Humans won’t bring animals when they colonize

If humans become extinct, wild animal suffering will continue indefinitely on earth (unless all other animals go extinct as well, which is unlikely but possible). Wild animals’ lives are likely not worth living, so this would be bad, but it’s not the worst thing that could happen.

Preventing human extinction obviously means that humans will continue to exist, but this direct effect is trivial compared to the effects described below.

Major reasons why preventing human extinction might be bad:

We sustain or worsen wild animal suffering on earth.

We colonize other planets and fill them with wild animals whose lives are not worth living.

We create lots of computer simulations of extremely unhappy beings.

We eventually create an AI with evil values that creates lots of suffering on purpose. (But this seems highly unlikely.)

Major reasons why preventing human extinction might be good:

We colonize other planets and fill them with wild animals whose lives are worth living.

We successfully create a hedonium shockwave–i.e. we fill the universe with beings experiencing the maximum amount of pleasure that it is possible for beings to experience.

Even if we don’t create eudamonia, we fix the problem of wild animal suffering and make most of the beings in the universe very happy.

We find other planets with wild animals whose lives are net negative and we make their lives better.

Emotional disclosure: I’m biased toward optimism here because I don’t like the idea of humans becoming extinct, and I definitely don’t like the idea that this could be the best outcome in expectation.

Even people who are pessimistic about wild animal suffering generally assume that preventing human extinction is good, but I do not often see this justified. Let’s consider some arguments for and against.

Arguments on Why Preventing Human Extinction May Be Good or Bad

Bad: Humans make wild animal suffering worse on earth

This scenario doesn’t require making any extreme predictions about the future, but it’s not clear that wild animal suffering (WAS) will be worse with humans than without. If humans go extinct then wild animals will almost certainly continue to suffer in the way they have been for hundreds of millions of years. It’s not conclusive that wild animals’ lives are net negative on balance, but it’s sufficiently likely that this is a major concern.

It’s conceivable that climate change could worsen wild animal suffering; this seems like the most plausible reason why humans might increase WAS if they stay on earth and don’t make any substantial technological advances. But it’s highly uncertain whether climate change will make things better or worse, and either way, humans will probably prevent climate change from going too far.

Bad: Humans colonize other planets and spread wild animal suffering

If humans continue to exist and successfully colonize other planets, they have a high probability of filling the universe with wild animal suffering (directed panspermia). This is good if wild animals’ lives are worth living on balance, and bad if they’re not worth living (the latter seems more likely).

Much of the reasoning below comes from a conversation I had with Kelsey Piper.

It is probably not technologically feasible to travel to other solar systems in less than thousands of years, which we could do much more easily if we were not made of organic matter. If we’re not made of organic matter (e.g. we exist as emulations on computer systems), we have no need for a biosphere filled with wild animals and we are unlikely to spread wild animal suffering. If future humans preserve their current aesthetic values, they may want to create biospheres just because they are aesthetically pleasing. This would use large amounts of resources that could be used for creating more humans instead. I’m uncertain about whether future humans will have sufficiently robust population ethics that they will prefer to use planetary-scale resources to create lots of happy humans (or human emulations, or whatever form humans are in at that point) rather than wild animals. Right now I do not expect that most humans value a population of one trillion happy people as better than a population of one billion happy people.

But Kelsey pointed out that it’s unreasonable to expect that humans would intentionally spend their limited resources on creating lots of wild animals with bad lives. Right now we are quickly burning through natural resources, and while there is a lot of pushback against this process, the dominant forces work in favor of habitat destruction. That will probably continue to be the case.

I expect it’s more likely than not that if we colonize other planets, we will not spread wild animal suffering, even if we don’t care about animals. However, WAS may be bad enough that even if we have only a relatively small probability of spreading it, the expected value of the far future is still negative.