12) Fußnoten und Referenzen
https://80000hours.org/articles/future-generations/
1. This discovery was discussed in an article by Clive Thompson in JSTOR Daily.
2. She added that “if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature from its own action as well as from increased weight must have necessarily resulted.”
3. “While some models showed too much warming and a few showed too little, most models examined showed warming consistent with observations, particularly when mismatches between projected and observationally informed estimates of forcing were taken into account. We find no evidence that the climate models evaluated in this paper have systematically overestimated or underestimated warming over their projection period. The projection skill of the 1970s models is particularly impressive given the limited observational evidence of warming at the time, as the world was thought to have been cooling for the past few decades.” ‘Evaluating the Performance of Past Climate Model Projections.’
4. In his book What We Owe the Future, Will MacAskill (a co-founder and trustee of 80,000 Hours) is even more succinct: “Future people count. There could be a lot of them. We can make their lives go better.” (pg. 9)
5. “Setting aside climate change, all spending on biosecurity, natural risks and risks from AI and nuclear war is still substantially less than we spend on ice cream. And I’m confident that the spending actually focused on existential risk is less than one-tenth of this.” The Precipice (pg. 313)
6. Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons on pages 356-357
7. John Adams, the second president of the United States who laid some of the intellectual foundations for the US Constitution, pointed to the importance of enduring governmental structures in his own writing: “The institutions now made in America will not wholly wear out for thousands of years. It is of the last importance, then, that they should begin right. If they set out wrong, they will never be able to return, unless it be by accident, to the right path.” Quoted in MacAskill’s What We Owe the Future.
8. See The Biology of Rarity edited by W.E. Kunin, K.J. Gaston
9. “The average lifespan of a species varies according to taxonomic group. It is as long as tens of millions of years for ants and trees, and as short as half a million years for mammals. The average span across all groups combined appears to be (very roughly) a million years.” — Professor Edward O. Wilson
10. Some might believe it’s just entirely implausible to believe humans could be around for another 500 million years. But consider, as Toby Ord precipice pointed out in The Precipice, that the fossil record indicates that horseshoe crabs have existed essentially unchanged on the planet for at least around 445 million. Of course, horseshoe crabs undoubtedly have features that make them particularly resilient as a species. But humans, too, have undeniably unique characteristics, and it’s arguable that these features could confer comparable or even superior survival advantages.
11. See Chapter 8 of Toby Ord’s The Precipice for a detailed discussion of the prospects for space settlement.
12. In a previous version of this article, Ben Todd explained how simple expected value calculations can give a sense of how significantly the future can weigh in our deliberations:
If there’s a 5% chance that civilization lasts for 10 million years, then in expectation, there are over 5,000 future generations. If thousands of people making a concerted effort could, with a 55% probability, reduce the risk of premature extinction by 1 percentage point, then these efforts would in expectation save 28 future generations. If each generation contains 10 billion people, that would be 280 billion additional individuals who get to live flourishing lives. If there’s a chance civilisation lasts longer than 10 million years, or that there are more than 10 billion people in each future generation, then the argument is strengthened even further.
This is just a toy model, and it doesn’t actually capture all the ways we should think about value. But it shows why we should care about future generations, even if we’re not sure they’ll come into existence.
13. Saulius Šimčikas of Rethink Priorities in 2020 researched the numbers of vertebrate animals in captivity. The report found that there were between 9.5 and 16.2 billion chickens, bred for meat in captivity, on any given day. There are also 1.5 billion cattle, 978 million pigs, and 103 billion farmed fish, among many other types of farmed animals.
14. Altogether, this means there are many, many lives at stake in the way the future unfolds. A conservative estimate of the upper bound (assuming just Earth-bound humans) is 1016. But estimates using different approaches put the figure as high as 1035, or even — very speculatively — 1058. These figures and other estimates are discussed in “How many lives does the future hold?” by Toby Newbury.
15. Note that we think the near-term risk from natural threats tends to be much lower than human-made threats.
Toby Ord explained on The 80,000 Hours Podcast why he believes extinction risk from natural causes is relatively low: “[We’ve] been around for about 2,000 centuries: homo sapiens. Longer, if you think about the homo genus. And, suppose the existential risk per century were 1%. Well, what’s the chance that you would get through 2,000 centuries of 1% risk? It turns out to be really low because of how exponentials work, and you have almost no chance of surviving that. So this gives us a kind of argument that the risk from natural causes, assuming it hasn’t been increasing over time, that this risk must be quite low.”
16. We’re also very concerned about mitigating climate change, though at this point, we believe it’s much less likely to cause human extinction on its own.
17. What about non-human animals? One might wonder whether this emphasis on the extinction of our own species is overly human-centric. [anthropocentric]
There might be some scenarios in which humanity goes extinct, but many other animal species continue to live for the rest of Earth’s habitable period. Does that mean that avoiding human extinction is much less important than we thought, since we believe non-human lives have value?
Probably not, for at least three reasons:
1. Without the ability to migrate to the stars, Earth-derived life may fall well below its apparent potential.
2. Wild animals may face extreme amounts of suffering, and it’s not clear how often their lives are worth living.
3. We still have a lot of uncertainty about what a valuable future should look like, and it’s important to preserve the one species we know of that is at least somewhat capable of seriously deliberating about what matters and acting on its conclusions.
18. Note that while reducing extinction risks and trajectory changes are split up in this explanation, they may, in practice, imply similar courses of action. Work to prevent, say, a catastrophic pandemic that kills all humans could likely also be effective at preventing a pandemic that allows some humans to survive but causes society to irreversibly collapse.
19. It seems plausible that reducing the risk of this outcome could be the most important cause to work on. However, it’s not clear to us what steps are available at this time to meaningfully do so.
20. It’s possible we’d prefer to act to prevent the suffering in 1,000 years rather than 10,000 years, because we feel less confident we can predict what will happen in 10,000 years. It seems plausible, for instance, that the greater length of time would make it more likely that someone else will find a way to prevent the harm. But if we assume that our uncertainty about the likelihood of the suffering in each case is the same, there seems to be no reason at all to prefer to prevent the sooner suffering rather than the later.
21. If the radiation sickness is so bad that it makes their lives worse than nonexistence, they might be able to object to choosing any policy that allowed them to be born. But we can ignore this possibility for the point being made here.
22. Some person-affecting views do assert that we have obligations to future individuals if a given individual or set of individuals will exist regardless of our actions. (Because of the extreme contingency in much of animal reproduction, the identity of future individuals is often not fixed.) For more information on this, see the entry on the non-identity problem in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
23. For an example of this view, read Leopold Aschenbrenner’s blog post on “Burkean Langzeitperspektive.”
24. Some researchers estimate that the chance of extinction is significantly lower; others believe it’s much higher. But it seems hard to be confident the risks are extremely low. Assessing the level of risk we face is plausibly a top longtermist priority.