existential risk

[jack_of_lantern]

I continue to marvel at three very common assumptions that I find being made all the time, most recently by my friend Oskar when we were talking late into the evening last evening:

1. Science has made life progressively better for us.  People in the past had things so much worse off.
2. Whatever problems we face, science can and will find a way to solve them.
3. It is all but inconceivable that humanity could become extinct.

First, no one has an agreed-upon way of measuring scientific progress.  I dearly love science, but my feelings about what it delivers for us are decidedly neutral.  Even the things that seem most innocently positive can end up having unexpected negative consequences.  Science is not ultimately a good or a bad thing; it's a tool with no inherent moral bias, opening some doors for us while closing others. Most importantly though, I consider myself something of an armchair historian, and I find things both to value and be repulsed by in most time periods.  I think I would be just as comfortable or uncomfortable living in any period -- and it wouldn't really have much to do with the period itself.  We are hardly living in the worst of times, but we're not living in the best, either -- whatever "best" might mean.  Witness the "primitive" hunter-gatherer societies that have more leisure time than "modern" industrialized peoples.  Witness the European settlers, captured by Native American tribes in various skirmishes, or the escaped slaves who joined some of these tribes, who desperately wished not to be returned to "modern" civilization.

The idea that science will fix it for us strikes me -- in the present context especially -- as what the ancient Greeks had in mind by hybris:  a kind of drive-anyone-else-crazy cheerful-to-the-point-of-manic optimism in the face of all but certain catastrophe.  The species is facing certain unique challenges at the moment: as in, challenges that it has never faced as an entire species before.  We really are in this one together; no human population is sufficiently isolated that it doesn't need to worry.  Climate change aside (and there are massive changes in the pipeline, including the disappearance at some point of the polar caps), there's the massive extinction of species that's been going on for some time now, the lost of diversity within species, the loss of forest cover, the substantive loss of terrestrial biomass, the unsustainable extraction of resources and production of toxic (in one way or another) waste, and so on.  All have the human signature on them.  Any one of these, on its own, one might hope (if still perhaps somewhat naively) to be solved through some quick fix from science.  But all of them together?  Our relationship with the environment, as a global civilization -- truly, the first global civilization Earth has ever seen -- is drastically unsustainable along various dimensions.

...Which brings me to the third and final point.  There comes a point in the lifespan of every individual and species, so far as I can see, when the individual or species must change/adapt/become-other-than-what-it-has been... or die.  Life is defined by change, by openness to change, death by lack of change.  (That perfectly captures death, for me:  a state in which one does not change.)  And this period, I think, represents one of those distinctive turning points for our species.  If we do not change voluntarily -- either because we refuse to, or because we are unable to -- then change will happen regardless.  It might be change that "merely" decimates our numbers -- or it might be change that wipes us out entirely.  We are far more vulnerable to changes in our environment than we seem inclined to allow, and -- ironically -- our very adaptability to change is one of the things that makes us most vulnerable.  We adapt to things that really are not in our long-term (or even medium-term) interests to adapt to.