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How bad would human extinction be? An obvious reason it would be bad is that most extinction scenarios would cause lots of human suffering and cut people's lives short. However, those who accept the increasingly influential ideology of "longtermism" claim that the main reason for extinction's badness is that it would prevent a potentially enormous number of future people from existing. How many people? If we colonize space and create huge computer simulations for "digital people" to live in, they argue, the number could be upwards of 10^58, or a 1 followed by 58 zeros. That's a lot of future people! But does this view make sense? Is longtermism defensible? In this talk, I'll examine these questions and argue that longtermism is not only implausible but could be extremely dangerous if taken seriously by those in power.

About the speaker:
Émile P. Torres is a philosopher and historian whose work focuses on human extinction and civilizational collapse. They are a contributing writer at Salon, have published in outlets like Aeon and The Washington Post, and wrote the first-ever textbook on "existential risks," or risks that could destroy humanity's future. Their forthcoming book, Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation, offers a sweeping survey of how our thinking about human extinction has evolved over time, from the ancient Greeks to the present.