“From a selfish point of view, there is nothing so valuable that it is worth the risk of being alive.”
I consider the net worth of sentient life so far to be negative. Even taking into account only humans, at least humans as we know them until now, that is, humans from the past and present.
Humans have suffered terribly throughout history. If we also take into account non-human animals, the situation is much worse. So, unless we had rational reasons to believe that the net worth of sentient life in the future would be very different from today, it seems logical to think that the extinction of humanity would not cause a loss of astronomical value. Perhaps we have an emotional impulse that invites us to believe that the future will be better than the present, but it seems to me to be nothing more than an evolutionary bias; an evolutionarily advantageous belief, and also marked by the survivor bias.
Anyway, what will the future be like? We do not know. Recently (the last centuries and years) we have witnessed an exponential growth in the capacity that we humans have to transform reality. How far can this take us?
I consider it unlikely, but possible, that humans of the future will be able to reduce astronomical amounts of negative value in the future. For example, humans could ensure happiness for their own species and also for the rest of animals, as proposed in The Hedonistic Imperative. The extinction of humanity would lead to the loss of this possibility of astronomical reduction of negative value and creation of astronomical quantities of positive value in the future.
In any case, this can hardly be done by creating or maintaining sentient beings such as current humans or other animals, but by creating other types of animals or sentient beings, such as post-humans, or other types of beings, such as digital beings or sentient robots, permanently happy. The extinction of humanity in the short term would lead to the loss of this possibility of creating astronomical quantities of positive value, but in a broader perspective, humanity and animals, as we know them, must disappear, or be transformed greatly, if what we want is a happy world.
Of course, there are many things that do not need to be changed or disappear. Vertebrate mammals with fur, such as cats, will continue to have that grace, softness, and playful spirit. Humans can compose or enjoy symphonies, or football, or artistic expression of any kind. Love and beauty, in all its forms, can continue to exist as before. What cannot exist in a happy world is suffering, murder, torture, hatred, envy, etc.
Being very pessimistic, humans will also be able to create astronomical amounts of negative value in the future, in astronomical factory farms of biological wet beings suffering all around the universe, or in astronomical number of suffering subroutines, turning the dry matter of the universe into agonizing dry brains, made of sand, plastic and metal.
In summary, the current situation is negative but it’s not yet astronomically negative, and humans would be able to:
- push this negative figure towards to zero
- get an astronomical positive value
- get an astronomical negative value
Humans seem to be absolutely relevant to future happiness, and the present moment seems particularly important.
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