Eons of Utopia

All we have to do is never fuck up

[day 5/7 - epistemic status: longtermism apology form]

Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977. Its mission was to study the very edges of the solar system, and then go gentle into that good night. As it was drifting away into the vast unknown, Sagan begged for one last picture.

Our pale blue dot (2020 rendition)

That there. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives.¹

if I stare at it too long I just start crying.

None of this is fantasy. Voyager 1 is real. It’s really out there, terribly cold and not slowing down, on a mission to nowhere.

The picture is real, that’s really home. That’s really us. Space really is that big and really is that dark. There really is no one else out there.²

We could be the only matter aware of itself, anywhere, ever. If we fuck this up we, no, the universe will lose this. forever.

You cannot grasp permanence like this. I can’t even reason about death. I think I’ve made my peace but then it hits me all over again. Someday, everything will end and it will never be anything that it’s like to be me ever again.

The year 2080: being 72 years old.

The year 2100: nothingness.

The year 446,329,494: nothingness.

Extinction is the integral of death. The unimaginable on an unimaginable scale for unimaginable periods of time.³

Imagine the year 2100. Fuck that. Let yourself truly imagine the year 80,000. Humor yourself and extrapolate 80,000 more years of the scientific method. All of a sudden colonizing the stars, living forever and curing cancer for the hell of it feel a lot less silly.⁴

It can be real. The year 80,000 can be real.

Avoiding extinction on the way there is not optional. It is the difference between having a couple of good years left and eons of utopia. Of course our little meat sack brains can’t comprehend this. They are much too small. So your frontal lobe shelves it all under “scifi”. But the threats (and promises) are very real indeed.

The stakes care not about your inability to comprehend.⁵⁶ The nuke ending all life on earth won’t care if you think it’s not fair that no one gets to see the year 283,492,493 due to a technical malfunction. A superintelligence will not have remorse. A mirrored plague will not apologize. And averting it all is a thankless job.⁷

Nukes, superintelligence, bioweapons. Under control of populist idiots. Every year scarier than the last. And no rule says we will make it.

We pretend the training wheels are still on, but dad let go a long time ago. We’ve been riding the bike ourselves this entire time. Let’s try our best not to fall.

The moon does not have to be the final frontier. We could live to see a million things that man was never meant to see.

Or it can be blackness forever.

The choice is ours. All we have to do is never fuck up.

And if that isn’t an effective use of my time, what is?

1. strongly recommend the full speech

2. (probably)

3. Don’t blame your brain for its inability to comprehend

4. again, this can be REAL. this will be scientific method graphics in the year 80,000

5. ben shapiro kappa deluxe or whatever

6. All I ask is that you don’t make fun of consequentialism for taking this seriously, then.

7. I have contributed to this. Sorry