Humanity’s Uncertain Future w/ Thomas Moynihan
EPISODE #37
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Historian Thomas Moynihan shares the complex history of how humanity began to contemplate its capacity to bring about its own extinction, why the study of existential risk exposes a prevailing pessimism about the future, and what the search for extraterrestrial intelligence reveals about our unique place in the universe.
Thomas Moynihan is a writer from the UK, currently working with Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute. His work explores how our knowledge of the threats and promises of the future has developed throughout the past, revisiting the ways people have thought about both the failure and the flourishing of our species within the wider universe.
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Luke Robert Mason: You're listening to the FUTURES Podcast with me, Luke Robert Mason.
On this episode I speak to author and historian, Thomas Moynihan.
“Extinction is much further beyond that. It's the end of all history; the end of all ability to retrospect, to look back, and regret the mistakes of the past.” - Thomas Moynihan, excerpt from interview.
Thomas shared the complex history of how humanity began to contemplate its capacity to bring about its own extinction, why the study of existential risk exposes a prevailing pessimism about the future, and what the search for extraterrestrial intelligence reveals about our unique place in the universe.
Luke Robert Mason: Over the last century, humanity has suffered a self esteem crisis. Increasingly, we've come to the realisation that we alone are responsible for our own fate. In doing so, we've simultaneously realised that there are a myriad of consequences for our actions. Some of those consequences might even lead to our own destruction. As Thomas Moynihan explains in his comprehensive new book 'X-Risk', discovering the ability to fundamentally destroy ourselves is luckily only a recent invention. Oddly enough, this is a message that should give us hope. Indeed, we've only arrived at this moment through a long and extensive history - one that has seen dramatic and ever changing relationships with our capacity for destruction. As Moynihan points out, it is through an understanding, appreciating and learning from this history that we might actually find the potential to survive the next century: one that proves to be our riskiest yet.
Tom, I guess the obvious question is: at what point exactly did humanity start to contemplate its capacity to bring about its own extinction?
Thomas Moynihan: People first started worrying about their capacity for causing our own extinction in around 1900. There are a couple of rare instances of people discussing this, speculating about it beforehand, but it only really builds momentum around 1900 - more specifically, after the Great War - then building in the interval period, basically becoming far more prevalent within culture for obvious reasons after World War II. But, people have been worrying about human extinction caused by natural disasters for a bit longer, since about 1750.
Mason: It seems like The Enlightenment plays such a key role in the way in which we started to think about the possibility of our humanity ending.
Moynihan: Exactly, yeah, yeah. The reason for that fundamental insight coming from The Enlightenment is the idea that value is something made. Before that, there was a tendency to think of value as something inherent within the structure of the universe or something that we inherited from the precedent of nature, or the precedent of tradition. During the enlightenment - we're talking about a period between something like 1650 and 1800 - people started realising that value was something made. What I mean by that is that it was something created by our own interactions; our own dealings with each other; our own activities. What that meant, in a sense, was that value - in the sense of everything we care about - rests entirely on our own activity. It's not vouchsafed or made secure by anything beyond that. In that sense, we're entirely responsible for it.
Unsurprisingly around this time, flowing naturally from that fundamental insight of the enlightenment, people started worrying about the fact that if we go extinct, or if we disappear then value is done for; that's it. It was basically realising the severity of it that made people start thinking about it as an actual objective fact; a possible fact; a prospective event that could happen within nature.
Mason: It's not just about the biological entity - the homosapien - that we're saving. You say in the book that it's that idea - value - but also morals. The fact that human beings are capable of being moral entities is the thing worth saving. It's not just about saving us for the sake of saving us, is it?
Moynihan: Exactly. One of the things that prevented people from even thinking about extinction as an objective fact or a prospect is exactly because they didn't realise how severe that would be. This is something that flows through the ancient worldview in the West, down into the medieval Christian worldview - taking on different forms throughout those different epochs. There was this kind of baseline intuition that humans are the things they value could be destroyed but eventually, that'll be returned or compensated somehow. There's this kind of sense of the narrative justice of nature. Basically what that meant was all loss, all destruction, and all denigration of valuable things - things we care about - could only be a local phenomenon in the sense that it's never permanent. Everything is either replaced, or made up for, or compensated for, or justified, or eventually revealed to be in some sense tending towards a wider moral purpose.
Mason: It's wild to think that there was even a time when extinction wasn't part of our consideration. You've teased there that in both ancient and medieval cultures, they thought very differently about the future. They didn't feel the need to pre-empt or even predict the long term future because their relationship with the cosmos was one that was extremely different. Could you help explain what it was like to be thinking about the cosmos at this time and how it informed our understanding of this thing we now come to call 'the future'?
Moynihan: Yeah, so again, it's at the risk of making massive, broad overgeneralisations.
Mason: Go ahead, just make broad overarching generalisations, why not?
Moynihan: They call it big history, I guess because it involves abstraction. This baseline intuition is that there is kind of no distinction between ethics and what we now call physics. Back then, they also called it that, but it had a slightly different meaning. There is an indistinction between ethics and physics, so what does that mean? It means that our tendency to now separate what we think would be morally desirable or morally righteous from our objective theories about the world - what actually is out there in the vastness of the cosmos - that distinction didn't really exist. At the very least, it was very messy and blurred, and entangled.
A good example to take is Ptolemaic cosmology. This is the preprepriant to cosmology and basically the model of the universe or structure of the cosmos prior to Copernicus. Copernicus was the astronomer who kind of revealed that the Earth in fact goes around the sun, rather than the other way around. In the Ptolemaic cosmos, it's basically a hierarchy of nested spheres. Each one of those spheres is populated by various orders of angels.
We can see just envisioning this - and I'm sure everyone has seen the lovely woodcut pictures of this that come from medieval times - that hierarchy, which for the medieval mindset was just morality - there was no other kind of universal rights of man. All of that stuff was later - hierarchy was morality for them. Nonetheless, it's ensconced in the actual physical structure of the cosmos in which they live.
A further thing: notice that each of the levels in that cosmic hierarchy are populated. Another interesting thing here is that the central most part of Ptolemaic cosmology is hell. That's the centre of the Earth; the basement of the universe. God resides on the outermost sphere. Even though hell might be filled with bad things, it's still filled with spirits and things experiencing what we now recognise as sentient. It might be bad but it's still populated with something. Within this cosmology, there's absolutely no room for unpopulated regions of matter. That's what I mean by this complete in-distinction between ethics and physics which kind of strikes us as weird now, but that's the way people thought for millenia.
Mason: In other words, there was no understanding that this was created for anything but us. In other words, no matter what we do, essentially, nature's always going to come to the conclusion that the reason for it to exist is to sustain the human being. Is that correct?
Moynihan: Yeah, I think that is correct. You could put a couple of caveats on that. There's an aspect of medieval Christendom that is entirely human hating. It's not anthropocentric in that triumphant sense that the word is kind of now used for in turn. It was absolutely human hating, but we were still at the centre, in the same way that hell was still the centre, but it was the moral centre. We were the centre; the focus; the target of all that denigration. But still, you can have moral denigration and moral fullness - the absolute fullness of humanity. Or you can have our perfection, our angelic nature. Nonetheless, there's no room again for the absolute frustration or absence of some kind of moral judgment.
It's a hundred percent true that there's this tendency to think in terms of purpose and think in terms of some order being out there that will reveal itself in the end. It doesn't have to be celebrating humans, but nonetheless we're still the kind of central player of that narrative.
Mason: That becomes the important distinction in the book. What you're talking about there is the notion of apocalypse. Extinction and apocalypse aesthetically might look the same, but what is at stake is the thing that is fundamentally different. Could you just help our audience understand: what are those fundamental differences? Why is extinction and apocalypse such a different thing?
Moynihan: It's only very recently, I'm talking in the past - like maybe five decades or less, maybe a couple of decades - that we've built enough of a conceptual toolkit to think about extinction in a naturalistic, physicalistic, scientific, rigorous way. It's only quite recently that we've developed that conceptual toolkit enough that we can now retroactively look back and go: these are all the times when people weren't thinking about it. To make that distinction clear - and it comes back to what I was just talking about in terms of its inherent narrative justice in the cosmos - apocalypse, in a sense, and it's baked onto the word, is the revelation of moral order. Think about Judgment Day, right? It's obvious in the word. Doomsday itself actually comes from this similar etymological route. Doom means judgment, so it's this kind of day when the moral order becomes consummate, absolutely manifests in reality. God makes sure that that happens regardless of us, independent of our own action.
The catchphrase that I like to put this into relief is that apocalypse is the sense of an ending, whereas extinction is the ending of sense. Sense of an ending is apocalypse. Extinction is the ending of sense. What do I mean by ending of sense? Well, where apocalypse is the consummation of the moral order, extinction of sense is its irreversible frustration. There's no further revelations or no further meaning. It is the end of meaning itself. It's a really clean distinction once you can see it, but I would say we're still in the process of cleaning that distinction up for ourselves.
Mason: How are we then to understand the move from prehistory into Judeo-Christian religion? It feels like at some point, we understood the cosmos as this thing that essentially existed to serve us. The moment at which we started to make these separations and understand there might be something such as the apocalypse, was that the turning point for us starting to realise that in actual fact, our relationship with the cosmos is vastly different than what we expected?
Moynihan: Yeah, I mean that's actually a really fantastic question. Again, to generalise, the Greek worldview tended to be eternalist. What eternalist means is that essentially, there is no change. There's no irreversible change. All change and all new things are just returns of old things that we might have forgotten about or might not have seen. Essentially, nothing new ever comes along - nothing radically new. This in a sense is very obvious. Of course, for people living back on Greek islands or the Greek mainland in BC times, their sense of time was rooted in very obvious, visible, observable things like the cycling of the seasons, day and night cycles.
Later, with the move to Christendom, you get a sense of history being progressive, but it's progressive in an entirely preordained sense. It's very much that no matter what we do - completely independently of us and our decision making skills and uncertainties, with the messiness of knowing and acting completely independently of all that - this moral order will still be made consummate.
Mason: How does something called the 'principle of plenitude' play into this? That's certainly one of the ways in which we can kind of understand this idea that no matter what we do, something else will appear elsewhere. Nothing ceases to exist that basically won't exist again, as you're explaining there.
Moynihan: Yes, so the principle of plenitude is again one of these ideas that people have kind of assumed, implicitly or explicitly, for most of the history of thinking in the West. It fell apart around 200 or 300 years ago, and now it seems so obvious to us that it's not true - although it does persist in certain ways - that we find it hard to imagine thinking of the mindset where this is a fundamental axiom of reality.
So what is it? Basically, the principle of plenitude holds that if something can happen, it will happen. Just as much as there's never any wasted space in nature where something could be, but simply never is, by that same token something can never leave nature and leave behind a gap or wasted opportunity where something could be, but never returns. Basically, what it means is that there are no absences in nature. All absences are temporary.
A species might disappear, and we have records of Romans noticing this. There was a particular plant they used as a contraceptive and the supply couldn't keep up with the demand. Those Romans knew how to have a good time. The plant disappeared. We have records of Roman naturalists talking about the disappearance of this plant, which might lead you to think they have this basic intuition about extinctions or the irreversible loss of things from nature, but it's all nested within this wider framework of the principle of plenitude. Everything lost is later regained or regained elsewhere in space. It's this very wide framework level assumption that means that you can talk about catastrophes and disasters and losses, and this applies not just to things but also to values. You can have losses, but they're always a local phenomenon. It's always nested within this wider system of equilibrium between loss and compensation.
You can see, naturally, why this means that no one took extinction seriously, because it's always basically a local affair. Biologists call this an extirpation. An extirpation is loss of species from a specific locale - rather than extinction which is its loss forever, everywhere. Even though you can see people talking about the loss of animals, the dodo disappeared sometimes in the 1600s but people only actually noticed it was gone forever about 200 years later. For the longest period of time, there was no concept of extinction, only extirpation.
Mason: When we apply that to humans, basically ancient cultures had seen empires rise. They'd seen empires fall. They'd seen whole cities be destroyed and then be built again from the ashes. I guess all of that then informs the way in which they did have a relationship with the future, which was through symbols such as the Oracle of Delphi. The way in which she saw the future was very encroached and based on what you're describing there. She didn't predict the far future. What she was talking about was things that they had seen in their recent present, and that she was allowing to say would represent themselves again and again, and in finitum. Could you explain a little bit more about that relationship they did have with these Oracles in ancient times, and how that helped to inform their navigation of the near future?
Moynihan: One of the distinctions between prophecy - because people have always been engaging with prophecy, it's one of those perennial, natural impulses of what we are - the difference between prophecy and prediction is that prediction is very good at noticing when it's wrong. In fact, it's basically designed to notice when it's wrong. It's sensitive to its own uncertainty, whereas prophecy absolutely isn't. Most prophecies end up just being visions of what people want to happen, or want to happen to other people that they don't like. There's a fundamental difference here.
People had these Oracles like the Oracle of Delphi, as you say, and so there was an engagement with some kind of sense of looking forward. But again, as you say, it was always basically different versions of the same thing; different versions of the past.
I think a comparison you can make here is between unicorns; mythological beings; Chimeras, and scientific theories. They're both unobservable. Take the objects that science poses - no one has ever seen an atom. We see it through abstractions and prostheses. What makes it different from a unicorn and what makes it different from a goat stag - which is what Aristotle would use instead of a unicorn - is basically because it's counterintuitive in lots of ways. There's this idea of minimally counterintuitive ideas to basically explain the distinction between myths and scientific theories. Myth is something that is minimally counterintuitive. It's just a normal thing that we've all seen before, but with a little twist on it. Those ideas tend to spread because they've got this catchy spice to them, but they're basically things that we're all familiar with. They spread very easily, whereas scientific theories tend to be maximally counterintuitive.
Moving from that distinction, I think you can apply that to the distinction between our modern scientific forecasts for the future which are maximally counterintuitive in the sense that they often forecast things like the heat depth of the universe, when we're talking at the largest possible level, whereas exactly as you say, the older relations to the future were just regurgitated forms of the past. There are points where Aristotle, for example, explicitly said as much. He said we only have knowledge of things that have already been actual. Sometimes, on very rare occasions, we can become acquainted with things just as they come into actuality. You notice that what that means is that we can't think of possibilities that no one has ever seen before. There is one important possibility that none of us have ever experienced and that is the extinction of humanity, because no one will be around to talk about it or think about it anymore. That was an important thing missing from their conceptual repertoire when it came to the range of possibilities for the past, the present, and the future.
Mason: That almost feels like a form of hubris. Because we haven't seen the destruction of humanity on a totalising scale, as far as we're concerned, we don't think it's ever going to happen. I wonder if the way in which we present and represent extinction in our media and in our films, and in our science fictional narratives - at such a crazy rate at the moment, with the idea of seeing New York under metres and metres of water. We've been exposed to the idea of our extinction in multiple forms of media and in multiple ways. These are very visceral ways in which we're seeing our destruction, especially after the end of 9/11 and what was happening around that particular period of time. Do you think that by creating that form of media and by putting these dystopian visions into the world, that we're almost, I guess, flirting with a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Moynihan: An interesting thing is the discourse upon ruins which goes back to the 18th century. It's becoming a very popular kind of trope within popular culture. You get the kind of romantic poets who used to love to discourse upon the ruins of lost civilisations. Plato also did the same thing in the Myth of Atlantis, but it became a major poetic literary trope around 1800, which is also around the time when speculations on outright extinction also emerged.
Again, we have to be careful in the vicinity of these ideas because those things are, in a sense, completely different. The ability to ponder upon ruins is a continuation of history. It might be a continuation of history for someone else - someone that we wouldn't recognise. I think that's where the attraction that you point out in terms of the fall of empires and particularly post 9/11 - we can understand why that might become more attractive than it was before. It's a sense that it's not my history, but it's still someone's. This kind of future point where someone's looking back on the ruins of my epoch or my empire. Still, it's still someone there. There's still someone around. It might not be recognisably us or me, or I, but it's still recognisably human or at least some kind of observer that's understanding the flow of history.
Extinction is much further beyond that. It's the end of all history; the end of all ability to retrospect and look back, and regret the mistakes of the past. That's inherently harder to put on the silver screen; to represent. How do you narrativise the end of all narration? What on the surface seems like our cinema obsession with the extinction of humanity, I can think of barely any films that actually properly represent the extinction of humanity. They represent last man scenarios and they represent post apocalyptic civilisational collapses, but there are barely any that show all of humanity disappearing and the world continuing without us. It would make for a kind of boring film. There are ones where there are aliens or posthumans around after us, but again there is a sense of continuation there.
Mason: That's what you do so well in this book. You tease the idea of what it would mean to not have meaning anymore. That's really hard for folks to grasp, but essentially human beings are the things that give meaning and value into the world. We have intrinsic value because we're able to do that. We've gone through these historical points, starting to realise what that value really means. I guess it all goes back in some way, shape or form, to the way in which we have a relationship with nature and how nature functions.
We have to ask ourselves: is this world full of value, or is it full of disvalue? Is the Earth itself alive, or is it dead? Does organic matter emerge from the dead matter or does it happen the other way around? What we're really dealing with and struggling with when we ask these questions of what it means for humans to become extinct is really what does it mean when there's no longer these value making entities to acknowledge the existence of life in the universe? I guess that the moment where we started to realise that in actual fact, our relationship with nature is slightly problematic, was a turning point between the 1600s and the 1800s that you've described so wonderfully as 'cosmic nonchalance'. What is cosmic nonchalance and how does that function into our changing relationship with nature, ourselves, our understanding of what might be possible in terms of our existence?
Moynihan: Before I answer the question on cosmic nonchalance, just to pick up on one of the things you said regarding value and nature backed value - how those things link up - we don't have a good enough answer for that yet but we're getting there very slowly. I'm glad you said 'acknowledge' when you said "If we're gone there's nothing around to acknowledge the value." I think a lot of these discussions some people might hear instead of talking about the loss of humanity as something incredibly bad, potentially the worst thing that could happen to us - but it sounds very anthropocentric in that sense that we're the only valuable thing in the universe. This might sound like these older world-views that at least implicitly I'm kind of proposing that we've had some kind of advancement and insight or wisdom over, in that they propose that the universe is made for us. The universe is absolutely not made for us. It doesn't hate us, it doesn't love us, it's absolutely unresponsive to anything we recognise as hate or love.
This is why the pessimism that you get - particularly after 1800 and particularly after the prospect of extinction kind of unleashes itself into culture - you get this kind of Schopenhauer dissuade - these kinds of thinkers, getting into the sphere of nature hating us and being this evil force. You still get it - modern day nihilists love this stuff - Cthulhu, all that kind of discourse, right? That's still nature caring about us.
To get back to the wider point, there are things with intrinsic value - at least I think so - that aren't human. Biodiversity; other species; maybe just complexity itself; physical complexity; maybe even nature in its independence. There's a sublimity in that that we think might be important just beyond our response to it. It's not that we're the only valuable things in the universe, but insofar as we recognise, we are the only evaluators that we currently know of. We're only things that can make judgments about those things that might have intrinsic value beyond us. We're also the only things that are very good at doing instrumental value very well, but we're also the only things that seem to be able to recognise terminal values; intrinsic values.
That leads me onto answering your actual question: cosmic nonchalance. These world-views that we've been talking about - the ancient one; the Christian one where value is safe and secure and independent of our actions - you might think that that all fell apart when the scientific revolution swung around and got rid of all of those nasty myths from our outlook. Unfortunately, history is never that simple, particularly the history of ideas. One thing I've been thinking a lot about recently is that with the history of technology, you can point to when a steam engine was made and go, "That's when the steam engine first popped into existence." With ideas, it's way more messy. One of the governing forces in our human intellect is what I call 'conceptual inertia'. It's like overhang from old ways of thinking into what's seen as rid of those older ways. I'm sure there are plenty of things that we're currently talking about and doing that are riddled with forms of conceptual inertia, that people in 200 years will degenerate us for, hopefully.
One of these examples of conceptual inertia within the scientific worldview was taking over the principle of plenitude. What that meant in practice was scientists would look up at this vast cosmos that had been revealed - the decentering of planet Earth - it made the notion of a plurality of worlds far more popular. People have thought about plural worlds and other planets beyond the ones that we can see since people have been thinking about the wider cosmos, probably. It gained a lot of momentum after the scientific revolution. These scientists would look up and think about these vast amounts of worlds elsewhere. If every star has planets like our one does then there are a lot of planets out there. They just thought: well, it would be a lot of wasted space if they didn't have living life forms - rational beings - to appreciate the beauty of nature and the work of God's creation on them. They all just presumed that all these other planets were populated, and populated with, basically, humanoid beings. You get some of the best scientists of the epoch making claims saying, "Yes, they must have geometry that's exactly the same as ours. Yes, they must have sciences. They must enjoy the benefits of society. They must live in houses as well, of course, because they must protect themselves from the elements. They're bipedal." Some of them admitted that they might be crustaceans, but they'd still be bipedal and have binocular eyes.
Basically, this kind of idea that the Copernican Revolution decentred humanity was a bit more complicated than that. In decentering us, it kind of projected us across infinity. We'd look up into this vast cosmos and see the human reflected back at us - a great example of conceptual inertia.
To finally answer your question, what this meant was that people thought that our planet was destroyed, and people have been playing round with these ideas in a recognisably modern sense since the beginning of the Scientific Revolution. They thought: that doesn't really matter. Say our planet gets cracked and destroyed; desiccated - that doesn't matter because there's humanoids elsewhere, following their valuable pursuit, enjoying the universe and feeling all of the pleasures and pains of life. Our loss is basically a meaningless loss. You might be surprised to hear this, but people said this explicitly from the 1600s down to the mid-1700s, and even later.
Mason: Having heard what you've just said there, I guess we had this moment in time where we had this peopled relationship with the cosmos - this assumption that the entirety of whatever was out there was very similar and perhaps even a reflection of what we had here back on Earth. There started to be cracks in that cosmic nonchalance. The first cracks were quite literally from the realisation that things could crack through our atmosphere. We started to realise that in actual fact, the cosmos was no longer stable or secure, but in actual fact it might be a hazard full of threats from things like near Earth objects. How did our realisation and understanding of geoscience start to destabilise the idea that what's out there is also a very relaxed version of what we have here on Earth?
Moynihan: Yeah, yeah. It's a long story, the move from a kind of perfect cosmos. Aristotle, again - going back to Aristotle - he said that the heavens were impermanent; they were perfect; they were incapable of corruption. That's because there's a sense of the really nice balance of the orbit and their continuous, methodical, seemingly painstakingly perfect motion. That started to fall apart when people like Galileo noticed sunspots. They thought: okay, that looks like a spot on a human as a form of corruption, so a spot on the sun seems to counteract what Aristotle was saying. Then people started to think more about asteroids and comets. These are these bits of rock that are just flying around and seem to destabilise, basically, the perfect ordering. Towards the end of the 1800s, people started to document these kinds of very large, intersolar comets: Ceres; Pallas. These seemed like bits of larger planets, these kinds of ruins - to go back to the topic of ruins.
People started to think: oh, so the solar system doesn't seem to have this perfect, rational, ordered, symmetrical design. It's filled with bits of junk. At the same time, people started to also think: well maybe there's evidence that they've hit the planet before. So you can find French philosophers of the Enlightenment talking about this quite early on. This all was moving in tandem, as you say, with the maturation of geoscience as a scientific field. It's kind of one of the slightly younger fields of science. The 1700s are like the big century for the consolidation of what we now recognise as the Earth sciences. Prior to that, people either presumed that the Earth had always been here in the way that it was now, or they presumed that the kind of story of the Earth was also the story of Adam and Eve, and the fall of mankind.
Earlier on in the 1700s, geological thinking tended to be as sophisticated as just going, "Those mountains, they're not symmetrical. They're kind of ugly. How do I explain that?" Because of this idea of God being the perfect designer and craftsman, people thought that he would have created this perfectly spherical planet. But then obviously valleys and mountains counteract that. Originally, people were like, "Oh it's our fault because we ate the apple and sinned, and then God messed up this perfect planet we had." Then eventually, people started thinking more in terms of physical causes rather than moral narratives. People started thinking of physical causes of all of these pockmarks - evidence for a ruined planet. By the end of the century, a vast amount of paleontological evidence had been built.
Scientists had kind of been thinking about fossils. Da Vinci was one of the first to think of them properly as biogenic matter; things caused by organisms. Prior to that, people thought they were jokes that nature played on it. A cheeky rock would decide to look like a shell. Da Vinci and a couple of Renaissance scholars started going, "No, they're probably imprints from very old lifeforms." When it was just shells and bivalves and these little things, it was easy to have recalls to the principle of plenitude and say, "Well, even if we can't see these animals on our back door still alive, even if we only have them in these fossilised forms, they probably exist somewhere else and no one's taking much notice of them." Or in the case of shells, it was very easy to say that they were still at the bottom of the ocean somewhere, still alive and living.
By the 1750s, there was evidence of bones from what we now recognise as mastodons, mammoths, and megafauna. It's a lot harder to maintain that those are hiding somewhere beyond our observation. Thomas Jefferson famously maintained this up until the 1790s: when most scientists were reaching consensus around the fact that these bones were prehistoric and therefore extinct beasts, Thomas Jefferson was absolutely confident that there were mammoths still roaming around in the wilderness of the Americas. As I said, exactly in the 1790s, there was scientific consensus reached about the factual, undeniable reality of species extinctions. Previous species had simply disappeared, for whatever reason. They'd gone and they were no longer around, which was a shock to this worldview, still enamoured with plenitude.
Around the time as well, scientists were taking more of a look into the deeper strata and were starting to realise that there were no fossils in these ones. You get these first comments on the idea that the Earth might have actually pre-existed complex life. This was a radically new idea as well. This is what then takes us back up into the sky. These kinds of scientists looked deep down into the Earth and saw for the first time, very evidently, that life hadn't always been a permanent feature on our own planet. If there hasn't always been a permanent feature on our own planet, why should we presume that it's an omnipresent feature of the whole cosmos? It was looking inwards that made us see outer space in a completely different way.
Mason: All that just ends with us feeling completely decentered, completely decoupled, and as you so wonderfully describe in the book, 'cosmically lonely'. We're the only ones, or potentially the only ones there. That kind of came to a screeching halt in front of our eyes when suddenly, we realised that humans were fast becoming decoupled from the cosmos because we started to realise that maybe there is no grand plan for us. Oddly enough, aliens seem to be pretty important to how we thought about our own place in the universe. Part of that is due to a paradox, and that is one of the Fermi paradox. For our audience, firstly could you describe what the Fermi paradox is? Secondly, describe how it had such a major impact on our thoughts about our own survival and even why our own survival might be urgently important.
Moynihan: Aliens of course are going to be important in this narrative, given that they were the kind of alibi that we used to point to, to go, "Oh no, extinction doesn't exist. There are humans everywhere. There are alien humans." This builds throughout the 1800s, this sense that: hang on, all this evidence from myriad fields of science seems to be converging on this idea that it's probably quite bad practice to contaminate all of our objective, factual theories with our moral wishes and desires.
With that backdrop, you begin to get a couple of people here and there - philosophers and scientists - saying, "Actually, it's probably quite naive to presume that the whole universe is populated with humans." This was also the century of vast progress. Humanity - The Great Acceleration, as we now call it - really beginning to become a planetary force. You start to get people talking about humanity's effect on the whole planet. People in the 1800s first started thinking of words for this. The recent craze around the anthropocene, there was a fad for it back in the 1800s and a lot of scientists started calling our geological epoch 'the anthropozoic' and similar kinds of things.
You get this sense that intelligence seems to be on this upward track to really disturbing its environment, becoming an obvious force within it. In the other direction, this sense that we can't just look up at the sky and presume that it's populated with stuff like us. Those two growing and in a sense conflicting intuitions come to a head in 1950 and reach a point of annunciation in the physicist Enrico Fermi. He was famously at a lunch with some of his colleagues on the Manhattan Project - a nice historical poeticism here that I'm sure we'll come back to. They're on this fateful site of the Manhattan Project and they're talking to lunch. They're talking about the UFO craze that was just then beginning to build. They sit down to dinner, probably talking about other things like chain reactions, and Fermi suddenly turns around and goes, "Well, where is everyone?" All of the other party members knew exactly what he was talking about. He was talking about the aliens. On first reflection, it seems like maybe a silly thing to ask. Then on second reflection, it's like: oh, that's an interesting question.
One of the things that at least I've found is that the more you think about this, the more profound it becomes. So much so that I think it could be one of the most important riddles of the modern scientific worldview. It rests on those two intuitions that I was just talking about: intelligence tends to disrupt its environment on the one hand; and on the other hand, we see absolutely no evidence of large scale disruptions when we look up into the night sky. That tells us something, in a sense. It tells us that either we're the first thing on that upwards conveyor belt to large-scale disruption, or there's something that stops any kind of intelligence from going from being planet bound to expanding outwards.
In the sense that I was talking about where it was looking down into the past of the Earth that made us think about the precarity of intelligence in the wider cosmos, looking into the cosmos and seeing the silence then caused us to look down onto ourselves and think: there's something quite wrong here.
Mason: That's almost the joke in your book. It's the aliens that made us realise just how important humans are. Or the lack of aliens, in actual fact, made us realise just how important we are. What the Fermi paradox actually suggests is that we might be the best chance of propagating this thing called life, this thing called consciousness, possibly this thing called intelligence throughout the universe. Then it confronts us with something that seems to be a factor of everyday life which is that the reason we might not be seeing these 'aliens' is because they just never made it through the technological progression that we're currently going through to be able to then go to the stars and to be able to visit and communicate with us. If they were there, perhaps we would have seen them already, and we might be going through that process of advancing our technology. By doing so, that might be the tipping point. That might be the thing that means that we don't need the planet. We become so technologically advanced that we actually end up destroying ourselves before we get the chance to go and visit other folk.
I guess then the question is: how does that change our relationship with the universe? You say so beautifully in the book how when we suddenly realise that maybe we're the universe's best hope at propagating life and at making this very lifeless place full of things that are in the image and likeness of us, you say that essentially that puts us in a place of making us the gardeners of the galaxy. Not guardians of the galaxy, but gardeners of the galaxy, engaged in this horticulture of the heavens. Is that the crux of it? Is that the reason we're here: to propagate the other planets? Or is that just one possibility for why human beings in our current state right here on planet Earth are so important?
Moynihan: One of the important things to keep in mind is that a lot of this reasoning going on is very probabilistic, drenched in uncertainty. There's this kind of reaction to that argument that's like: oh, what, the only reason we're important is because we're unique. That's not quite it, because everything is unique. Every species is unique, because there's only one of it. If it goes, that's it, gone forever. It's kind of not unique to be unique in that pure root, factual sense. We're able to - as I said earlier - make evaluative judgments to value things; to find things valuable; to acknowledge them as valuable. One of the things that we acknowledge as valuable is intelligence, but also life. That's where the horticultural stuff comes in. It's this recognition that ahead of any evidence to the contrary, it would be immensely rash for us to be cosmically nonchalant and go, "Well, there'll be someone else elsewhere."
In terms of contemporary science and scientists, the major person that I can think of that might be someone you'd want to point the finger at and go, "You're a cosmic nonchalance-ist" would be Simon Conway Morris who studies macroevolution. He's a biologist. He's a big fan of this thing called 'convergent evolution'. We've just had an example of it happen in the UK where coronavirus has picked up a beneficial mutation independently but identical to the South African variant. That's an example of convergent evolution. There's something beneficial in the design space of an organism or of organisms such that they tend towards it just through the blind process of natural selection. The canonical examples are eyeballs. Those evolved independently a whole bunch of times. Echolocation, as well. The ichthyoid shape that is shared by dolphins - which are mammals, fish and ichthyosaurus' - which are reptiles.
We have all of these examples of convergent evolution anyway. Conway Morris is very confident that humans are so convergently adaptive that there's an inevitability in their existence. Just after making this argument, he argues, "But we can't just presume that there's humans elsewhere, ahead of evidence. How rash would that be?" For the older people who believed in this kind of upward conveyor belt towards something very humanoid, the reason why that didn't really occur to them is because they weren't thinking probabilistically, I don't think. Nonetheless, we have no evidence to the contrary so we should act as if we are the only intelligent thing in the universe. That's not human centrism, it's just value centrism. We just happen to be the bootloader for what is valuable and intelligent.
Taking all of that into account through reading this, I've gained personally - I think - quite a strong appreciation of the kind of drive for wanting the universe to be a moral place. Something that in our disillusioned, dejected moment in history seems so naive that the very impulses are kind of renunciated. Just reading how all these people from the past desperately wanted this to be true, I think that when we realise that it isn't true in the sense that it's just by default reflected back to us by the cosmos, it's full of value just independently of us, that's just not true. We shouldn't just therefore give up on that view. We should realise that it's, in a sense, our obligation to fix the cosmos.
At the moment, yes it is a massive amount of wasted real estate for all these places being bathed in abundant energy that is currently just going to squander. It's just hitting inorganic masses. As far as we know, there is nothing interesting going on in the whole galaxy except for potentially here. In that sense, it's kind of almost our obligation to go out and fix that waste, in the same way that say, if you saw an art gallery burning, you'd want to stop it. Currently we're in that cosmic situation where there's kind of a dam of things that could be used to create value that's just flowing away. All we'd need to do is find a way to channel it and use it. Again this doesn't have to be human centrism. If we agree that life, biodiversity, complexity itself is in some sense intrinsically valuable, then again it's in a sense our duty to go and maximise it elsewhere. At the moment, as I said, it's very much the opposite situation.
Mason: That's what I love about how you've structured your writing here. You're not really telling us the history of things that are going to kill us. You're telling us the history of the value of the human being. This is really an argument whereby you're using the idea of extinction to make us suddenly stand up for ourselves as human beings and go, "You know what? In actual fact, we do deserve to be around, for this multitude of reasons." You so interestingly look at this idea of humanoids reemerging. The idea that if we did suddenly die off - and to be fair we're just a tiny, tiny little blip in terms of the cosmic scale of time - if something did destroy us, would the multitude of time that we've got allow for us to reemerge again? The answer is that yes, possibly. Maybe we have had this process of recurrence - maybe not on this planet but other planets.
But then that begs the question of what are we trying to preserve? Are we trying to preserve just the humanoid, or the emergence of the humanoid throughout time and space? Or, are we trying to preserve the collective knowledge that we're able to create through this moment of time? The one thing that humans do so well and do so uniquely is that they have a collective culture. They're able to take knowledge and pass it from the past into the present and then through to the future. That's our very unique skill. It feels like what we're trying to preserve is that - the body of knowledge itself - not so much whether it comes in the form of a human person, but what we've learnt by just being human is the thing that's worth preserving.
Moynihan: Yeah. I guess we have to again abstract now we're talking about the whole cosmos and the place of morality in it. You have to abstract. I use the word 'value' a lot. Obviously a lot of people are probably thinking: what does that mean?
Mason: What's the value add of being human in the 21st century? What's our return on this blasted investment?
Moynihan: Exactly, exactly. As you point out, value has this kind of dismal science twinge to it. What I would say is that what I'm saying is value is just the ability to correct ourselves. A lot of people that don't like the human - maybe this is a kind of bias that I have from being the person that I am and writing the things I am, and reading the comments on the things that I do - I'm not talking about anti humanist academics. I'm talking about this general anti humanist tone. It finds expression in people being like, "Oh, I agree with Thanos." These are kind of pop cultural coordinates, but nonetheless they are important. There is this general tone, I would say. I know that's diffused, but you know.
Mason: Does that general tone then emerge from the environmentalist movement or how the environmentalist movement has at least presented itself in the last two to three years? We have something quite literally called 'Extinction Rebellion' which puts all the emphasis on the extinction and very little emphasis on the rebellion. It just feels like here's the thing we're heading towards, as if that's the thing that's going to scare us, finally, into the rebellion. It's almost as if they've got their priorities mixed there. There's vast swathes of people in the environmentalist movement who would argue that if humans just go out the way, then nature would fix the climate mess that we've caused and then something else will reemerge in our place, hopefully in sync with what's going on, on planet Earth. I can sort of understand that impetus.
Moynihan: I think the environmentalist movement didn't come up with that. It's kind of latched onto it as this preexisting waft in the air of culture in Western Europe, which is the main place where this exists, I think. As part of this research, I looked back on previous spheres and previous times. The major one throughout the 50s and 60s aside from thermonuclear annihilation was overpopulation. This was the original beginnings of the environmentalist movement. On the one hand you have Silent Spring by Rachel Carson and that was raising the alarm on pesticide use and that type of environmental degradation. The other major strand was neo malthusianism which basically says there are too many humans. You read that stuff and it's so unpalatable. By our own standards 60 years later, there is some really nasty stuff in there. People advising that the developing world administers sterilisation programmes, really nasty stuff.
Obviously you don't see that now in the more antihumanist, more malthusian aspects of the environmental movement as it currently stands. Nonetheless, there is - again as a form of inertia - a slightly pernicious, malthusian sentiment remaining there. This idea that we are the virus. I think it's an inverted sense of the old sense of cosmic nonchalance that I picked on earlier, talking about hell for the medieval world or this idea that Schopenhauer specifically said, "We live in the worst of all possible worlds." and he really wanted that to be true. These people stand in that lineage where it can parade as hard nosed and realist because it's pessimist - although those two words are completely not the same thing. It can parade as those because it's all dark and nasty, and it seems to be taking account of the decentering lessons of the past centuries. Again, it's just that they want to be the centre of the world. Even if they want to be world vain rather than the purpose, the whole teleological point of all creation, they still want to be world vain. I don't want to psychoanalyse people, but I will allow the listener to have a go at it. I think that there are very pernicious, malthusian strains in current thinking.
On a different end of things, one of the reasons for pessimism about the future is looking at the crimes of the recent past. They are humongous and awful, atrocious and unforgivable. That means that there's a kind of scepticism or a suspicion about value itself and what it even is. Is it even something that guides our actions? Do we use reason to get where we're going, or do we just end up there and post hoc rationalise backwards, and justify everything? I think that's a major split in different ways of thinking about the world that are still with us.
What I would say about crimes of the past is that value is again, as I said earlier, the ability to correct yourself; the ability to write those wrongs. I would say that they will always remain unforgivable. There is no sense of this utopia future. Marx said that the final revolution will justify all previous ones. You can see why that leads into slightly dangerous forms of utopian thinking, and I agree, but we can - at least in the long prospect of the future should we not muck up - create a world that is so radically better than the current one that the whole thing looks slightly less cruel, and pointless, and evil. It's not just writing the crimes of the human past. I think it's also writing about the crimes of the cosmic past. It's just this vast, abiotic waste that's filled with nothing of interest or value until potentially we emerged. Billions of years before us, where it was just squandering energy and stars pumping out vast amounts of energy into nothingness. I think in a sense, we can kind of tip the balance a little bit in the future. That's what I think value is. There is value in being able to correct yourself, basically. I think that's why we should stick around.
Mason: The problem comes when we make a mistake that isn't correctable. I think that's where the entire field of existential risk really plays in the 21st century. You're affiliated with the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute which has figures like Mick Bostrom - who's lovingly called Bostrodamus by a mentor of mine, Professor Steve Fuller. He really helps us solidify this idea of existential risk in the 21st century. Why do you think there's been such an emergence of thinkers like this, who want to look at the multitude of possibilities for the extinction of our humanity in a very objective way?
Moynihan: I think it's picking up on what I said at the very beginning, which is that it's only in the past maybe two or three decades that we've actually created a crisp enough concept of what's actually at stake in extinction. Now it's a lot easier to look back and go, "Oh, these were the times when people weren't thinking about it." What I see as the reasons for this - people who have lived through this would perhaps have better answers - but what I see is a couple of things. The Cold War creates this sense of impending doom, but that doom is very diffuse. People talk interchangeably about the destruction of the West and the descutrition of civilization itself and of the whole species. Those things are all so enormous that they all melt together. There's this cognitive bias called scope neglect where when things get big enough - numbers or scales of severity - we lose the ability to distinguish between them., even though those distinctions might be incredibly important and vast.
One of those is that around the 1980s - and the reasons for this might be that it was around this time that scientists really were putting together a robust case for the actual mechanisms behind nuclear fallout that could lead to outright extinction. We're talking about 'nuclear winter' - Carl Sagan pioneered that work. It was around this time that philosophers - Carl Sagan as well - but philosophers and primarily the ethicist Derek Parfit started making these arguments that human extinction is severe in a way that's far, far, far worse than say the destruction of even 99% of humans. That remaining one percent - and there are billions of us so that's a significant amount of people - even though that's the worst thing that would ever happen in history thus far, there's still the potential for history to continue. It falls into the ruination that we were talking about earlier.
With the outright destruction of humanity, that's not just the destruction of all of those currently living souls, and the pain, and the frustration, and the loss that that causes. It's also the loss of the entire future. It's not just the loss of humanity. It's the loss of humanity's potential, as well. You can see how that links back into value being the ability to correct yourself.
Parfit made this argument, and so did a dearmourment activist, Jonathan Schell. A bunch of people kind of convergently made this argument around the same time in the 80s. They really, again, put into crisp distinction just how much worse extinction would be to a lot of the other things we thought of as worst case scenarios. I think that created a kind of clean, ethical, philosophical case. It was also in the 80s that the Fermi paradox really started to be taken and paid attention to as a serious scientific issue amongst cosmologists, astronomers, astrophysicists, and people interested in this stuff - it really started to become a paradox.
There was a lot of optimism around SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) in the 60s and 70s. Then in the 80s that started to fall apart for myriad reasons, so the silence became a lot louder in the 80s as well. Then around the 90s, the internet took hold and disparate communities of I guess what you'd now call a nerd - highly intelligent people that are able to think outside of the box and think unconventionally, but also rigorously - these communities coalesce.
One of these communities was the transhumanist community and the extropian community as well, which had this very strong sense of the sheer amount of freedom and value that could be in the future. One of the things that was the coalescing factor of that community was the idea of nanotechnology. Nanotechnology presented itself as potentially unlocking the ability for unbounded cornucopianism - anything we want - but at the same time presented this ability to potentially destroy the biosphere if it was invented. This was an idea that was very, very much in vogue during the 90s. I'm thinking of K. Eric Drexler and his work. This was the basis of the transhumanist community, so there was a sense of what now appears very utopian in the sense of this impending nanotechnological future, but there was also a very resolute idea in recognition that that vast valuable future over the hill - we could go extinct before we reach that. It's an upping of the stakes.
Since then there have been similar communities after the transhumanist one in the 90s that have been torchbearers for those similar themes. I'm thinking of the LessWrong community, the online rationalist crowd, and now Effective Altruism. So yeah, I think it was just this building momentum behind this way of looking at the world which I saw on Twitter the other day referred to as the 'high stakes worldview' which I love as a term. I'm going to nick it and use it myself. I think it's as good a placeholder for modernity as there is. Modernity is the high stakes worldview.
It came to institutional fruition through the work of Nick Bostrom. He's the founder of the FHI (Future of Humanity Institute). In a sense, he kind of single handedly made these topics philosophically legitimate. There were people beforehand - John Leslie - who wrote on these topics in very serious, analytical ways, but it was in a sense Bostrom who really pushed them into philosophical sophistication, and it just so happens that Derek Parfit was his PhD supervisor. You can see the connection between where I started and where I've just ended.
Mason: I like calling them the 'no future folk' because they spent their entire lives trying to map out what's going to kill us eventually. There's a belief that they are right, we're not going to be around to find out about it anyway, so thanks for that one, Nick.
I guess what I'm trying to work out is, where do we go from here? Do we put our trust in the individuals who've been able to create extreme forms of wealth using the technology that we also believe might be our demise? There's kind of a cruel joke here. The technology that may end up destroying us has given a vast amount of wealth to individuals who now realise that the technology they've created has caused a circumstance that's unliveable, so now they're going to have to try and fix that. I guess that goes kind of back to what you were saying: we're able to fix the problem. This is their way of repenting for their sins, almost. If they can get a rocket to Mars, then maybe we'll forgive them for the extractive corporate capitalism they've been engaging in here on Earth for the last 25 to 50 years. It's kind of a weird devil's bargain moment that we're in right now.
My question to you, Tom, is where do we go from here?
Moynihan: I think the more people talking about these things, the better. Then you're going to get different voices. Some of these things are so important that it doesn't really matter who's talking about them and who's popularising them. Also, in the process of being popularised, I think there will be a diversification of different ways of thinking about this that I think should be productive. Obviously there's a resource cost to diversification of viewpoints that has drawbacks, I guess. There's the common argument - this goes way back to HG Wells and that kind of era: oh dear, we've created the ability to kill each other and we don't have a unipolar government. This is a century old theme of futurism, and was a big theme amongst transhumanists as far as I'm aware, in the coalescence of the movement.
I think it's only good that there seems to be a shift and it is down to the spread, the dissemination of ideas around existential risk. I think it's also down to the attention and the change in tone around climate change discourse. The fact that AI is evidently developing quite fast at the moment, that might not continue. There's been boom and bust cycles before. There has been a shift, I think. I perceive it as good. It's interesting, as you said, the kind of playfulness involved in thinking about these possibilities. For most of the history of going through these ideas, it's people taking the piss out of them more often than taking them seriously.
Mason: You mention Jules Verne in the book.
Moynihan: Yeah, yeah, and Jonathan Swift as well. He gets a look in, because he absolutely hated science. He thought it was these weird antisocial freaks that were just playing around with vacuum pumps and wasting their time, not contributing to civilization. You could say that back when he was around because there weren't genuine, undeniable, material changes. The sciences hadn't yet picked up that much pace. They did in the century afterwards with the Industrial Revolution. People have always taken the piss out of him. There's always been a kind of nonchalance around these ideas. I think it comes from a kind of recourse to common sense.
Let's go back to Aristotle. That 'recourse to what I know is what there is' kind of thinking. You see this with the COVID situation as well. Particularly the people who are in COVID denial. They are like, "Oh we've gone through this in the past, we can go through it again. Everything will be fine. We don't need to do anything, we didn't do anything in the past." Obviously there's a strange thing going on there. When we encountered similar situations in the past, we weren't aware of them as they were happening so we didn't have that same moral obligation to do something about them.
There's always been this kind of storm pool attitude to thinking about this. A lot of the people that I quote in the book are satirising people worrying about the severity of extinction or a very rational end to the world. That's the title of the first chapter. It comes from an article totally taking the piss out of these kinds of new ways of thinking.
Through my perspective from that all being in the background of my mind, I'm just so happy that there is this kind of shift towards people actually thinking about these things seriously. Where do we go from here? That's a job for the engineers, the politicians, the decision makers, the policy makers.
Mason: So you're just going to relinquish control, are you? That's not the answer I expected after reading this book, but I do understand your optimism there. You say something so beautiful within the pages of the book which is that our understanding of existential catastrophe comes with existential hope. They come as a pair. We need to predict the risks that may eventually kill us to be able to then mitigate and come up with strategic responses to them. I understand that that's what's motivating your optimism there.
I'm also slightly concerned about a self fulfilling prophecy. The more we do probabilistic forecasting or futurology and the more that sort of informs our understanding of the possibility of our annihilation, and the more we create these global models and forecasts, the more we become secure in the agency and the authority of that information and how it presents itself. Basically, if a computer model tells us that Miami's going to be underwater in 20 years, then what we do in the present is go, "Oh, that is a fact. Miami's going to be underwater in 20 years." It hasn't come to pass, it's not actual yet, but we assume it's a fact and then we start doing investments into things like seawalls. We're basically going to drive investment around building massive protections around the island of Miami to make sure Miami isn't under 20 foot of water by 2050 or whatever the proclamation or prediction is. What that ends up doing to us is makes us focus on the solutions as opposed to focusing on mitigating the problem in the first place. Why don't we stop Miami being 20 foot underwater instead of finding solutions for when Miami is 20 foot underwater?
It just feels like we should probably be concerned about self fulfilling prophecy, because a preoccupation with these sorts of risks could eventually end us up in a place where we create these scenarios for these risks to actually occur. If we allow Elon to build his rockets, we can not worry about how we're gardening our current planet because at least we can physically see our backup plan - our plan B - being built in front of our eyes. It just feels like we're at this very memetically dangerous point in time where what we decide to put our attention on is what's going to define our outcomes. The present really does have an effect over the future.
Moynihan: Yeah, yeah I know. I couldn't agree more. That's one of the dynamics that begins as soon as prediction, in a modern sense, begins. You see it in the beginning of the stock market. It's that self fulfilling prophecy aspect. People talk about moral hazard as one of the reasons not to invest or look into geo-engineering and stuff like that. As you point out, this idea that if we have the means to mitigate it, we can still keep treating the Earth as a trash heap. I'm not sure if these things are so intimately connected in that sense, that looking for the solution to things precludes acting responsibly.
For me personally, talking about horticulture and gardening the galaxy, I think that biocomplexity and biodiversity has an intrinsic value. Yes we should be looking at ways of putting failsafes into not just human life but life - Earthborn life, more generally - creating redundancies in that. The only redundancy at the scale of an astrophysical disaster is spreading beyond just a single planet or even perhaps a single solar system. We can invest in all that and that's ultimately, probably, one of the only ways to actually build longevity into whatever it is we're doing here. At the same time, also recognising the intrinsic value of the things we're currently messing up. We need to not fall into that moral hazard, self-fulfilling prophecy trap.
One of the ways is thinking about intrinsic values in that sense. Things that are good regardless of their instrumental value to us. I think that's very important. A cosmos with more life in it is better than one without. That means that yes, we should protect the Earth as it currently is, but also invest in those ways of going further abroad. Such as they are, they are what they are right now, which leaves a lot to be desired, right?
Mason: Reading and looking at your work, the wonderful revelation for me was that a lot of these ideas and a lot of these dreams that we have about the future are historically based. If we want to understand the future, we really do have to understand our history, because that's the way in which we craft and form what we want to put out into the world. You so beautifully say that our mental time travel - the fact that we can mentally choreograph hypothetical futures, predict the non present, plan and strategise - that's the thing that is so important about being human. That's the thing that's worth preserving. That's the thing that we might find is what allows for our preservation. That unique way of being and that unique value that we have is our ability to constantly overcome what is thrown in our way. It only happens in a change of mindset. It's not really technologically based. It's about how we think about nature. It's about how we think about ourselves. It's about how we think about the cosmos. We're not an individual capitalisence. We're not an individual in this. We are a collective in this, and we all have to come together to be able to mitigate these risks. Nothing here is inevitable - at least that's the hope that I was seeing in your words. Correct me if I'm wrong there.
Moynihan: No, no, absolutely. We can look into a future that we want and then find a way to try and get there.
Mason: One step further, Tom, I wonder if the actual act of looking and the act of describing, and the act of future gazing itself - as you so beautifully described in the book - I wonder if that is the thing that creates the future that we bring into the present, and actualise in the present. I wonder if that's the thing itself. Let's have the right sort of narratives now for how we want to tell the past of the future, if that makes sense?
Moynihan: Again, there's that kind of hyperstitional aspect of all this. I think that's often talked about in quite a fateful, bad way, but there's also something about values themselves which are kind of attractors. Whether you're a utilitarian or a deontologist - no matter your ethical philosophy - the true value really exists in the future, I think. As William James said, all of our thinking about values has to be shot through with facts.
That's also one of the lessons of the story that I've tried to tell. Even though a lot of it is about that building distinction between those things, at the same time it's always this kind of responsiveness between the two. I think everything we've learnt shows us that as opposed to - again to bash on Aristotle - he said everything humanly achievable had already happened so being good is just being like the past in the better ways; the peaks rather than the troughs. I think we now realise that that all exists in the future. I completely agree. Of course, in a sense I guess being interested in history, all of my [inaudible: 1:18:16] are always going to be completely tangled up and reciprocal. But yeah, I absolutely agree with you that we need to have the right ways of thinking about the future now, to get to where we want. Like you said, the FHI, the 'no future crew' - I hadn't heard that before.
Mason: The 'no future folk'.
Moynihan: The 'no future folk'. I think it's just a kind of contingency of the order in which things have happened. One of my colleagues there, Anders Sandberg, he's this brilliant polymathic genius and he's writing this book that's the sequel to all this stuff that's already come out about the many ways that we could die. It's called 'Grand Futures' and it's just this compendium tour through all the great, brilliant futures that we could realise. Obviously, some of them are incompatible, maybe, in terms of their ethical content. Who thinks they'll be good? Again, I don't want to be a panglossian optimist but it's the job of future history to figure out those distinctions and incompatibilities, and sift through them.
I think what we're lacking now - and people like Anders are fulfilling that void - is a greater sense of the menu; the options available to us. I think that that kind of void is going to be redressed. As you say, historically, these two things are absolutely intertwined. Existential risk on the one hand, and existential hope on the other. Back in the 1750s, the first people that started worrying about these things also instantly were talking about these - and this was so speculative and science fictional back then - massive mitigation schemes that future humans could put into effect.
One of my favourite ones is Lord Byron talking about a planetary defence system. Steam powered ballistics to fend off incoming asteroids. That was nonsense at the time, but now NASA has a planetary defence.
Mason: Be careful what you wish for, because it might just come true. Works like yours help us realise what humanity has wished for in the past, so we can prepare for the shit that's coming around the corner. This is the way we were thinking about things. A book like this makes me realise that in no way, shape or form should we get rid of those hang ups from the past; those hangers on from the past. What we should do is appreciate them for what they were at the time and understand how they were affecting and inflicting on our possible future and the future making that we're doing in the present.
You give us a tease of a thing that we can do here in the present, which is about readopting this idea of the human vocation. You say how humanity itself constitutes a type of daring project. Humanity is the thing. The funny thing about existential risk is that it can be used as a collective noun. It can describe a group of things that may cause us trouble, or can be used as a verb. It can be used to talk about the things - the risks - that are worth taking. How do we update the Enlightenment mission for the future? In other words, what is useful about this idea of retrieving the human vocation? In other words, why fight for our survival unless we know what we're fighting for?
Moynihan: You've answered your question right there. Fighting for our survival is realising what we're fighting for, in a sense. It's kind of giving a reason to why we're here. In a sense, it's similar to what we were talking about with recursiveness across time, between future and past present. There is a recursivity in that. Again, these are all unfounded questions. I wouldn't say that there are any answers here, because I like the future. If there are all the answers we have in the present then there's no future.
There's this idea of the human vocation. Someone who's read enough Freud, Nietzsche, Marx would probably be very suspicious about such an idealistic notion. Basically at its kernel, it's the idea that we're not just here to survive. Kant actually said that human maintenance is not enough. We need to excel or we need to improve. That's the idea. The vocation is the idea that we somehow earn what we are, rather than just inherit it from the past or from our germ-line, from our genome. It's the sense that we somehow make it as what we are. Because it's earned, then it can in a sense be improved or revised. It's this sense that the human itself is - obviously not infinitely because they are physical limits - but boundlessly revisable. Unless we screw it all up now, we have the whole future to explore all of those options. There's vast option value in keeping the future in view and keeping history going.
One of these very comforting things for the older world-views that we've been dealing with is the sense of repeatability. It's this sense that: oh don't worry, Planet of the Apes will happen here or elsewhere. I think we've since realised through going through historisation - and what I mean by that is the experience of acknowledging history on the move, which started in the 1600s and gained pace in the 1700s. Since historisation, we've realised that in a sense, it's our history that makes us unique. It makes us unrepeatable in the sense that when we look at that abiotic past that I was talking about earlier, it's filled with homogeneity, repeatability, reversibility. In a sense, boring-ness. I think that the future could be filled with fun and curiosity.
This might just be my sentiment but I hold these things dearly and I'm not saying that it's going to be a rosy ride - it's definitely not. Someone even as idealistic as Hegel said that spirit is never one to shy away from disaster. Its history will be shot through with it. I think we need to take that into account. I'm going to sound Hegelian now talking about synthesising counterposed things, but on the one hand we have vast un-evidence based optimism in our history.
Perhaps you could argue more recently, we've had a vast amount of disillusion and pessimism of what it is to be us. I see, in some sense, those things taking the best from both and overstepping them in the process in this kind of realisation of the hope and the risk. The promise and the peril, or however you want to put it. It's not that kind of panglossian optimistic view that no matter what we do, that utopian future will arrive. That's how historical materialism works. It's not that. It's that we have to forge it ourselves. Again, to be quite 'enlightenment' about it, I think Kant said it best when he said, "Dare to use your eye in understanding." That means you have to take responsibility for getting things wrong. There's a risk involved in that. You have to risk being wrong to even be right in the first place.
I think that applies more widely to this big thing that we're talking about - human vocation - to get anywhere beyond now, you have to undertake risk. This is kind of didactic and it's something we all know. It's a boring lesson from being a teenager that we're all very familiar with, but part of growing up is undertaking more risk. That's how you gain responsibility and stability, and identity: a sense of coherent selfhood.
Mason: It feels like what you're saying is that the thing that is worth preserving into the future is human knowledge itself. Even if the thing that we realise through this process of just being humanity is how to destroy ourselves, that knowledge would be useful for other humanoids on other planets, or other versions of us that may reappear in the vast future. We didn't get a guidebook on how to do this human thing. It feels like the only way we could recover after a collapse if only a few people were to survive, or for us to restate these cultural histories, is to find a way to have knowledge repositories.
James Lovelock has talked about a handbook for survival which basically assumes that there's going to be some humans left on the outskirts - that one percent of humans on Earth that are going to be able to rebuild. What I'm really saying is that if there are no humans left, should the real project that we're focused on be about outsourcing - or not even outsourcing - but be about uploading the information we've learnt during this process of being human and of historicising the human experience - shouldn't that be the thing that we preserve?
Perhaps it's the fact that we just preserve intelligence itself and it doesn't necessarily need to be in the human form, which I know touches on some of Bostrom's interests. Perhaps we should just put our knowledge in the stars and at least we know that that's still survivable.
What I'm really trying to get to is will Earth's apex cogitator be AI or humans? If it is AI, then should we be okay, potentially, in a very transhumanist sense? Should we be okay with getting out of its way if the thing that AI is able to preserve is intelligence? Preserve it in a way in which we're not able to preserve it in the confines of the biological, breathing human body - one that doesn't travel very well in space, whereas information travels at the speed of light through the stars. Should we take seriously the notion that what we're preserving here is not the human, but the human experience?
Moynihan: Mm, yeah. I think that narrow attachment to the human can often be a narrow attachment to what the human contingently is, rather than what it should be or could be. That more normative aspect of us; that ability to go, "Oh, that would be better than the current situation with so much suffering and so much awfulness in the world. Let's see how we can get there." These things are very complicated but I think narrow attachment to the human hasn't worked well in the past because our definition of what the human is has always been, in that sense, very contingent.
The universalism of these people I was just talking about - Kant, Hegel, etcetera - was universal only for a specific demographic of people. That wasn't what I would say was a narrow attachment to the human. What the human is in the wider sense of the vocation - that's the sense I touch on with the ability to correct oneself - is the ability to revise oneself. There's kind of nothing essential there.
The question of whether you can get disembodied intelligence is a different one. In the same way that I would posit that someone from, say, the 11th century probably wouldn't recognise us, I think that we can expect the same thing to happen down the track. There are two ways of looking at this. You could be a Nietzschean and go, "Oh, history is written by the victors. Of course the change will be retroactively seen as good." but I think the other way is sloughing those contingent aspects of the human is what gets us beyond those parochial, chauvinistic aspects. We realised at one point in time that it was irrational to identify massively with your bloodline. I think at some point in the future, we might think the same thing when it comes to the planetary birthplace of the [inaudible: 1:30:53].
Mason: Well let's hope for that because I know you share my sentiment that I want for the continuation of humanity. I do believe that many of the possibilities that we've dreamed will be achieved. Tom, I just want to thank you for writing this truly earth shattering book and in some cases, I mean that quite literally. There is an Earth shattering on the front of the book. I just want to thank you for your time and for being on the FUTURES Podcast today.
Moynihan: It's been an absolute pleasure, and just so much fun. Who knew that talking about the end of the world would be so much fun? Thanks so much.
Mason: Thank you to Thomas for showing us how the decisions we make today might have enormous consequences for the future of humanity. You can find out more by purchasing his new book, 'X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction', available now.
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Credits
Produced by FUTURES Podcast
Recorded, Edited & Mixed by Luke Robert Mason
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