The Future is Vast: Long-term perspective on humanitys past, present and future
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
I agree with the idea of preserving opportunity in the future, but the way it is posed in this article is strange. It treats these unborn billions as if they exist right now, and to change the future is to betray them. Focusing so much on the number of unborn people also makes it seem like the author thinks a larger world population is inherently better, morally better. Say the world population instead stabilizes at six billion by the year 2700. That leads to trillions less people being born than in the author's scenario. Is that a lost world? Would the people alive then care?
From a utilitarian perspective, which values the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people would consider more happy people to be a good thing.
However you tweak the numbers, unless you assume a much more significant depopulation than just the current 8 or so to 6 billion people, it's many trillions of people either way. Even with a massive depopulation, if human life continues until then the number will unquestionably dwarf the current population.
So it's posing the simple question: If your actions cause pain for future generations, how many people will it effect? What's an acceptable number of future people to hurt for whatever you're doing now?
This is a moral question, a kind of ultra scale trolley problem, not an answer.
What he fails to accurately represent is the structure of the future. Cause this its not accurate to depict it like the past as one line of history, of sequential events and scenarios. The future is the sum of all possible scenarios, and that includes short-term disasters and recoverys. Its a scenario-tree with overlapping forests in the branches.
Its a tree, that deforms as one moves on it, gains capability and gathers risks to return to a scenario that is similar in ways to the past. Branches thicken as the fruit of research thicken the likelihoods. And its not explored by one tribe on leader, one people, its explored simultaneously by all of humanity, even the dead branches leading nowhere, not even into the past and diminished trees. On some planet we might one day have a nuclear exchange.
With this tree of chances in mind, some recent developments also make more sense- as long as humanity has no behavioral self-control, developing ever more advanced exponential technology and hand it to the individual, reduces the thickness of the probability branches higher up in the future. Exploring one self, social engineering, social implants and protect against disaster by root-hardening (investing in technology that allows for easier, faster recovery) is more important sequentially then having next level tech (like fusion, flying cars and space travel for everyone).
I botched this post, but the truth is in it.
All progress will be bent to that end.
The only alternative is something completely different. Wizards or something.
Why? Because it is mass consumption of goods and services by the many that allows for the massive wealth of the few on top. If not for this mass consumption, the very rich would be orders of magnitude poorer in an absolute sense (though they may be much richer than the median in a relative sense). It is only by skimming from a huge economy that allows for the very rich as we understand them today to exist. And if the mass consumption exists, that means, by definition, that the majority are not destitute.
It is patient beyond our fathoming
We could have already exhausted all of the easy to obtain energy and resources, and that would make growth very hard to sustain at a level where we can expend extra effort on space exploration.
Imagine an alien civilization that didn't have a Carboniferous period where energy was just left sitting around and accumulating for future use.
Now imagine us exhausting it before we expand beyond our planet. That's the worry. Will we be able to tap into renewables in a way that sustains growth? Maybe. We're not there yet, though.
In fact, the filters on our past are things with odds of survival that we estimate by counting orders of magnitude. At the same time, you will have a hard time getting estimates of survival lower than 1% for the known filters on our future.
Unless there is something really surprising with space travel, we are past the Great Filter.
Now we still have basically all of those -- because realistically we're still not at the point where we have anywhere to colonize and survive long term without a living earth, even if we had the tech to try -- but we also have the ways in which we can eliminate ourselves, like causing our own climate crisis (which we are gleefully doing right now) or nuclear annihilation.
Now tell me, what odds do you place on humanity killing itself before we learn to live in space?
But if we kill earth before we've fully worked out how to terraform somewhere for permanent living without restocking from a living planet, of which we know of only one for sure, that might extend human living for like.. 50 years or something but certainly not a million.
I think we're realistically a long long long way away from that, and most of the ways in which we might "kill the earth" will have a negative impact on our ability to achieve it to begin with.
And again, the odds of a planet-killing asteroid hitting the earth haven't changed materially in probably like a few million years. We're no less vulnerable to that than we were 20k years ago. So I don't see why you think we're less vulnerable now just because we've managed to throw some tin cans in orbit.
An almost planet killing asteroid hits us every 50 million years or so. Thus the probability of one not hitting us in a thousand years is around 99.99%. Certainly you are not proposing the great filter has a 99.99% survival rate? So talking about asteroids is absolutely a non-starter.
For comparison, I was talking about a filter with survival rates of around 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% (more a few zeros, but who is counting?). What odds you place on a nuclear war?
Your assertion is that the things that face us now are somehow less likely to destroy our species than the things we faced before, thus the "great filter" must be behind us. Ignoring for a moment that we certainly don't even know all the potential species-killing events we potentially face (ie. unknown unknowns), I haven't seen you explain why any of the ones we have faced are less of a problem now, or why any of the ones we face now are less dangerous than the ones we faced before. You just assert it as true and then when pressed try to haggle on some percentages you seem to have pulled out your ass.
Of course, we can be hit by a big asteroid, or the planet sterilized by a nearby supernova or some other totally unexpected events out of our control, but we keep turning our present reality something unsustainable in many ways.
We should not be surprised if we hit the barrier we built in front of us.
First a lab leaked virus, then one man with a giant ego and a nuclear button.
As tech becomes more powerful, it becomes easier and easier for one accident or deranged person to kill us all.
Either way, 800k years feels very optimistic right now. We need to stop thinking about a trillion potential future people over a million years and start making things better for the few billion or so who will live in the next 20-100 years if those trillions are ever going to exist. We're really really bad at this near-medium horizon, endlessly shuffling the costs of our choices onto them and their children as if we can amortize it forever.
Your figure of 1/3 deaths, or up to 3 generations to rebound might be too optimistic. We just don't know.
Given how reliant we are on existing supply chains, their complete breakdown could send us back into the stone age. We've certainly seen how even a relatively mild pandemic can disrupt our lives for years. The effects of something far worse would be difficult to predict. Us measly tax payers can only hope for the best.
That news to the ancient egyptian civilization, mesopotamian civilization, incan civilization, aztec civilization, etc.
I can recommend the writings of William J. Perry [1] and for blunt emotional effect the BBC movie "Threads" [2].
Where are you getting that from? Are you sure you're not mistaking this for the expected lifetime of the Sun as a normal star?
What it references: https://arxiv.org/abs/1009.4698v1
It's not the definitive sort of statement that GP initially (now deleted) implied it was.
Less than 9 billion people lived before the agricultural revolution.
So much for humanity's claims to have transcended nature.
EDIT:
(stealing a half-remembered quote from someone else)
"Humans beings are unique in that they are the only known species who produce offspring in order to subsidize their fantasies."
Clearly, it isn't all-consuming.
Also your quote is blatantly false. Consider bees. The queen produces offspring literally to build her hive and feed her young.
More so, the drive for reproduction isn't necessarily about kids, but sexuality. Sex sells. A big chunk of our civilization is about food and sex.
The total genetic consciousness of humanity cares for your particular genes about as much as you care for a single hair or cell of skin falling off the greater whole.
It is all-consuming in the sense that it is fundamental to life by definition. (Unless we are to posit some organism arising from proto-life and just 'hanging out' until the end of the universe.) And it is the second half fundamental to evolution -- the other being death.
Yes. Reproductive rates vary over time and due to environmental conditions.
See Calhoun's Mouse Utopia Experiments for an extreme example of this. (Though simplistic applicability of this to human society, in the ways that have been done in the past, should probably be discouraged.)
> Also your quote is blatantly false. Consider bees. The queen produces offspring literally to build her hive and feed her young.
Other animals act in collective ways. Yes. But it's not talking of collectivism in terms of bees, ants, or wolf packs.
So far as I understand the quote, or the sentiment, it refers to the seeming fact that bees, ants, wolfs, etc, reproduce as a series of drives that function to that end without them needing to be cognizant of that end. Whereas humans, in addition to the compulsive drives of pleasure, etc, require justification. A queen bee does not concern itself (so far as we understand the mental processes of other animals) with prospects a billion years from now. A queen bee doesn't have to justify that more bees are good. Eggs are just cared for, fertilized, hatched in relation to the functioning of the hive and the processes which occur to regulate such. The seeming distinction with human beings is that the course of evolution has perhaps instilled them/us with a sort of, if not a 'meta drive', then a drive to override other aspects of our evolved intelligence which might undermine reproduction. In short, humans don't just 'get horny', they/we also have to 'get religion[1]'. Other animals (again, so far as we are aware, which is admittedly not very far sometimes) don't seem to require any justification on top of 'the mating dance makes me horny', they just 'do it'.
[1] This, of course, should be considered in terms of ideology broadly, rather than just religion specifically. (In addition, I would also contend here that ideology is not an external addition, but a fundamental of human psychology, and to paraphrase Zizek 'the most thoroughly ideological environment is the post-ideological one.'
Of course it does! Bees gather honey literally to survive through winters.
We can even grant that honey bees, for instance, do appear to have some type of awareness of time and space, as indicated by their communicative 'dances'. However, there is a vast gap between encoding approximate seconds to kilometers (in human terms) and the time relations of the heat death of the universe.
Intelligence, self-awareness, these are all things that have developed in various species to varying degrees. And new data generally keep showing that we have previously underestimated just to what degree that is the case.
However, it has yet to be shown that bees (or any other animal) are compelled to instantiate and perpetuate social interactions with the point of advancing propositions such as "people who live in the future matter morally just as much as those of us who are alive today."
> billions of years ... survive through the winter
That's G.R.R Martin levels of winter.
EDIT:
I don't want to make it seem as if am I discounting the ability for the deployment of forethought by other animals. There is, however, the issue of any 'horizon of time'. Bees can work to restore a hive in the middle of winter because it is potentially conceptualized, in some fashion, to be necessary. A crow can interface with multiple interlocking scenarios in order to achieve an outcome (usually food). We have cooperative behavior: one monkey distracts the tourist, the other steals the food, etc. However, there seems to be little evidence for any other species having such a notion of time as to extend much more beyond immediate concerns in an active sense. Longer phenomena, such as the reproductive cycles of cicadas, is more linked to environmental factors and internal molecule clocks than it is to what could be defined as conscious relations.
This is not also to say that some species may also have (or in the future have) undergone convergent evolution with regards to this type of mental processing, just that it doesn't generally seem to be the case.
Calhoun's experiments are kinda sketchy and likely are not reproducible. [0] They were extensively promoted as PopSci, especially by Calhoun, but only limited papers where actually published, never the full results, and attempts at reproduction have called into question many of the findings.
[0] https://www.gwern.net/Mouse-Utopia
Until we have good reproductions, it's probably good to write this experiment off.
But you are likely correct; I should have been stronger in my warnings.
Unfortunately, however, it could be taken that I was indicating the wholesale applicability of a possibly one-off event as explanation to broader and seemingly repeated phenomena (leveling and/or declining population rates in so-called developed countries), rather that just as a possible single extreme instance of population and reproductive instability as generalized example.
My interest is confined strictly to the rat populations themselves. The particulars of the designs involved and for the issues that were introduced by them, I think that to be the more interesting part.
Any applicability to human sociology I would regard as ridiculously erroneous at this stage. (Or perhaps any stage. We tend to cross-associate species too much sometimes.)
Though, I wonder if reproducibility may not, here, be as useful as we think. It is of course necessary for such to scientific, or at least scientifically studied. Repeatability, however, is not a prerequisite of existence. It is a question of how high a degree of variability exists within the flow and inter-relation and outcomes of population-wide phenomena among social species.
Except Calhoun didn't do the basic stuff to rule out the obvious non-social causes for population breakdown. He didn't take offspring from the colony and test to make sure they still could reproduce healthily in a new setting. Calhoun doesn't clearly specify all the starting conditions, but at least one run started from 4 breeding pairs which introduces the possibility of inbreeding as a close call. There are also diseases that cause sterility and odd behaviors in rats.
So basically until someone can reproduce the experiment properly, there is pretty much zero epistemic content that can be drawn from the Calhoun experiments except as a cautionary tale about taking self promoting scientists at their word rather than demanding their data as well.
Would it have been better to talk about bivalves[2] and baboons[3]?
I would generally prefer bivalves to baboons.
But then I would be accused, again, in trying to illustrate a general phenomena or principle, of drawing a line to some vector of particular conflux between species A and H. sapiens, ala the domain of Jordan Peterson's lobsters.
The problem is, I am afraid, in such discussions as these, my posts will have to account down to the punctuation, lest one correction will need be issued or question be raised, in which case the totality of the thing is blown to the proverbial kingdom come by its (and my) inability to account for the sum totality of a minute portion of the universe. (A trivial failing, I admit, but one I have to own up to.)
Except perfect is never going to be good enough.
It's similar, after a fashion, to having to deal with young earth creationists. Yes, but where is the transitionary fossil between H. habilis and H. erectus? The counter claim will then arise that there are differences in opinion as to whether H. ergaster is a precursor to H. erectus or categorizable in terms of inclusion with H. erectus.
The question is: why do I put in the effort?
Maybe because silence, inaction, is always likely in support of something. Neutrality can likely only exist at minimum if the subject and phenomena are not extant within the same light cone. Practical considerations might allow for a smaller distance, but might as well be thorough.
Ultimately, I have to be fine with misstepping. Failure, after all, in the end, is the only option.
Returning to Calhoun a moment, since I might as well ride the derailment off the cliff (semper desistas semper exieris[4]), the final outcome of Newton's Flaming Laser Sword is that swaths of reality functionally cease to exist. Of course there is epistemic content. That content is not applicable within a scientific framework, that is very true. But something, unless the entirety was fabricated, did happen. Maybe Calhoun purposefully funneled the experiment into his result, The Mad God of Universe 25. Maybe he was the Harry Harlow of rats. But the basics of it are that reproductive rates changed and the population collapsed. Maybe it was from disease. Maybe it was from inbreeding. Maybe it was from the food. Maybe it was from the design of the enclosure. Maybe one day Calhoun decided to climb into the enclosure and stomp them all. Maybe it was all these things together. It's not much. But 'pretty much zero' is not zero.[5] As almost everything I tend to post proves, close enough doesn't cut it.
-------
[1] Yes, I am aware this is not a 'real' word, and I don't care. Another few hundred years and it will be a word. It's been independently derived too many times.
[2] https://jpswad.people.wm.edu/Martins%20et%20al%202018%20-%20...
[3] https://www.princeton.edu/~baboon/publications/2003AJHB.pdf
[4] I won't claim this is grammatically correct. My latin classes were more than two decades ago.
[5] (Bees, interestingly enough, can be taught the concept of zero, which puts them ahead of human toddlers.)
[1] https://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/channels/news/scent-man-23549...
EDIT:
Even so, it would have helped even more if my original example hadn't been functionally useless.
Psychology in particular has a problem with many papers poorly assessing their own generalizibility and making much stronger/broader claims than are justified by the actual design of their study. This, combined with the widespread teaching of badly run "famous" studies such as Calhoun, drove me to abandon getting a degree in that field.
If you live in a developed nation, you probably feel secure that humanity will not perish without you having kids. You are allowed to simply enjoy life as you wish and not have kids if you choose (at least, that is my ideal).