Trends are toward environmental progress and future gains are possible---extinction’s not justified

There are many ways to critique this argument, of course, but I wish to focus on a particularly radical kind of response I encountered recently. During the 2018 meeting of the Society for Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology (SSoCIA), an organization devoted to discussion of the many broader issues surrounding astrobiology and space exploration, there was a panel discussion on the ethics of human colonization. When the bet hedging argument came up, some scholars countered that we should not subject other worlds to our reckless environmental practices, period. They felt that, until and unless humans can demonstrate an ability to live in harmony with our environment, we deserve extinction. This claim is highly ambiguous in at least two important ways. First, it’s very unclear what exactly would constitute success in “living in harmony with the environment,” which risks creating an impossible standard. Second, it’s very unclear precisely in what sense all of humanity could deserve extinction, since it is hardly the case we have, each and every one of us, committed a capital offense. Whatever the precise details, I will label the claim that humans should go be allowed to go extinct for our ecological sins eco-nihilism.

It is difficult to find explicit defenses of this position in the literature, though many have at least flirted with variations on the idea. Deep ecologists have been arguing for some time (see Drengson 1995) that constituents of the natural world have moral value on a par with human beings, even humanity as a whole. This naturally leads to the thought experiment Alan Weisman conducts in his influential book The World Without Us (2008) where he considers the ways the Earth and its inhabitants would be better off without its human population. Adam Morton’s Should We Colonize Other Planets? (2018) reflects the increasingly common sense of ecological pessimism by arguing that humans are doomed in the long run anyway, and thus it’s best for all concerned if we simply resign ourselves to extinction1. Not surprisingly, this combination of extreme pessimism about our future and guilt concerning the human role in bringing it about can produce some truly extreme positions. Witness the Voluntary Extinction Movement (Jarvis 1994), which takes the position that humans are morally obligated to stop reproducing altogether. Such ideas also seem to have influenced the terrorist group Earth First! I certainly don’t mean to suggest that such radical ideas are representative of those who oppose human colonization, but I do think the pessimism and guilt driving these extreme views have an unappreciated influence that cries out for critique.

II. Implicit Assumptions

Implicit assumptions are often the cause of problems because their unconscious nature prevents their being exposed to critical scrutiny. In this case, I there are three important background assumptions that may be operating to one degree or another amongst eco-nihilists:

1) The Inevitability of Doom: It is inevitable that we will continue our evil ways - our fate is sealed. How then can we justify buying a few more years of life at the expense of other worlds2? The debate here boils down to one between pessimists and optimists. I suppose if we all agreed that human extinction were truly inevitable, the eco-nihilists might have a good point. But this prediction is not well-supported, despite some of the more hysterical predictions we have grown used to hearing from environmentalists3. Even pessimists usually allow that it’s at least possible humanity will learn to live more sustainably in the future. We can’t say for sure, but what we can say is that human society is highly adaptable and often rises to meet challenges in unexpected ways. In other words, progress happens, even though it’s often more difficult and slower than we would wish.

There are some unconscious biases which operate to make pessimists’ predictions about such things stronger than the evidence actually warrants. For one thing, people tend to focus on concrete details more than overarching trends, which explains why one sometimes hears the claim that the United States has not made significant progress on racial issues. Such statements are not actually true – indeed, taken literally they are patently absurd - but instead express the frustration of those focused on all the many ways American society is still sadly divided by race. The point they are making - that we have not achieved anything like racial parity and must keep on fighting - is perfectly legitimate, but the way they make it is problematic. The same can be said about environmental issues – we have certainly made enormous progress on the environmental front in the last 100 years, though it is also true that we still live in a horribly unsustainable fashion, and that this poses a grave danger to everything that calls Earth home.

Another factor here is something I call the bias of the familiar in futurism. This just means that it’s easier for people to see the dangers posed by change than the benefits because the dangers are usually about disrupting elements of society with which they are familiar, while the benefits require imagining entirely new ways of living. Thus, Socrates famously objected to the widespread use of writing, arguing that it was a poor way to communicate complex ideas and would undermine the oral tradition that was a cornerstone of the Greek world. He was not wrong about the dangers, he simply could not envision all the beneficial changes writing would ultimately bring about and thus his calculation of costs and benefits was radically incomplete.

And there is some evidence that environmentalists in particular tend to overplay their hand when predicting dire consequences. Consider the famous Simon-Ehrlich wager on the price of commodities. The biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb (1970) argued that the growth of the human population would put increasing strain on our limited resources and commodity prices would thus inevitably increase. The economist Julian Simon argued that changing social attitudes and better technology would cause prices to fall. They formalized their wager and put it to the test - Simon was proven correct. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we should never listen to environmental warnings, just that what seems like an “obvious” result is all too often not what actually comes to pass. As Neils Bohr is said to have observed, “It is very hard to predict, especially about the future.”

If you are extremely pessimistic about humanity’s long-term ability to curb our environmental irresponsibility, then it’s reasonable to think colonizing other planets might not be a good idea. But if you think this is a challenge we can likely meet, and you believe colonizing other planets is a good way to insure humanity’s long term survival, then it’s hard to see why we shouldn’t at least try. Maybe the pessimists are right, but there is certainly no a priori reason to think so and the evidence is inconclusive. Given the clear and massive moral costs of the complete destruction of humanity (not to mention the Earth and everything else on it), eco-nihilists must at the very least shoulder quite a heavy burden of proof before we take their claims seriously.