The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement
vhemt.org
vhemt.org
I do believe this would have won.
But it was an informative exercise, as I've since found that many good ideas also fall into this category along with all the nutty ones.
Compared to many people in the world, I suspect that those people reading hacker news may have a relatively large opportunity to influence others, for better or worse.
If we discuss these kinds of issues there is a small chance that some people will decide to act in a way that is more beneficial to others, society, & the environment.
But at second glance, there is more going on here.
Even if we are being charitable we would say that extinctionists have a critical lack of ambition. A poverty of the mind. A parochial vision of the possible, narrowed down to such a narrow slice of what might be that it may as well be invisible. They cannot look much beyond their noses. They do not see the natural world as the seething pit of pain and anguish and violent death that it is. They are willing to bow out themselves while condemning animals to that for the foreseeable future. The rational and caring extinctionist would destroy the entire biosphere, but even that is short-sighted, as it doesn't do anything about the rest of the universe and all future time. There will be more biospheres, more tooth and nail evolution.
Extinctionists are fixated on relinquishment, a form of cowardice in the face of being challenged by circumstances and change. They have seen the problem, and their answer is it is to leave the building, making no effort to address the issue. How can that possibly help? It is a pathological lack of ambition taken to its logical conclusion, and weaponized by jealousy of those who feel that, yes, something might be done.
There is suffering. So build the means to end it. If you can't envisage how, then you aren't reading widely enough. Ultimately we can replace all of the natural biosphere. We can rebuild man and animal in reality or emulated environments: all of them, every last thing capable of pain. We can remove the circumstances of suffering from any who suffer and who want that suffering to end. That it will require centuries, molecular nanotechnology, brain emulation, and other technologies of the same ilk? So what? How long has this world waited already for those capable of making this achievement? Seizing the future and continuing the work that our species has barely started on in the quest to eliminate pain is the high road.
And if at the end of the day there are still those who feel that they would like an untrammeled world, well let them build as many as they like - provided that all the species living upon them capable of pain are in fact living in a paradise free from suffering.
But heaven forbid we feel any sympathy for those who want to press the game over button now, who cannot raise their eyes just that little bit to see the golden future we could build with just a little more time.
These people are quitters? Maybe they are, but in other ways then you call them out. Suffering is a condition only to those able to perceive it. Suffering is a creation of perception. Imbuing some moral "high road," upon which, we should seek to travel seems a narrow concern of individuals within such a species. We are lucky enough to be born able to suffer, we suffer - maybe lucky enough to find joy and elation, then we die. We are one of the suffering. Do I sympathize with suffering and seek to help alleviate it? Sure, but I'm not haunted by it. It's the other side of me. Something which propels me.
What's interesting is that via this 1992 website, some tiny sect of people are focusing on something else they consider avoidably bad and an important concern to be addressed which, within a larger context, is even more devoid of contextual reasoning.
Their healthy biosphere will, at some point be lifeless and destroyed when the sun dies out or some other event with slightly greater than 0% chance occurs. For what purpose did they "save" it now?
We each have our own forever. It starts when we are born and it ends when we die. The same is true of the biosphere, the solar system, the galaxy, etc. In between, we experience each moment from a unique perspective... and then that moment is gone as is the person we were at that moment. Our suffering is gone. Our joy is gone. A new moment is hear and it is more lovely are intolerable than the last.
Work towards what you like, but building high roads on a spheroid planet or in emulated circuits still has you going round in circles. Without suffering we'd mostly just sit in a circle, staring around, not enjoying relief or, worse, finding suffering in moments devoid of ecstasy. The golden time is now as it's the only time we certainly have.
Maybe there's something I'm missing about population dynamics, but generations are a pipeline. Yes, you're around for many years after your kids are born, but as your kids are born your grandparents or great-grandparents are probably reaching the end of their rope.
A system where a process dies as soon as it spawns a new process will have no more net growth than a system where the process sticks around for N cycles after spawning a new process, and then dies. Given the same original number of processes, it will have a greater number of processes running at equilibrium, but it will experience equilibrium nonetheless.
Not to mention, "two kids" actually leads to a very gentle decline (because not everyone reproduces) which is reasonably socially stable, unlike a world in which fertility is 0.2 per couple.
With only two kids per couple, even if every woman had 2 children (which is what a 2.0TFR would mean), the population would still decline.
Step 2. Extremely altruistic people cease reproduction.
Step 3. Humanity goes on. If there was a gene for altruism (or a set of genes and their relationship) it was now removed from the gene pool. Humanity is now less altruistic, probably worst than before Step 2.
E.g.
Step 2. Extremely altruistic people cease reproduction and use the time and energy they would otherwise have spent on their own children to educate and encourage others to become more altruistic.
(The website is down, so I don't know what these people are trying to accomplish--I'm just taking the name literally.)
But then consider what happens when sexual reproducing species experience an extreme population dip: traits suddenly become much more variegated because now there is an overlap of recessive genotypes that used to be hidden. So maybe this won't happen?
I'm not so sure about extinction, but a steady state population (possibly with less people than now) seems pretty attractive to me. At the moment I don't believe we are culturally able to sustain this.
I often wonder what needs to be done to make it happen. Probably a more equitable distribution of wealth and resources is job number one (observing that rich societies have a low fertility rate). Which probably means that it will still be many generations before it can happen.
http://cl.ly/image/3H1A3S341k1t
Of course, we might muck it up good in a few short years here.
Edit: who on Earth decided this was a good comment to downvote? We are doomed.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits-...
I am not sure if "doomed" is the right word. It seems pretty plausible that existing civilisation will collapse, as many human civilisations have done in the past, and there will be additional human suffering (more than the considerable amount there is now), but I doubt we as a species will become extinct within the next few hundred years.
Plus, what if we do leave? Do you think our governments are really progressing towards that Star Trek enlightened super government, or are we progressing toward some sort of Orwellian nightmare? What would humanity look like when it colonizes more planets and leaves? Would we be the good aliens or bad aliens you see in sci-fi movies?
Right now we still seem like a species dominated by self interest, and it doesn't look like we're changing any time soon...
One thing we do have, though, is the power to amplify our own significance. We've only been writing about what happens to us for 5000 years or so. There are Bristlecone pine trees nearly that old, and even that is just the tiniest little flash, so brief it is undetectable, in the time that the planet has been here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_the_Earth#Solar_evolu...
We have the duty to prevent that if possible. Using near future technology we should be able to at least ensure some life survives the death of our star. Easily imagined technology would let us spread life far enough to survive almost any catastrophe. It will be up to some future life forms to figure out how to escape the heat death of the universe... We can only do so much after all.
We are, you could say, one of Nature's many apparatus to long term success. Any biosphere that does not develop space travel is doomed to eventual extinction.
Except for the dolphins. We don't need to encourage other species to just dick around all day. That's our niche.
""" Under the constant scenario, an American who forgoes having a child would save 9,441 tonnes of CO2 – almost six times, on average, the amount of CO2 they would emit in their own lifetime, or the equivalent of making around 2,550 return aeroplane trips between London and New York. If the same American drove a more fuel-efficient car, drastically reduced his or her driving, installed energy-efficient windows, used energy-efficient lightbulbs, replaced a household refrigerator, and recycled all household paper, glass and metal, he or she would save fewer than 500 tonnes. """
http://web.archive.org/web/19961230175931/http://www.vhemt.o...
Of course most of their KPMs have been headed the wrong direction, so perhaps they'll soon throw-in-the-towel?
A related site...
http://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/
...which also goes way back:
http://web.archive.org/web/20000511095311/http://www.churcho...
My whole perspective on the situation was largely changed when I learned the latest scientific perspectives about predicted population from the incomparable Hans Rosling: http://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-p...
That said, a good portion (not all) of the foundations of VHEM are valid even if the conclusion and complete package is, well, less valid. I won't go into details here. I sympathize with the feelings, but they aren't really the right perspective in the end.
See http://foundational-research.org/publications/importance-of-... for more discussion.
I took a full page screenshot, it's not a great solution, but I hope it helps until the site is back to normal.
Earth will drift on, as it always has and will. What would be the point, except for some flowery aspirations (by dead aspirants) of beauty and perfection? These people want humanity to die off over something that could never be more than principle? One man's principle no less? Give me a break!
Beauty, perfection, extinction... all of these concepts are distinctly human in nature. But the cosmos (and our planet) are not, and we barely understand the rules (let alone the game) which they play. Our beautiful planet is a statistical footnote, special only in that the results of its RNG yielded an environment especially fortuitous for life. The cosmos is only matter interacting with other matter, at all levels and at all scales, forming systems upon systems upon systems, the interactions of which we perceive in this thing we call consciousness. (Separate from most worldviews, I think, is that this one can (theoretically, eventually) be expressed completely in models of physical interaction, which is something most of the world's creation stories cannot do.)