We Are Not The Final Chapter

For forty years a simple probabilistic argument has attempted to show that the human story is coming to an end. The argument is flawed, and our journey is just beginning.

There is currently a fire debate in opinion columns on the subject of longtermism - the idea that we should prioritise the long term future. The sheer overwhelming number of possible future humans or posthumans, even when discounting their priority with distance into the future, gives them an outsized role in our moral calculus. However, there are some that view this as a dangerous extremist movement that would sacrifice the present for some imagined future.

I support the former view; the latter view was recently expressed in an utterly terrible Salon article consisting of personal attacks on longtermists that I will not even link to. But if we were to entertain a more reasonable critique of the concept, it might be to ask how we can be sure there is an expansive future to look out for. It has been argued in the past that this is likely not the case.

The following an excerpt from my upcoming book about space settlement where I cover this topic as part of a projection about our long term…