life meaning is through engagement and altruistic sacrifice. In other words, “it is through being concerned for other people, both living and as yet unborn, that a person achieves self-enrichment and personal satisfaction.” As Bell adds, “Genuinely caring about future generations and taking effective action to benefit their well-being