How to Ensure the World Never Ends

A few weeks ago, we talked about the idea that the world is not magically eternal, and it is possible for it to come to an end. We finished with a positive message that by taking this possibility seriously, we have the ability to prevent it from happening. Today, we’re going to use math to show why there is hope, and why it is worth it to work for the preservation of humanity.

Each year, there is some probability the world will end. At times, the probability has been frighteningly high, such as in the US-USSR cold war. It is clear that we want to avoid the risk rising to such levels ever again. But how low is low enough? Suppose there is a 1 in 100 chance the world will end this year. That doesn’t seem too bad; it’s a little scary, but we’re almost certain to survive. But what if the probability remains the same next year, and the next, and the next? A 1 in 100 chance of extinction in one year adds up to a 63 in 100 chance of extinction in 100 years!

It’s impossible to get the probability to 0, because there is always the possibility for something to go horribly wrong. How low, then, is low enough? One in a million? One in a billion? Because of the way probabilities stack up, the cumulative probability will rise to 63 percent over that timespan. In other words, if there is a one in a million chance of annihilation per year, then the probability will have risen to 63 percent after a million years, and continue to climb after that.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not comfortable with the probability rising over 1 percent ever. Well, in the reasonable future at least; the universe will inevitably end, but that is so far in the future we can approximate it as infinity. So how is it possible, if probabilities accumulate and it is impossible to get the probability to 0, to prevent the cumulative probability from rising up into the unsafe zone?

To answer this, we have to look at the mathematical concepts of limits and convergence. Let’s start with limits. Take the equation,

y = 1/x²

What happens when x = 0? We’ve been taught that it doesn’t work, we’re not allowed to divide by 0. But we can take the limit as x approaches 0. The smaller x gets, the larger y gets. Thus, the limit of y as x approaches 0 is infinity.

Now let’s talk about convergence. Suppose

y = 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 …

The sequence goes on infinitely long, each term being half the previous term. What is y if there are an infinite number of terms? You might think that, since we are adding an infinite number of positive numbers together, the answer will be infinity. But it’s not. If we take the limit of y as the number of terms approaches infinity, the series converges to 1. That’s right, the sum of this series, all infinite terms of this geometric sequence, is a finite number!

The graph for the function e^1-x continually approaches 0, but never reaches it. However, as x approaches infinity, the total area under the curve starting at 0 approaches the number e, or approximately 2.7.

Image generated by Wolfram Alpha LLC. 2009. Wolfram|Alpha. (access April 23, 2020). This image has been edited.

So now we have what we need in order to reduce the probability of human extinction to 1 in 100 cumulatively from now to the infinite future: Start small, and reduce the probability every year. If the probability is 1 in a million this year, we should aim for 1 in 1.1 million next year, 1 in 1.3 million the next year, and so on forever. We can never reach perfection, but we can always get just a little better.

Of course, this is an idealized goal. The probability in real life goes up and down depending on technology, politics, Earth’s geological and environmental state, and all kinds of things. But we can use wisdom, governments, institutions, and individual passion to mitigate the probabilities so that when they rise, they don’t rise as high as they might have. And if we keep working on these problems forever, we can continue to improve on them until the universe starts to run down. And even then, if we have been working on existential risk for all that time, we may be able to forestall the heat death of the universe as our post-biological descendants enjoy life for eons untold.

Visions of Utopia

I want to live in a utopia. I want a world of peace, where all people can thrive and pursue lives that are fulfilling to them. Is this just a dream? A fantasy? People have tried to create perfect societies before, but they have always wound up with their own problems, and some went to hell on the road paved with good intentions. Maybe the idea of a perfect world is incoherent; as they say, one man’s heaven is another man’s hell. But that doesn’t mean we should give up. We may not be able to reach a mythical utopia, but at we can work to make the world better than it is, and dreams and visions can give us something to aim for. Perhaps instead of utopias, it would be better to call them “extremely good societies.” So today, we are going to look at a number of things we might hope to find in an extremely good society.

Source: Wikipedia

To begin with, not everything is relative. There are different kinds of fulfillment, which are meaningful to different degrees to different people, but a model that works pretty well is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It is represented as a pyramid, with physiological needs like food and shelter at the bottom, and attaining one’s true potential at the top. Some say each level requires all the levels below it to be filled before it can be worked on, but I think it more true to say the lower on the hierarchy a need is, the more distress it provokes when it is not met, and the higher on the hierarchy a need is, the more fulfilling it is when it is met. Those who have great community and have all their social needs met, but who struggle for the basic physiological needs, might live happy, if difficult, lives. And those who have all of their physiological and security needs met, but struggle with the higher needs, may live easy and comfortable, yet be bored out of their minds. I think it fair to use how well and for how many people the hierarchy of needs is filled as a first approximation to measure how good a society is.

So now let’s look at some things we might find in an extremely good society. Some of these may be incompatible with one another. Some may be feasible in the near future, while others require radical change. We’re not looking to build the One True Utopia, we’re just imagining some things that might be found in some kind or other of extremely good society. So let us begin.

A healthy balance of individualism and collectivism
In the United States, the prevailing thought is that we should each be our own person, work hard for our own benefit, not rely on others, and succeed in life through our own blood, sweat, and tears. We contrast this with countries with dictators or ruling communist parties, and say, “look how bad it is for those collectivists, who have to live their lives in service of the State.” Yet it seems to me there is a clear third option, a healthier kind of collectivism mixed with individualism. Instead of seeing ourselves as loners elbowing our way forward in the world, or as tools in service of an empire, we see ourselves as part of a national and/or global community. Collectively, we build our society to be a positive, encouraging environment, making it easy and rewarding for individuals to seek fulfillment.

A Shift from work to hard fun
Right now, the basic dignity of having one’s physiological needs met is contingent upon one of four things: selling one’s time to earn a living, mooching off family or friends, becoming dependent on stigma-laden welfare programs, or getting lucky and having a bunch of money fall into your lap. In the future, when the resources needed to fulfill people’s basic needs are more efficiently distributed, we can hope things will be cheap enough that people will need to work less, either by fewer days in the week, fewer hours per day, or by it becoming optional to have a job. This would free up time to pursue hard fun activities, letting people grow and learn skills that are interesting and fulfilling to them, rather than being forced to spend their energy as cogs in the market.

By Eddie Quinones on Flickr

Of course, many people would still put their time and energy into work, because, frankly, money is great. With money, you can buy a bigger house, fancy stuff, and show off to your friends. Or, you can use it for important causes like reducing poverty, scientific research, buffering against existential risk, building infrastructure, creating a business to supply a need, and all kinds of things. If people spend their time pursuing hard fun, then many people will still pursue money, because to them, earning money and using it for things they care about is hard fun.

Less dopamine overdose and advertisements
Let’s face it; in modern-day capitalism, we are bombarded with ads and subtle manipulations to make us indulge in all kinds of things we would otherwise neither want nor need. From sugar to toys to sex to junk food, we’re pumped full of dopamine and induced to endlessly crave more, more, more. In an extremely good society, we would emphasize the need for long-term fulfillment over the desire for immediate gratification. Healthy food would be more abundant and offered up for display in stores, while the junk food would be tucked away in the corners. Social media and pornography would take on a tone of kindness and emotional support, rather than being optimized to maximize clicks and ad revenue. And speaking of ads, there would be a lot fewer, and those we had would direct us to resources to easily find things we really want and need, rather than butting into our awareness to try to make us crave things we never would have wanted otherwise.

By the way, if you are interested in partaking in some legal civil disobedience against the dehumanizing side of capitalism, you may want to consider using an adblock extension on your browser. It’s free, and once you try it, you may realize you never knew how refreshing a life with drastically fewer ads could be.

The ability to have grown-up conversations about emotions, including sexuality
In our society, especially among men, we are taught that our emotions are our own problems to deal with, and that we shouldn’t let them affect our work. If this isn’t outright said, it is heavily implied. Yet emotions are often not trivial things that can be easily dealt with in private. Much of the time they require support from friends, family, and authority figures. We should, then, move societally toward a place where we can more comfortably open up with our emotional struggles, and not be so quick to dismiss others who do so as attention-seeking or lazy.

This is very strongly seen in the realm of sexuality, where, in America at least, we simultaneously see two conflicting extremes of social expectation. On one pole, we are expected to pretend sexual desire does not exist except in an institutionally recognized monogamous relationship called marriage. This expectation is put higher on women. On the opposite pole, we are expected to be ravenous for sex, pursue it aggressively, and use it as a competition for status. This affects mostly men. Both of these, however, are a struggle for both men and women. Progress can be made on both these problems by reducing the taboo on sex, and thus reducing the allure of its forbiddenness and the sense of rebellion associated with it. We would also expect better education and safety methods, reducing the risks of STDs and the need for adoption and abortion.

Easy access to reliable information
In the age of the internet, information is so abundant we don’t know what to do with it. This is a problem, because it makes finding true and reliable information a hassle. In an extremely good society, official sources of information like the census bureau or scientific encyclopedias will be presented in ways that are more easy for the average person to read, with plenty of charts and graphs available with a few simple clicks. Search engines will continue to get better at showing what people are looking for, and make the most reliable sources easy to find, perhaps in drop-down lists. Easy-to-follow, multi-channel instructions for how to find jobs and pursue interests will be abundant, in contrast with the marginally helpful blog posts that searches present today.

No skeletons in the closet
When considering utopia, it is important that it be a real utopia, not just a facade. The prosperity we show must be real, and we can’t shove people who don’t fit our image into prisons, slander them with national media, or burden them with so much work they can’t think straight. We also wouldn’t have laws preventing abuse and injustice from being exposed, like these. A house is not valuable if we dress up its rotting frame with nice carpets and wallpaper; we want the house to be top quality through and through.

A renewable economy
When we throw something away, it doesn’t just disappear. It goes into a landfill, or a river, or the ocean. Over time, trash piles up. Nature gets polluted, and resources get used up. It is clear this cannot go on forever. In an extremely good society, we would use resources in such a way that our waste can be recycled back into new resources. Instead of the input being raw materials and the output being garbage, the input would be sunlight on Earth, and the output would be Earth’s heat radiated away into space, and everything we use would cycle in the middle.

A post-scarcity economy
Food isn’t free. That’s because it takes a lot of work to produce the amount of food needed to feed everyone. But when was the last time you paid for air? There’s no need. It’s everywhere. We just breath it without thinking about it. That’s because, in economic terms, food is scarce, and air is abundant. But food doesn’t always have to be scarce. When the methods of producing and distributing a commodity become so robust that everyone has easy and free or nearly free access to them, that commodity is said to be post-scarcity. In many places, water is post-scarcity. We just open the tap or the drinking fountain, and out it comes.

In the future, energy may become post-scarcity when we figure out good nuclear fusion reactors. Raw materials may become post-scarcity once we develop a good space infrastructure and start mining asteroids. Over time, as technology, infrastructure, and social progress get better, we can hope the rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy will become progressively less and less scarce.

One possible avenue toward post-scarcity is the Patreon model. Artists, educators, and content creators of all kinds produce work that is available to all for free, giving people the option of donating an amount per month of their choosing out of gratitude. For many independent creators, this works really well, and there is a vast wealth of every kind of art and entertainment you can imagine floating around for free on the internet. It may be possible for this model to extend to other industries as well.

A flourishing natural environment
We are in the middle of one of the great extinctions of geological history, and it’s because of, well, humans. I’m not just talking about the industrial revolution, though that’s part of it. Our ancestors have been hunting species to extinction and grazing grassy plains into deserts for hundreds of thousands of years.

At first, this may make us feel sad or ashamed. But we shouldn’t be. We are merely among the first few generations to know about this problem, which means we are also among the first who have had the opportunity to try to solve it. And even if you aren’t overly concerned about saving the whales and pandas, a healthy ecosphere with lots of biodiversity is good for humans in many ways. In an extremely good society, we can expect to find nature flourishing everywhere.

By WinterE229 (Wikipedia/Creative Commons)

Preparation for and prevention of catastrophes
Right now, it is the way of the land for laws, safety regulations, and disaster preparations to be done in response to catastrophes that have already struck. Take the COVID-19 pandemic that is at its height in the United States at the time this post is written. There is a shortage of masks among doctors. Why? Because hospitals didn’t stockpile them beforehand in case of a pandemic outbreak. Here’s the thing: we knew something like this could happen, and how to prepare for it, but we didn’t do it. Maybe it was to cut corners and save money, or maybe it was because we were working on all kinds of problems in the present, so future problems that may or may not occur didn’t seem as immediate. Either way, we can expect extremely good societies to have a wise view of risk assessment and preparation at the national level.

Thirty years ago, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama proposed the idea that history is over, and the best possible type of society has been found in liberal democratic capitalism. But history is not over. As we have seen, there are plenty of ways society could become better. Maybe the labels of “liberal,” “democratic,” and “capitalism” can be applied to some kinds of extremely good societies, but history is very much still in motion. Right now, you and I have the opportunity to play a part in the course of history, and help steer it toward an extremely good society. So let’s dream. Let’s imagine. And let’s look for real, feasible ways to turn those dreams into reality.

Challenge and Hard Fun

See also:
Work and Purpose

There is no question that life is about more than happiness and easy fun. Eating, drinking, and being merry can get stale really fast. The go-to antidote to this mediocrity is applying ourselves to work. We put our effort into things we might not want to do, and when we are done, we sit back and enjoy the benefits of a job well done, and sometimes a paycheck to boot. But work is not the only way to add purpose to one’s life, and it is often not the most effective way either.

Preparing for a marathon is no walk in the park. Athletes build up discipline, sticking to special diets and pushing themselves to run farther and farther. Then, they join thousands of others in a 26-mile run through the city. Why do millions of people do this every year? It’s not because of the prize money. Rather, it’s because of the challenge, of forming discipline and building oneself up, and the satisfaction of knowing for the rest of your life that you did it. Marathon running and all that goes into preparing for it is an example of what I call hard fun. Other examples of hard fun include things like exercising, learning a language, building relationships, playing games, solving puzzles, contemplating mysteries, creating art, tending a garden, and practicing skills.

Like work, hard fun is hard. But unlike work, which comes from places of necessity and circumstance, hard fun is motivated from within. It is rewarding enough that we make ourselves do it just because of the enrichment it brings to our lives. The key difference here is between external motivations and internal motivations. Work is something we have to do because forces outside ourselves make it necessary. Hard fun is something we push ourselves to do from within, because its intrinsic value to us is just that powerful.

Hard fun can bring as much meaning and purpose into a person’s life as hard work, and often more so. To understand why, we have to look at the reasons why work can be meaningful. It is not because we are forced to do it, nor because it isn’t fun, nor because of the pay. The meaning in work comes from overcoming various types of challenges, rewarding outcomes that are directly related to the activities of the work, and the bonds formed with others through shared efforts. These same things are just as meaningful when we don’t have outside forces nudging us to do them with carrots and sticks. We seek meaning in our lives, crave it with every fiber of our being, and thus push ourselves, challenging ourselves to learn, accomplish, and become better at things. This is the great power and beauty of hard fun, providing meaning and purpose to our lives without being pressured or forced into it.

Sometimes a person’s work is hard fun to them. Whether they came to realize it because outside pressures pushed them into it, or they knew it was what they wanted to do all along, they do their job from the heart, and the paycheck is just a bonus. When this happens, it is a very beautiful thing.

Earth: Eternal or Vulnerable?

Earth. For most of our history, we have thought of it as The World. The place created for life. The canvas upon which the drama of history takes place. As far as we knew or cared, Earth was pretty much the whole Universe. Sure, the sun, moon, stars, and planets were out there, but they were there to serve as signs and sources of light, and to mark the passage of time. There was a purpose to the world; it was there for us. It was eternal. Sure, we supposed it had been created some time in the forgotten past, and would end sometime in the inscrutable future, but for us, for our grandparents, and for our grandchildren, it was what it was.

Only recently have we begun to wake up from this fantastic dream. New methods of observing the heavens and Earth opened our eyes to the vast context of space and time we exist within. We learned that the Earth and the Universe are not anywhere near as close in size as we thought. The Earth is a planet, one among an uncountable number; the sun, merely another star. And we learned that for every star we can see, there are billions upon billions in our galaxy alone, and our galaxy is just one among billions upon billions. In universal time, all of human history is but a fraction of an eyeblink. And in the eons before us, the world has changed dramatically, many times.

We still usually think of the world as what is real. We say that all that stuff about stars and galaxies is real too, but it feels distant, like it’s somehow less real than the ground we stand on. This is put into words by the phrase, “down-to-Earth,” which describes someone who is focused on the tangible present. It is our natural inclination to pay the most attention to things we can see and touch, and treat everything else as if it is less real. We talk about “the real world,” meaning the place we find ourselves in, with an emphasis on our social and economic environment. And even though we know objectively that Earth is one tiny planet around one middle-sized star, we struggle to break away from the narrative of The World upon which we stand as the foundation of the universe.

From Voyager 1, amongst a background of stars and the glare from the sun, Earth appears as merely a fraction of a pixel.

We have plenty of stories of the world coming to an end, from the gods and demons of mythology, to invasions from aliens, to nuclear war, to giant asteroids, to plagues, to just about anything we can imagine. Yet we know these are just stories—or at least most of us do, anyway—and at the end of the day, The World will still be here. Always has been, always will be.

Except that isn’t so. The sun is heating up, and in about a billion years this will cause Earth to follow in Venus’ footsteps with a runaway greenhouse effect, boiling away the oceans and making the planet inhospitable to any life. Unless our descendants are around for some planetary engineering, The World will end.

In our planet’s history, life has faced several major extinction events and survived. First, there was the Great Oxygenation Event 2.5 billion years ago, when photosynthesis evolved and gave our atmosphere the large amounts of oxygen that keeps us alive today. While that was good for the life that evolved later on, it was toxic to the life at the time, and killed most of it off. During the past billion years, there have been five famous mass extinction events, each of which killed off more than half the species on Earth. And right now, we’re in the middle of another mass extinction, this time caused by a fun little species called homo sapiens, first by lots and lots of hunting, and nowadays by irresponsible pollution.

In the past, despite toxic atmospheres, ice ages, supervolcanoes, and mountain-sized meteorites, life has always bounced back. This has led to the Gaia Hypothesis, which proposes that Earth is a self-regulating system, which always brings itself back to equilibrium when the balance is disturbed, like a living body keeping itself in homeostasis. The Gaia Hypothesis is a prominent theme in David Brin’s 1990 near-future science fiction novel, Earth, which is really good and I highly recommend it.

While the Gaia Hypothesis might help us sleep easier with the belief that we will solve our current global problems and The World is going to be okay, much of the evidence supporting it may be an illusion. Take the Fermi Paradox; the universe has been around long enough that alien civilizations could have gotten billions of years’ head start on us, and enveloped noticeable chunks of the galaxy in Dyson spheres. Yet when we look out into the universe, we don’t see big empty spaces in the Milky Way, nor in any of the other thousands of galaxies we have looked at, suggesting technological life is extremely rare.

One answer for why we see no signs of alien civilizations is the idea of filters, events standing between non-replicating matter and technological civilizations, which most planets never get past. Perhaps it is unimaginably rare for non-replicating matter to form replicating molecules. Perhaps it’s the leap from single-cells to multicellular life. Or maybe, most mass extinctions in the universe wipe out all life on their planet, and we happen to be the one place where life got lucky six times in a row.

This implication of the Fermi Paradox suggests that maybe we shouldn’t let ourselves become complacent about the continuation of the Earth. In addition, we have something today the Earth has never seen before in its 4.5 billion year history: rapid technological progress. Through science and economics, more and more power has become available to the average person. For example, the internet is only a few decades old, and now almost anyone can view the vast stores of human knowledge stored on it, to which the great libraries of the past pale in comparison.

The present-day philosopher Nick Bostrom put forth a thought experiment: imagine the set of all possible inventions as an urn full of balls on a scale from white to black, white being something that can only be used for good, and black being something that can destroy the world. Throughout human history, we have been pulling balls from this urn with varying shades of gray, from airplanes to vaccines to nuclear bombs. But there may be, unknown to us, a possible technology that would be extremely easy for anyone to make and destroy the world with. A black ball technology. Perhaps a self-replicating swarm of drones tasked with destroying all humans, or an unstoppable virus, or an easy method of creating black holes. The fact that we cannot rationally rule out the possibility of a black ball technology 100% has led to an alternative to the Gaia Hypothesis, the Vulnerable World Hypothesis.

The fact that neither humanity nor life on Earth has been wiped out in the past is not sufficient to say it won’t happen in the future. That would be survivorship bias. We cannot rule out the possibility that a large-scale natural disaster or a powerful technology could end it all. However, there is a bright side. The fact that it is possible for The World to end does not mean it is guaranteed. Taking the Vulnerable World Hypothesis seriously could make it a self-defeating prophecy. If we accept that our choices could mean the difference between fading away into nothing and a legacy of life that goes on into the deep future of the universe, then we will be spurred to reduce our existential risks as much as possible. Just like technology has given us more power to destroy the world than ever before, it has also given us unprecedented power to save it.

We need not despair at our impending doom, but neither should we live on as usual, casting our faith blindly at Nature or Fate or God or aliens. We are the caretakers of this world, the sole beings with the ability to rationally assess the risks and design methods to mitigate them. We have strong narrative attachment to The World. But if we want to be faithful to truth, we must treat it analytically, just like everything else. It is our responsibility to learn, to gather information, and to work to preserve our precious home in this vast, empty universe.