EA - Humanity’s vast future and its implications for cause prioritization by evelynciara

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Humanity’s vast future and its implications for cause prioritization, published by evelynciara on July 26, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary Humanity could last millions of years and spread beyond Earth, resulting in an unimaginably large number of people being born. Even under conservative assumptions, at least 100 trillion people could exist in the future. The best way to help future people have good lives is to create positive trajectory changes—durable improvements to the world at every point in the future. Reducing existential and suffering risks would improve humanity’s entire future trajectory, whereas speeding up economic growth would only create benefits over the next few thousand years (which is still a very big deal for the next few generations). Based on this information, I’ve pivoted toward reducing suffering risks (S-risks), or risks of astronomical suffering in the future, because it is an important and neglected strategy for creating positive long-term trajectory changes. How many people could there be? There are almost 8 billion people in the world today. The United Nations estimates that by 2100, the global population will stabilize around 11 billion people with 125 million births per year. If we have an idea of how long humanity will survive, then we can estimate how many people will be born in the future. Modern humans have been around for 200,000 years, and the average mammalian species lasts for a million years. So let’s suppose that humanity will survive for another 800,000 years. If 125 million people are born each year, then 100 trillion people will eventually be born. That’s 12,500 times as many people as are alive today. If we last 10 million years, like some mammalian species, then we could eventually give rise to over a quadrillion people. Of course, human civilization could survive for much longer than that—or much shorter. Even in extreme scenarios, climate change is unlikely to destroy civilization or render humans extinct, but it could indirectly lead to our extinction by driving political instability and global conflict. By some accounts, artificial general intelligence could be developed this century, and if we don’t have the technology to align AGI systems with our values, one could go rogue and kill us all simply because it is indifferent to our survival. On the other hand, we could use our technological capabilities to live for billions of years in the Solar System and beyond. This century, we will probably start establishing human settlements on other planets, like Mars, and satellites like Saturn’s largest moon Titan. Some scientists have speculated that we will be able to start traveling through deep space by the end of the 24th century. Earth will remain habitable for at least another 500 million years, but if we have a presence elsewhere in the Solar System, we can survive for much longer than that. When the Sun eventually becomes a white dwarf in 8 billion years’ time, we could still live in artificial space habitats orbiting what’s left of it, but most of us will likely be living on exoplanets and space habitats orbiting other stars. Trajectory changes vs. speeding up growth This vast potential has profound implications for how best to help as many people as possible in the present and future. Many longtermists believe that creating trajectory changes—durable changes to the amount of good in the world at every point in the future—is more valuable for the trillions of people yet to be born than trying to speed up the future. Preventing an existential catastrophe, such as human extinction or the collapse of civilization, is a prototypical trajectory change, since the entire value of the future hangs in the balance. In Stubborn Attachments, economist Tyler Cowen argues that humanity must focus on three things to m...