The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction
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Last annotated on February 10, 2017
The Introduction will give the book’s main arguments, particularly a ‘doomsday argument’Read more at location 252
the doomsday argument could do little to tell us how long humankind will survive. What it might indicate, though, is that the likelihood of Doom Soon is greater than we would otherwise think.Read more at location 255
One of the doomed humans complains of his remarkable bad luck in being born so late. ‘There have been upward of fifteen thousand generations since the start of human history—yet here I am, in the one and only generation which will have no successors!’Read more at location 267
Suppose that many thousand intelligent races, all of about the same size, had been more or less bound to evolve in our universe. We couldn’t at all expect to be in the very earliest, could we? Very similarly, it can seem, you and I couldn’t at all expect to find ourselves among the very first of many hundred billion humans—or of the many trillions in a human race which colonized its galaxy. We couldn’t at all expect to be in the first 0.1 per cent, let alone the first 0.001 per cent, of all humans who would ever have observed their positions in time.Read more at location 271
The doomsday argument aims to show that we ought to feel some reluctance to accept any theory which made us very exceptionally early among all humans who would ever have been born.Read more at location 281
Carter’s doomsday argument doesn’t generate any risk-estimates just by itself.Read more at location 287
It is an argument for revising the estimates which we generate when we consider various possible dangers.Read more at location 287
even if the ‘total risk’ (obtained by combining the individual risks) appeared to be fairly small, Carter’s doomsday argument could suggest that it should be re-evaluated as large.Read more at location 293
Hundreds of new chemicals enter the environment each year. Their effects are often hard to predict.Read more at location 312
Who would have thought that the insecticide DDT would need to be bannedRead more at location 312
They can now spread world wide very quickly, thanks to air travel.Read more at location 317
The death of the dinosaurs was very probably caused by an asteroid.Read more at location 322
You may be far more likely to be killed by a continent-destroying impact than to win a major lottery:Read more at location 322
An extreme ice age due to passage through an interstellar cloud?Read more at location 325
Earth’s biosphere: its air, its soil, its water and its living things interact in highly intricate ways.Read more at location 331
foolish to think we had foreseen all possible natural disasters.Read more at location 334
a genetically engineered organism reproduces itself with immense efficiency, smothering everything?Read more at location 338
breakdown of a computer network which had become vital to humanity’s day-to-day survival.Read more at location 350
deliberate planning by scientists who viewed the life and intelligence of advanced computers as superior—possiblyRead more at location 353
Some other disaster in a branch of technology, perhaps just agricultural, which had become crucial to human survival.Read more at location 358
Modern agriculture is dangerously dependent on polluting fertilizers and pesticides,Read more at location 359
the compression would indeed have to be tremendous, and a Bang engineered in this fashion would very probably expand into a space of its own.Read more at location 365
The possibility of producing an all-destroying phase transition,Read more at location 366
Edward Farhi and Robert Jaffe suggested that physicists might produce ‘strange-quark matter’ of a kind which attracted ordinary matter, changing it into more of itself until the entire Earth had been converted (‘eaten’).Read more at location 367
several scientists have suggested that everyone is listening and nobody broadcasting, for fear of attracting hostile attention.Read more at location 381
politician convinced that, no matter what anyone did, the world would end soon with a Day of Judgement.Read more at location 393
just as bad to choose somebody who felt that God would keep the world safe for us for ever,Read more at location 394
My Value and Existence was a lengthy defence of a neoplatonic picture of God as an abstract creative force,Read more at location 396
Schopenhauer, who wrote that it would have been better if our planet had remained like the moon, a lifeless mass.Read more at location 404
Ethical relativism, emotivism, prescriptivism and other doctrinesRead more at location 405
Relativism maintains that, for example, burning people alive for fun is only bad relative to particular moral codes,Read more at location 407
Emotivism holds that to call burning people ‘really bad’ describes no fact about the practice of people-burning. Instead, it merely expresses real disgust,Read more at location 409
feeling of duty not to burn people results from ‘internalizing’ a system of socially prescribed rules.Read more at location 411
is concerned mainly or entirely with reducing evils rather than with maximizing goods.Read more at location 426
Now, there will be at least one miserable person per century, virtually inevitably, if the human race continues. It could seem noble to declare that such a person’s sufferings ‘shouldn’t be used to buy happiness for others’—and to draw the conclusion that the moral thing would be to stop producing children.Read more at location 427
Some philosophers attach ethical weight only to people who are already aliveRead more at location 430
Some philosophers speak of ‘inalienable rights’ which must always be respected, though this makes the heavens fallRead more at location 434
advantages of uncooperative behaviour should always dominate the reasoning of anyone who had no inclination to be self-sacrificing.Read more at location 439
annihilation of all life on Earth would be no great tragedy. Other intelligent beings would soon evolveRead more at location 442
this overlooks the fact that we have precious little idea of how often intelligent life could be expectedRead more at location 443
It can seem unlikely that our galaxy already contains many technological civilizations, for, as Enrico Fermi noted,Read more at location 445
it could well be that in a few million years the human race will have colonized the entire galaxy, if it survives.Read more at location 447
we could hardly expect to be among the very earliest—among the first 0.01Read more at location 454
Now, suppose that you suddenly noticed all this. You should then be more inclined than before to forecast humankind’s imminent extinction.Read more at location 457
Carter’s reasoning provides us with additional groundsRead more at location 461
DOOMSDAY AND THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLERead more at location 462
The principle reminds us that observers, for instance humans, can find themselves only at places and times where intelligent life is possible.Read more at location 463
help to persuade us that our position in space and in time is in fact unusual:Read more at location 468
There would be nowhere else where we could possibly find ourselves.Read more at location 481
the anthropic principle can at the same time discourage the belief that it is more rare and unusual than is neededRead more at location 482
In the New York Times, July 27, 1993, Gott reacts to some pointlessly aggressive criticisms by Eric Lerner. Lerner had held that he himself, for example, couldn’t usefully be treated as random. ‘This is surprising’, Gott comments, ‘since my paper had made a number of predictions that, when applied to him, all turned out to be correct, namely that it was likely that he was (1) in the middle 95 percent of the phone book; (2) not born on Jan. 1; (3) born in a country with a population larger than 6.3 million, and most important (4) not born among the last 2.5 percent of all human beings who will ever live (this is true because of the number of people already born since his birth). Mr. Lerner may be more random than he thinks.’Read more at location 494
Carter suggests, no observer should at all expect to find that he or she or it had come into existence very exceptionally early in the history of his, her or its species. It is this simple point which led first him and then Gott to the doomsday argument.Read more at location 512
while everyone is inevitably unusual in many ways, that can be a poor excuse for looking on ourselves as highly extraordinaryRead more at location 517
Suppose that the cosmos is radically indeterministic, perhaps for reasons of quantum physics. Suppose also that the indeterminism is likely to influence how long the human race will survive. There then isn’t yet any relevant firm fact, ‘out there in the world’ and in theory predictable by anybody who knew enough about the present arrangement of the world’s particles, concerning how long it will survive—likeRead more at location 525
Yet in order to run really smoothly, the doomsday argument does need the existence of a firm fact of this kind, I believe.Read more at location 530
For anyone who believes in radically indeterministic factors yet says that something ‘will very probably occur’ must mean that even those factors are unlikely to prevent its occurrence.Read more at location 532
doomsday argument has now been thought about rather hard by some rather good brains.Read more at location 536
If it did, then almost all ‘anthropic’ reasoning—reasoning which draws attention to when and where an observer could at all expect to be—would be in severe trouble.Read more at location 538
Users of the anthropic principle therefore ask about an observer’s probable location in space and in time.Read more at location 540
Any people of a heavily populated far future are not alive yet. Hence we certainly cannot find ourselves among them, in the way that we could find ourselves in some heavily populated city rather than in a tiny village.Read more at location 545
Note: x OBIEZIONE SULLA CLASSE DI RIFERIMENTO. NN SI PUÒ PARLARE DI UOMINI CONSIDERANDO ANCHE CHI DEVE ANCORA ESISTERE. Edit
Imagine an experiment planned as follows. At some point in time, three humans would each be given an emerald. Several centuries afterwards, when a completely different set of humans was alive, five thousand humans would again each be given an emerald. Imagine next that you have yourself been given an emerald in the experiment. You have no knowledge, however, of whether your century is the earlier century in which just three people were to be in this situation, or the later century in which five thousand were to be in it. Do you say to yourself that if yours were the earlier century then the five thousand people wouldn’t be alive yet, and that therefore you’d have no chance of being among them? On this basis, do you conclude that you might just as well bet that you lived in the earlier century?Read more at location 556
We should tend to distrust any theory which made us into very exceptionally early humans.’Read more at location 569
Here, then, is a quick introduction to various common objections,Read more at location 573
(a) Don’t object that your genes must surely be of a sort found only near the year 2000, and that in consequence you could exist only thereabouts.Read more at location 574
what Carter is asking is how likely a human observer would be to find himself or herself near the year 2000 and hence with genes typical of that period.Read more at location 575
(b) The doomsday argument is about probabilities. Suppose you know that your name is in a lottery urn, but not how many other names the urn contains. You estimate, however, that there’s a half chance that it contains a thousand names, and a half chance of its containing only ten. Your name then appears among the first three drawn from the urn. Don’t you have rather strong grounds for revising your estimate? Shouldn’t you now think it very improbable that there are another 997 names waiting to be drawn?Read more at location 583
Don’t protest that your time of birth wasn’t decided with the help of an urn.Read more at location 587
Again, don’t be much impressed by the point that every lottery must be won by somebody or other.Read more at location 589
Suppose you see a hand of thirteen spades in a game with million-dollar stakes. Would you just say to yourself that thirteen spades was no more unlikely than any other hand of thirteen cards, and that any actual hand has always to be some hand or other? Mightn’t you much prefer to believe that there had been some cheating, if you’d started off by thinking that cheating was 50 per cent probable? Wouldn’t you prefer to believe it, even if you’d started off by thinking that its probability was only five per cent?Read more at location 590
(c) Don’t describe the doomsday argument as an attempt ‘to predict, from an armchair, that the humans of the future will be only about as numerous as those who have already been born’.Read more at location 593
The argument doesn’t deny that we might have excellent reasons for thinking that the human race would have an extremely long future,Read more at location 595
(If you begin by being virtually certain that an urn with your name in it contains a thousand names in total, and not just ten names, then you may remain fairly strongly convinced of it even after your name has appeared among the first three drawn from the urn. Still, you should be somewhat less convinced than you were before.)Read more at location 596
(d) Don’t object that any Stone Age man, if using Carter’s reasoning, would have been led to the erroneous conclusion that the human race would end shortly.Read more at location 598
it wouldn’t be a defect in probabilistic reasoning if it encouraged an erroneous conclusionRead more at location 601
(e) Don’t object that if the universe contained two human races, the one immensely long-lasting and galaxy-colonizing, and the other short-lasting, and if these had exactly the same population figures until, say, AD 2150, then finding yourself around AD 2000 could give you no clue as to which human race you were in.Read more at location 608
a human could greatly expect to be after AD 2150 in the long-lasting race—which you and I aren’t.Read more at location 611
there would be nothing automatically improbable in being in a short-lasting human race.Read more at location 614
(g) Don’t protest that we can make nothing but entirely arbitrary guesses about the probabilities of various figures for total human population, i.e. the number of all humans who will ever have been born.Read more at location 616
the doomsday argument, like any other argument about risks, can also take account of new evidence of efforts to reduce risks. Because it doesn’t generate risk-estimates just by itself, disregarding all actual experience, it is no message of despair.Read more at location 621
