Extinction and the Matter of Meaning

Mass extinction - the human conundrum - where meaning lives

Photo by Sabina Music Rich on Unsplash

First, quick fiction update: my story ‘Butchered Tongue’ is available in Heartlines Spec and another story, ‘Child of the Mountain’, appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine.

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Part one: All things end

As we enter a shiny new year, it feels only right to consider extinction. No? Just me?

What is extinction, though?

On the face of it, that’s a simple question. A species goes extinct when the last of its members dies¹. But once we look at life beyond animals, the idea of ‘species’ becomes more flexible — plants hybridize readily, bacteria have regular orgies where they exchange chunks of genetic material, and so on.

An extra complicating factor is that extinctions are usually established retrospectively, by looking back. Based on fossils, so mostly vertebrate animals with bones, we can estimate that around 99% of species that have ever existed have gone extinct. And that’s okay. Extinctions are part of evolution, as is the rise of new species through speciation. Sometimes, though, extinction speeds up across species. When the extinction rate drastically increases above the expected background rate, we enter a mass extinction.

Life on earth has gone through five mass extinctions, most famously the asteroid-fueled one that ended the age of dinosaurs². Today, we are in the sixth mass extinction. It may not feel like it, but most mass extinctions don’t happen from one day to the next. They are rapid in the geological sense, but can take generations to spiral out of control. The extinction rate depends on which group of organisms you look at - mammals, birds, invertebrates, and so on - but even conservative estimates suggest that current extinction rates are 100 to 1,000 times greater than the background rate.

This is the conservative estimate from Ceballos et al. 2015. Accelerated modern human-induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction? Science Advances 1(5).

But let’s be honest, there’s one species we’re particularly interested in.

Time for human extinction.

Part two: Destroyer of worlds

Human extinction is a popular trope in fiction. I Am Legend, Children of Men, The Last of Us, The Road, Station Eleven, Oryx and Crake, After World, The Last Man³… Plenty of books, movies, and games take place in a world where humanity is circling down the existential drain.

And yet, in the last decade, give or take, human extinction has become an explicitly defined research topic, usually framed in terms of existential risk or x-risk.

What makes us think such a risk is imminent? After all, the oldest fossil evidence of modern Homo sapiens is about 300,000 years old. In terms of large mammal species, with an average ‘species lifetime’ of about 3 million years, that’s decidedly unimpressive. We’re kids, making a mess of our room and gorging on candy.

And that might be a problem.

Many of the so-called x-risks, barring asteroids and extraterrestrial events, are (partially) the result of our presence and rapid population growth. Nuclear war or nanotechnology running wild, for example. Pandemics, aided by humanity clustering in cities and billions of animals in factory farms pumped full of antibiotics, or a climate changing at a pace many species struggle to keep up with while promoting more extreme weather events. And everyone’s recent favorite, AI. I’m not convinced by the evil Skynet scenario, but if AI is an existential risk to humanity, I wager it will be through a combination of rapid misinformation multiplication, infrastructure demands, and environmental degradation.

But let’s entertain a perfect combination of calamities. Humanity goes extinct. Is that bad? Is that worse than other species going extinct? Why⁴?

In an Aeon essay, philosopher Émile P. Torres sees three categories of ethical response to human extinction. I’m going to summarize them broadly, but there are plenty of subcategories and nuanced arguments related to each of them.

• The further loss view: human extinction means losing something. It could be the future happiness of billions of people, or advances in science, art, and so on. Human extinction = bad.

• The equivalence view: human extinction in itself is neutral. The suffering associated with some ways of going extinct is obviously bad, but the state of humanity being extinct isn’t bad, because no human would be around to suffer from said badness. Human extinction = neutral.

• The pro-extinctionist view: the suffering associated with going extinct is bad, but humanity being extinct might be good. Erasing humanity from the universe prevents potentially massive human (and other?) suffering in the future. Human extinction = good.

If I put on my nihilistic bastard hat⁵, I might say that humanity going extinct is merely a redistribution of organic matter. But if you’ve read some of my previous posts, you know that I’m a (not so) closeted romantic. Let’s see if we can save humanity.

Part three: Meaning maker

The tricky thing about the three options above is that they are anthropocentric. Whether we deem (human) suffering good or bad, whether we prioritize future joy or not; those are human decisions about human life, human suffering, and human joy. Some arguments extend this to ‘posthumans’ (our distant descendants, the future chickens to our current human dinosaurs).

The least anthropocentric view may be the nihilistic bastard view, but that way lies madness. If nothing matters, then, well, nothing matters.

To many of us, human extinction matters because we make it matter. That sounds like another anthropocentric circle argument. But the mere fact that I can draw that verbal circle is important.

If nothing has meaning, everything can be given meaning.

In No Plan, Irish songwriter Hozier sings,

There's no plan, there's no race to be run
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun
There's no plan, there's no kingdom to come
I'll be your man if you’ve got love to get done

There is no grand plan, no decreed path for humanity. And yet we will face the rain to bask in the sun. We will find meaning in the bonds we forge and the goals we pursue.

We, humanity, have the uncanny ability to see worlds in grains of sand and heavens in wild flowers. We can’t help ourselves; we crave meaning and purpose — Viktor Frankl, who wrote the famous Man’s Search for Meaning called this the ‘will to meaning’, which, in turn, was based on thoughts of philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who wrote,

What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act... [T]he crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die

In my space spider post, we considered the psychology of meaning and found that it is a web of purpose, coherence, and (subjective) existential significance.

Perhaps there is meaning in looking into the cold void between the stars and observe and feel and know that the iron in your red blood cells could only have come from the heart of an ancient star that was scattered across the universe in a brilliant supernova.

Perhaps this sense of meaning is an illusion. But doesn’t that make us magicians?

You are part of the universe, bright and brilliant; a glimmer of light pushing back against the darkness of encroaching extinction.

We are still here.

Let’s make it matter.

Thanks for reading. I’m glad you’re not extinct (yet). Clicking buttons matters if you make it matter.

1. Slight nuance here: a species can be ‘functionally extinct’, meaning that perhaps a few individuals remain, but extinction is unavoidable. For example, there are currently two Northern white rhinos left. Both are female. So unless there’s a male hiding somewhere or someone wants to fund a major cloning program, the Northern white rhino will soon be extinct.

2. Except that birds are (technically) dinosaurs. They are the descendants of a group of dinosaurs called Maniraptora. Gives a whole new dimension to a chicken sandwich, doesn’t it?

3. Not only did Mary Shelley write the science fictionally prescient Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, with The Last Man she also basically invented modern dystopian literature. What a mind! *swoon*

4. I’m going to sidestep religious arguments here. I am not religious, so, to me, those arguments are not persuasive. If, however, you are religious, you could use reference to human souls or some divine decree to justify humanity’s specialness. Within the religious context, those are good arguments and you have every right to make them. For this post, let’s focus on non-religious arguments.

5. Though I admit I can still learn a thing or two from cuddly curmudgeon Schopenhauer, who once wrote,

If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence?

True to his word, Schopenhauer had no kids. (Neither had Kierkegaard.)