Research Fellow Saher Hasnain reports on a Dining with Dinosaurs seminar exploring the existential crises facing the human race, with Dr Anders Sandberg.
Consider if you will: the grandest challenges facing humanity today.
Following that idea train through to completion while avoiding existential pitfalls is a fairly difficult activity.
We are faced with symptoms of big, troubling, existential crises every day; especially in the realm of environmental change, artificial intelligence, and potential cosmic warfare.
Anders Sandberg’s talk at Reuben’s Dining with Dinosaurs seemed set up to deal with the end of times by offering two things: the potential of an ark and a ticket on it. The spectre of existential collapse loomed high behind it.
Grappling marvelously with weighty topics like risk, longtermism, and disaster justice (among others), Dr Sandberg still left the audience with hope and a way of approaching the end of the world as a practical problem instead of a crippling one.
Using Dr Strangelove, Deep Impact, and 2012 as effective framing examples, the audience were led through the various narratives and framings in apocalyptic storytelling and morality in the end-of-times. Who deserves to live past the end of the world and witness the demise of all that we know and love? How did we come to this? As a society and as humanity?
While the reasons for the end of the world may range from the grotty and practical, to borrow Dr Sandberg’s words, to the grand and moral, the result may still be the same - a potential end to the project of humanity. Humanity has been here before and has been shaped by the difficulties of civilization constricting events (think here of the impacts of the Toba eruption, give or take a Wednesday, about 74,000 years ago).
Using these events from the past, it is useful to think of the types of scenarios that we may be faced with in a catastrophic event. Ranging from general fine-ness - to all humanity being destroyed, there is the mid-level scenario of 99% of humanity perishing. Which is worse? A matter of perspective of course, but only one of those scenarios includes the end of humanity. But does this matter if there is nobody here to witness it?
Answering this may also be a matter of framing. Are we as humans the best placed to answer this? It is generally accepted that losing all of a single species is categorically worse than losing 99% of them - is this because we will miss them?
Asking questions like this may drive the question on the practicality of such inquiries, given that so much of our world is broken for so many people. But that is a rather myopic way of thinking. Caring and planning for the future of humanity does not take away resources and attention from the present. It may indeed help in doing so. Considering the apocalyptic narratives and events around us, there is always a strong element of cooperation and collaboration (amidst all the individualistic and selfish functions of course), but generally some elements of justice prevail. The human project has demonstrated remarkable resilience and a capacity for community. We can be better and this can be planned for without sacrificing the needs of the present.
But, one can definitely argue that it is probably better not to be extinct.
