The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement

http://www.vhemt.org/

by nirmel • 11 years ago

52 53 11 years ago

Life on earth has around 1 billion years left(Sun will be too hot). Without intelligent life all will surely go extinct. We may be its ultimate saviors when/if we conquer the stars.

marricks• 11 years ago

Comparing the odds that we will destroy it with global warming or nukes is tough though. Seems like we may well be the arbiter of it's doom.

Plus, what if we do leave? Do you think our governments are really progressing towards that Star Trek enlightened super government, or are we progressing toward some sort of Orwellian nightmare? What would humanity look like when it colonizes more planets and leaves? Would we be the good aliens or bad aliens you see in sci-fi movies?

Right now we still seem like a species dominated by self interest, and it doesn't look like we're changing any time soon...

kiba• 11 years ago

There's a shit ton of matters we can convert into living space before we can even think of colonizing life sustaining planets.

markbnj• 11 years ago

Meh, climate change might make it more or less comfortable for us and other creatures, but it won't "destroy" anything, and I seriously question whether human beings, marshaling every last bit of technology we have at our disposal right now, even have the power to "destroy" the earth. I'm almost certain we do not.

One thing we do have, though, is the power to amplify our own significance. We've only been writing about what happens to us for 5000 years or so. There are Bristlecone pine trees nearly that old, and even that is just the tiniest little flash, so brief it is undetectable, in the time that the planet has been here.

nickbauman3• 11 years ago

We'll only seriously start responding to global warming when a significant part of Manhattan is underwater.

themartorana2• 11 years ago

Seems like more than enough time considering how far we've come in the past 6000 years, and technologically, that graph looks something like this:

http://cl.ly/image/3H1A3S341k1t

Of course, we might muck it up good in a few short years here.

Edit: who on Earth decided this was a good comment to downvote? We are doomed.

shoo5• 11 years ago

One perspective is that human population and various other characteristics of the economy & environment roughly agree with the "Limits to Growth" standard run modelling that was done 40 years ago:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits-...

I am not sure if "doomed" is the right word. It seems pretty plausible that existing civilisation will collapse, as many human civilisations have done in the past, and there will be additional human suffering (more than the considerable amount there is now), but I doubt we as a species will become extinct within the next few hundred years.

Moshe_Silnorin• 11 years ago

The trend is your friend until the bend in the end.

sliverstorm2• 11 years ago

Hah, that sure is an interesting way of looking at it! Just as aerobic organisms saved life on Earth from the Great Oxygenation Event, and fungus & bacteria saved life on Earth by recycling, humans could save life on Earth from the Sun by developing space travel.

We are, you could say, one of Nature's many apparatus to long term success. Any biosphere that does not develop space travel is doomed to eventual extinction.

thangalin• 11 years ago

Some estimates put this at 600 million years, assuming Earth is not gradually moved to a trans-Neptunian orbit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_the_Earth#Solar_evolu...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

xenadu02• 11 years ago

Bingo. We need to keep the biosphere stable/habitable and preserve a good amount of biodiversity, but ultimately all species and all of their decendant species will go extinct in a short period of time (on a universal scale).

We have the duty to prevent that if possible. Using near future technology we should be able to at least ensure some life survives the death of our star. Easily imagined technology would let us spread life far enough to survive almost any catastrophe. It will be up to some future life forms to figure out how to escape the heat death of the universe... We can only do so much after all.

logfromblammo• 11 years ago

I have believed for a long time that the moral imperative of humanity as a species is to propagate the Earth ecosystem to other planets and in artificial space habitats.

Except for the dolphins. We don't need to encourage other species to just dick around all day. That's our niche.

nirmel• 11 years ago

A better-presented analysis that links to this site: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/13/climate-c...

shoo5• 11 years ago

That's a good analysis. Here's an excerpt:

""" Under the constant scenario, an American who forgoes having a child would save 9,441 tonnes of CO2 – almost six times, on average, the amount of CO2 they would emit in their own lifetime, or the equivalent of making around 2,550 return aeroplane trips between London and New York. If the same American drove a more fuel-efficient car, drastically reduced his or her driving, installed energy-efficient windows, used energy-efficient lightbulbs, replaced a household refrigerator, and recycled all household paper, glass and metal, he or she would save fewer than 500 tonnes. """

klenwell• 11 years ago

Site's down for me, but the epilogue of Michel Houellebecq's novel The Elementary Particles[0] laid out an elegant program for accomplishing this. Although it often goes unremarked in critiques of the novel, I thought it was the most remarkable part of it.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomised

snowpanda• 11 years ago

The site ended up working for me after a lot of attempts.

I took a full page screenshot, it's not a great solution, but I hope it helps until the site is back to normal.

https://www.anony.ws/i/2015/06/09/5b0d9946_o.png

oconnor0• 11 years ago

But why? It seems just as foolish to assume we need to die off to save others as it does arrogant to assume we can pollute and kill without consequences.

reasonattlm2• 11 years ago

At first glance this crowd are a sort of polar opposite to the paradise engineers. The goal is eliminating suffering. Paradise engineers want to do it by building. Extinctionists want to do it by removing those capable of perceiving suffering.

But at second glance, there is more going on here.

Even if we are being charitable we would say that extinctionists have a critical lack of ambition. A poverty of the mind. A parochial vision of the possible, narrowed down to such a narrow slice of what might be that it may as well be invisible. They cannot look much beyond their noses. They do not see the natural world as the seething pit of pain and anguish and violent death that it is. They are willing to bow out themselves while condemning animals to that for the foreseeable future. The rational and caring extinctionist would destroy the entire biosphere, but even that is short-sighted, as it doesn't do anything about the rest of the universe and all future time. There will be more biospheres, more tooth and nail evolution.

Extinctionists are fixated on relinquishment, a form of cowardice in the face of being challenged by circumstances and change. They have seen the problem, and their answer is it is to leave the building, making no effort to address the issue. How can that possibly help? It is a pathological lack of ambition taken to its logical conclusion, and weaponized by jealousy of those who feel that, yes, something might be done.

There is suffering. So build the means to end it. If you can't envisage how, then you aren't reading widely enough. Ultimately we can replace all of the natural biosphere. We can rebuild man and animal in reality or emulated environments: all of them, every last thing capable of pain. We can remove the circumstances of suffering from any who suffer and who want that suffering to end. That it will require centuries, molecular nanotechnology, brain emulation, and other technologies of the same ilk? So what? How long has this world waited already for those capable of making this achievement? Seizing the future and continuing the work that our species has barely started on in the quest to eliminate pain is the high road.

And if at the end of the day there are still those who feel that they would like an untrammeled world, well let them build as many as they like - provided that all the species living upon them capable of pain are in fact living in a paradise free from suffering.

But heaven forbid we feel any sympathy for those who want to press the game over button now, who cannot raise their eyes just that little bit to see the golden future we could build with just a little more time.

shoo5• 11 years ago

What do you propose should be done in the short term - say, the next 50 to 100 years?

reasonattlm2• 11 years ago

Be utilitarian. Make a list of what causes the most suffering and involuntary death, and personally contribute to work on whatever is high in the list and not being aggressively worked on today. Which is most of it. Degenerative aging and farming of animals, for example, being two things to eliminate on the time scale you mention. There is a lot on the list that can't be tackled meaningfully today, such as placing all higher animals into some form of simulation or at least controlled environments in which they can live as close to usual as possible without pain. Or means of human mind engineering to remove suffering without terrible side-effects. For that help to advance enabling technologies in the fields of computation, nanotechnology, and biology.

nickbauman3• 11 years ago

Replace the biosphere? If you aren't joking, I think this attitude is part of the problem, one which got us into this mess in the first place. We've gotten along for millions of years without Amazon.com. I don't think VHEM is game over. With VHEM the idea is perhaps you can explore things like what you're saying, but not without understanding that enacting a world without limits implies building a system that will consume all the worlds resources and will one day have to consume itself. Go ahead and dream and explore, but don't make war on the rest of the planet (which is what is implied with "replacing the biosphere".)

pistle2• 11 years ago

You seem to have basic presumptions that suffering is avoidably bad and that suffering is an important concern to be addressed.

These people are quitters? Maybe they are, but in other ways then you call them out. Suffering is a condition only to those able to perceive it. Suffering is a creation of perception. Imbuing some moral "high road," upon which, we should seek to travel seems a narrow concern of individuals within such a species. We are lucky enough to be born able to suffer, we suffer - maybe lucky enough to find joy and elation, then we die. We are one of the suffering. Do I sympathize with suffering and seek to help alleviate it? Sure, but I'm not haunted by it. It's the other side of me. Something which propels me.

What's interesting is that via this 1992 website, some tiny sect of people are focusing on something else they consider avoidably bad and an important concern to be addressed which, within a larger context, is even more devoid of contextual reasoning.

Their healthy biosphere will, at some point be lifeless and destroyed when the sun dies out or some other event with slightly greater than 0% chance occurs. For what purpose did they "save" it now?

We each have our own forever. It starts when we are born and it ends when we die. The same is true of the biosphere, the solar system, the galaxy, etc. In between, we experience each moment from a unique perspective... and then that moment is gone as is the person we were at that moment. Our suffering is gone. Our joy is gone. A new moment is hear and it is more lovely are intolerable than the last.

Work towards what you like, but building high roads on a spheroid planet or in emulated circuits still has you going round in circles. Without suffering we'd mostly just sit in a circle, staring around, not enjoying relief or, worse, finding suffering in moments devoid of ecstasy. The golden time is now as it's the only time we certainly have.

priv_acy• 11 years ago

In the eighth grade I had an english teacher who challenged us to write either a serious essay or a piece of satire, with the goal of getting half the class to believe it was satire and the other half to think it was serious.

I do believe this would have won.

mjfl2• 11 years ago

I have no idea why these kinds of misanthropic ideas, having little or nothing to do with programming or entrepreneurship, get this kind of attention on Hacker News.

tomc19852• 11 years ago

Because they're interesting. And this is a place of interesting things.

shoo5• 11 years ago

I think some people who read hacker news may be interested in discussions of the increasingly serious challenges facing us as individuals, communities, and as a species.

Compared to many people in the world, I suspect that those people reading hacker news may have a relatively large opportunity to influence others, for better or worse.

If we discuss these kinds of issues there is a small chance that some people will decide to act in a way that is more beneficial to others, society, & the environment.

johnny22• 11 years ago

I like to take an interest in what other folks of a similar mind are involved in, even outside of programming/computers. There are more than a few (semi)well-known programmers who are actually involved in or otherwise support the VHEMT.

damoncali2• 11 years ago

I enjoy them. I still can't tell if this one is real or intended as humor. That's fascinating to me.

mirimir• 11 years ago

Poe's law: "[W]ithout a clear indicator of the author's intent, parodies of extremism are indistinguishable from sincere expressions of extremism."[0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

damoncali2• 11 years ago

I believe we were studying Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" at the time. Now that I think about it, it was probably more like 10th grade.

But it was an informative exercise, as I've since found that many good ideas also fall into this category along with all the nutty ones.

sliverstorm2• 11 years ago

I'm always confused why the "two kids" i.e. replacement is treated as growth. This seems to be a systemic belief.

Maybe there's something I'm missing about population dynamics, but generations are a pipeline. Yes, you're around for many years after your kids are born, but as your kids are born your grandparents or great-grandparents are probably reaching the end of their rope.

A system where a process dies as soon as it spawns a new process will have no more net growth than a system where the process sticks around for N cycles after spawning a new process, and then dies. Given the same original number of processes, it will have a greater number of processes running at equilibrium, but it will experience equilibrium nonetheless.

Not to mention, "two kids" actually leads to a very gentle decline (because not everyone reproduces) which is reasonably socially stable, unlike a world in which fertility is 0.2 per couple.

chrisfosterelli• 11 years ago

Replacement-level total fertility rate is actually generally accepted to be a little bit above 2 (around 2.3), due to unnatural deaths and other causes. At least in Geography.

With only two kids per couple, even if every woman had 2 children (which is what a 2.0TFR would mean), the population would still decline.

gojomo• 11 years ago

They've been at it for a long time, so if the site isn't responding, you can look at archived copies nearly 20 years old:

http://web.archive.org/web/19961230175931/http://www.vhemt.o...

Of course most of their KPMs have been headed the wrong direction, so perhaps they'll soon throw-in-the-towel?

A related site...

http://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/

...which also goes way back:

http://web.archive.org/web/20000511095311/http://www.churcho...

silveira• 11 years ago

Step 1. Extremely altruistic people join the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.

Step 2. Extremely altruistic people cease reproduction.

Step 3. Humanity goes on. If there was a gene for altruism (or a set of genes and their relationship) it was now removed from the gene pool. Humanity is now less altruistic, probably worst than before Step 2.

nickbauman3• 11 years ago

I was thinking almost the same thing: people choosing not to reproduce selects for those who will reproduce, making the effort ultimately futile.

But then consider what happens when sexual reproducing species experience an extreme population dip: traits suddenly become much more variegated because now there is an overlap of recessive genotypes that used to be hidden. So maybe this won't happen?

beachstartup2• 11 years ago

that's funny, because usually people are called selfish when they don't want to have children.

danieltillett2• 11 years ago

Yes by grandparents and siblings.

mynameishere• 11 years ago

In an evolutionary sense, altruism was valuable in tribes--having empathy meant helping people who shared a portion of your DNA, and was often much more beneficial than selfishness. Pretty obvious, really. Globalism has made it pathological, even suicidal. Genotypes related to generalized empathy--causing people to spend their resources, reproductive capacity, or their lives, helping unrelated people--are already doomed, even without suicide cults.

(The website is down, so I don't know what these people are trying to accomplish--I'm just taking the name literally.)

shoo5• 11 years ago

There are other means of passing information between individuals in a population, e.g. by communication, upbringing, education, propaganda.

E.g.

Step 2. Extremely altruistic people cease reproduction and use the time and energy they would otherwise have spent on their own children to educate and encourage others to become more altruistic.

dllthomas• 11 years ago

... and you wind up with those more predisposed to being altruistic, upon education and encouragement, also foregoing reproduction. The result may be a short term surge in altruistic behavior, but a stronger selection away from altruism at the genetic level.

unluckier• 11 years ago

See also: Idiocracy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL1-340ODCM

danieltillett2• 11 years ago

Let me introduce exhibition number one - the shakers [1]. At least they left us some nice furniture.

1. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers

mikekchar• 11 years ago

If one assumes that this kind of altruism is hereditery. I could just as easily be cultural.

I'm not so sure about extinction, but a steady state population (possibly with less people than now) seems pretty attractive to me. At the moment I don't believe we are culturally able to sustain this.

I often wonder what needs to be done to make it happen. Probably a more equitable distribution of wealth and resources is job number one (observing that rich societies have a low fertility rate). Which probably means that it will still be many generations before it can happen.

tomc19852• 11 years ago

And who is going to care about Earth's natural splendor when noone is around to appreciate it?

Earth will drift on, as it always has and will. What would be the point, except for some flowery aspirations (by dead aspirants) of beauty and perfection? These people want humanity to die off over something that could never be more than principle? One man's principle no less? Give me a break!

Beauty, perfection, extinction... all of these concepts are distinctly human in nature. But the cosmos (and our planet) are not, and we barely understand the rules (let alone the game) which they play. Our beautiful planet is a statistical footnote, special only in that the results of its RNG yielded an environment especially fortuitous for life. The cosmos is only matter interacting with other matter, at all levels and at all scales, forming systems upon systems upon systems, the interactions of which we perceive in this thing we call consciousness. (Separate from most worldviews, I think, is that this one can (theoretically, eventually) be expressed completely in models of physical interaction, which is something most of the world's creation stories cannot do.)

Aqueous• 11 years ago

Oops, the site is down. I guess the verdict is in: Voluntary human extinction doesn't scale.

JesperRavn• 11 years ago

Like Peter Singer, I believe that preventing suffering in living beings is the most important ethical goal. On this count, human impact is ambiguous. We cause a lot of animal suffering through agriculture. But we also cause a lot of animals (especially marine life) not to exist who would have otherwise.

See http://foundational-research.org/publications/importance-of-... for more discussion.

jonpress• 11 years ago

The earth and the universe will cease to exist eventually so we might as well make the most of them.

quadrangle• 11 years ago

I love Nina's work and appreciate Sir David Attenborough's focus on population as an issue (though he would never agree with the VHEM). But…

My whole perspective on the situation was largely changed when I learned the latest scientific perspectives about predicted population from the incomparable Hans Rosling: http://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-p...

That said, a good portion (not all) of the foundations of VHEM are valid even if the conclusion and complete package is, well, less valid. I won't go into details here. I sympathize with the feelings, but they aren't really the right perspective in the end.

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement

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