How Long Could Humanity Continue For? - Will MacAskill

We are at the very beginning of history. Future generations will see us as the ancients living in the distant past. What are the events that really could have civilizational trajectory level impacts? And then, finally taking action, trying to figure out, okay, what can we do to ensure that we navigate these challenges and try to bring about a wonderful future for our grandchildren and their grandchildren? (air whooshing)

Given the fact that we're seeing James Webb Telescope images all over the place at the moment, kind of seems like a smart time to be thinking about far-flung futures and potentials for civilization and stuff like that.

Absolutely. James Webb is making very vivid, um, and in high resolution, uh, an inc- incredibly important fact, which is just that we are at the moment, uh, both very small in the universe, (laughs) um, and also very early in it. So almost all of the universe's development is still to come ahead of us.

That's wild to think about the fact, e- especially on our time scales, right? You know, you think about 20 years as being a very long time in a human lifespan, and then you start to scale stuff up to continents, to the size of a planet, to the size of a solar system or a galaxy or the universe, and it, it puts things into perspective.

Yeah. Well, we're used to long-term thinking being o- on the order of a couple of decades or maybe a century at most, but really that's being very myopic. Um, I mean, how long has history gone on for? Well, that's a couple of thousand years. Homo sapiens have been around for a few hundred thousand years. The Earth formed 4 billion years ago. First, um, the Big Bang was a little under 14 billion years ago. And if we don't go extinct in the near future, which we might do, and we might cause our own extinction, then we are at the very beginning of history. Uh, future generations will see us as the ancients living in the distant past. And to see that, we can just use some kind of comparisons. So a typical mammal species lives around a million years. We've been going for 300,000 years. That would put 700,000 years to come. So already on that, by that metric, our life expectancy is very large indeed. But we're not a typical species. We can do a lot of things that other mammals can't. That creates grave risks such as, um, from engineered pathogens or AI that could bring our own, um, demise. But it also means that if we survive those challenges, then we could last much longer again, where the Earth will remain habitable for hundreds of millions of years. And if one- we one day take to the stars, well, the sun itself, um, will, uh, only stop burning in about 8 billion years, and the last stars will be shining in 100 trillion years. So on any of these measures, humanity's life expectancy is truly vast. If you give just a 1% chance to us spreading to, you know, the stars and staying as long as, uh, lasting as long as the stars shine, well, we've got a life expectancy of a trillion years. But even if we stay on Earth, the life expectancy is still tens, many tens of millions of years. And that just means that when we look to the future and when we think about events that might occur in our lifetime that could impact that future, that could change humanity's course, well, you know, we should just boggle at the stakes that are involved.