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That we might be the agents of our own extinction is a relatively recent idea in the story of the human species. As our understanding of our place within the cosmos has expanded, so too have the ethical demands placed upon us. During what could be the daybreak of human history, the severity of extinction rests on futures lost.

Text by Thomas Moynihan

Saint Augustine once wrote that the “world is like an oil press: under pressure”¹ and listed the known calamities of his fourth-century world – “famine, war, want”. Today, 16 centuries later, we are more pressurised than before. We now know of many more worldly risks and our acquisition of knowledge, and power, has itself made more of them.

Writing in Roman North Africa at the opening of the Middle Ages, Augustine ultimately believed that history was a function of divine fulfilment. He compared the world to an oil press because he thought it was ineluctably sorting good souls from bad. He believed that, like the press, it would inevitably accomplish sorting and highest justice would be made consecrate, no matter what. The world may have been under pressure, but its future was secure.

We are now endowed with more history than Augustine. Burdened by centuries of accumulated knowing, we feel the pressure of the world in a completely different way. There is no security beyond our own actions. Our entire human future rests upon the deeds of today. Moreover, in our actions, the very future of human action itself is at stake. Especially now that we can enact our own destruction.

Historically speaking, it is perhaps shocking that humans have only very recently figured out that the human species could go extinct and, with it, everything humanly meaningful and valuable. This is not to say that humans are the only valuable things in the universe. Not at all. Rather, it is to say that we are the only beings (that we thus far know of) that can evaluate it, or, put a value on it.

But what is value? This remains an open question. But hereafter we mean it in its specifically moral sense: indexing our ability to regard certain states of affairs as morally “good” and imagine others as morally “better”. We navigate our world not just by talking about things, but by assessing them: venturing that some things ought to be and others ought not. Our language is not limited to what is or has been; it also enables us to resolve what should be.

Humans may not be the only valuable things, but are the only evaluators we know of. We are the only known beings capable of becoming responsive to the impartial demand to make the cosmos a better place for all, as well as recognise the capacity for good or bad in the consequences of our attempts to do so. As far as we know, no other beings can ethically improve themselves or their world, nor correct their beliefs about how best to do so.

In the West, people started worrying about human extinction sometime around 300 years ago, when poets and philosophers started anticipating visions of Earth’s biosphere continuing without us, bereft of all human concerns.

People have told stories about the end of all things since people first started telling stories. But the various apocalypses of religion and mythology invariably anticipate the end of the world as being inherently meaningful or moral, as somehow consummating meaning and justice within the universe, rather than irreversibly frustrating its realisation.

Moreover, none of the great apocalypses anticipate the extinguishment of value and meaning within a world that continues to exist, in its vast muteness and meaninglessness, totally devoid of humans or recognisably humane significances. Indeed, value and justice often were presumed to live on interminably in the spirits, the gods, or the afterlife.

So, the story goes something like this.

For most of Western history, value was invariably assumed indestructible in the sense that its aggregate remained constant and was conserved independently of human actions. This was the same whether this indestructibility was vouchsafed through belief in paternal deities or eternal returns of the same. Then, somewhere in the Enlightenment, when changes to material conditions became visible and the future came clearly into view as a target of meaningful moral influence, people realised value was mutable. It could be made or destroyed; it was capable of being consequentially diminished or augmented. But it was only recently that people awoke to the sheer breadth of potential future consequences – the sheer range for immense goodness or badness in outcomes.

During the Cold War, the collapse of Western civilisation, of global civilisation, and the termination of Homo sapiens were often spoken of interchangeably. There was little concerted effort to distinguish the severity of these outcomes and give a structure to the badness of global disaster.

Early glimmerings, however, are found back in 1958, when Bertrand Russell suggested that refusing a nuclear exchange, even if the price of pacificism was a global victory for despotic totalitarianism, remained vastly better than internecine annihilation. He urged that despotism was reversible, as were past “dark ages”, whereas outright extinction would be uniquely irreversible.² To think otherwise, he suggested, is to sacrifice myopically the capacious opportunity of future generations for the narrow anxieties held by the present one (which may yet come to have seemed world-historically fleeting).

Some found the notion strange. Russell’s colleague in philosophy, Sidney Hook, swiftly replied in disagreement. He took issue with Russell’s suggestion of duty to the yet unborn and explained why:

I must confess that I have some difficulty with this notion of obligation, as if it implied there were millions of souls extending into eternity waiting to be born. I do not share this theology. If there are such souls, they may perhaps become embodied elsewhere. ³

But obligation to future generations is no theology. Absolving our duties to the future with the hopes that its promise and values will “become embodied elsewhere” – perhaps on planets further abroad – is actually itself much closer to theology. For it is to defer to the heavens, whether they are considered alien or angelic. Accountability to future generations is, in fact, theology’s opposite: the ultimate transposition of the locus of our ethics, of our responsibilities and their ramified pay-offs into the thoroughly secular – that is, worldly – arena of history.

Appropriately, “secular” originally meant “that which concerns the generations of humanity”.

1. Augustine, Sermones, xxiv.11.

2. B. Russell, ‘World Communism and Nuclear War’, New Leader, May 26 1958, pp. 9–12.

3. S. Hook, ‘A Free Man’s Choice’, New Leader, May 26 1958, pp. 9–12.

This attitude to the future is historically novel. Where prior generations, such as Augustine’s, thought we lived near the terminus of humanity’s mundane saga, many philosophers now believe we might be living at its daybreak. This is linked to the epoch-making discovery that value is made – that its subsistence is dependent upon our actions rather than maintained in independence of them – and, because it can be made, it can also be meaningfully lost. This defines the high-stakes attitude to history evinced above, from Russell to Parfit.

Against his belief that we stand at a bright new dawn for ethical reasoning and action, Parfit cited a competing notion: “Some people believe that there cannot be progress in Ethics, since everything has been already said.” This opinion, ironically or unironically, is nothing new. In around 350 BCE, Aristotle declared that “probably each art and science has often been developed as far as possible and has again perished”. This, he wrote, has happened “not once nor twice nor occasionally but infinitely often”. Therefore, within “the multitude of years … almost everything has been found out”. Inquiry and discovery are just remembering in the right way and trying to “supply defects” in our recall.⁹ This fits naturally with Plato’s own suggestion that knowledge is the remembrance of the lessons of past lives.

It was an almost universal conviction of the ancient world that all possibilities are eventually realised, or no possibility goes permanently unrealised. The realisation of nothing is forever frustrated. For millennia, contemplators were enamoured with the conviction that nature is as full of all possible things as it can be. There is no wasted opportunity: no place where some item could be, but simply never is; no gaps, no unoccupied real estate. This was a frequently unacknowledged assumption for large swathes of Western philosophy.

Of course, saying that no possibility goes permanently unrealised also means that no realisation can irreversibly return to the inexistence of mere possibility. This is one of the reasons why people didn’t apprehend the truth of permanent species extinctions – our own included – until very recently. It was thought that if a species was lost here and now, it would return some other place or at some other time.

So too, as Aristotle implied, with ideas and useful discoveries: if we forget some piece of knowledge, we can rest assured that it will one day be rediscovered. In this sense, knowledge can never be permanently forgotten. Whatever is lost will return; discovery is just remembering the past.

So too with moral value: if all valuable things and events are reliably and inevitably realised – entirely independently of our actions – then we cannot change or influence that aggregate amount. The best we can do, given Aristotle’s belief that everything valuable has already been somewhere discovered, is understand “maximising value” as nothing more than the task of returning to elder maxima. This implies an indestructibility of value: it cannot be created.

The indestructibility of value means that value is conserved through all its destructions and generations. The total amount never changes, even if local quantity is subject to shifts. Value is never globally diminished or grown, it is transferred elsewhere in time or space. We cannot leverage meaningful change upon the amount in the world. We can perfect ourselves, becoming more virtuous, but this is a personal and parochial affair, never one that transforms material conditions globally and irreversibly. There is therefore no meaningful historical change. Indeed, perfecting ourselves is revisiting previous peaks of virtuosity, following prior example and fulfilling well-established natural ends, rather than searching for forms of perfection as-yet-unrealised.

9. Aristotle, Complete Works: Revised Oxford Translations, ed. J. Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1698 and 2005) vol.1 556, vol.2.

Background belief in an indestructibility of value persisted, from the eternal returns of the Greeks into the hopeful eschatology of Christianity. For medieval Christendom, humans may have blighted creation, bringing in imperfection through misused freedom, but, in the end, this is just a blip, the interval of worldly history just a detour within an otherwise insoluble consummation of divine justice.

As Augustine wrote, the “goodness” of created beings “can be augmented and diminished”, ¹⁰ but, ultimately, “all natures are good, because their author is supremely good”. Variability is just an illusion, caused by limited perspective: “variable good was created and is governed alone by the immutable good.” ¹¹

Here Augustine was practising something we now call theodicy – justifying the ways of God to man, rationalising the ways things are. The theodicean impulse rests in the desire to believe that value and justice are not dependent on our actions but are perfectly maintained, like permanent natural constants, independently of our deeds.

For both the ancient Greek and medieval Christian, individuals could create local fluctuations, but the global amount of good could not be meaningfully diminished nor augmented by humans. Assuming value immutable, you are never going to answer the demands of protecting or promoting it.

This is not to say that people of these past eras were carefree or insouciant. When it came to personal affairs, they were surely as motivated and concerned as we are today. Probably they were often more wise, virtuous and upright. But there could yet be little sense of a humanmade future within which there is radically more, or less, goodness than today.

Assurance in value’s indestructibility persisted well into the modern epoch, perpetuating itself into the scientific worldview. In the wake of the scientific revolution, the riddle of “evil” or “corruption” gained new resonance. Looking down telescopes in the early 1600s, pioneers like Galileo noticed that the heavens – which the ancients and medievals presumed to be perfect and incorruptible – were themselves subject to decay and destruction. Sunspots were noticed. This implied that suns themselves die, which, in turn implied the mortality of entire solar systems. How could a perfect creation, designed by the perfect creator, admit to such imprudent squander?

The recourse was indestructible value. Many scientists and naturalists during the early modern epoch simply claimed that for every sun that dies, another is necessarily born. This was thought to apply also to populated worlds. Moreover, it was often applied to the species that inhabit them. It was numerously argued that if a species dies on one planet, it will re-emerge on another in the fullness of time. Because of this, the destruction of planet Earth would only be a temporary setback for an eternally recurring humanity.

For example, in 1686, the French writer Bernard Fontenelle pronounced with confidence that for all the “ancient Stars that disappear, other new ones are born in their places, and that Defect in Nature must [be] repair’d”. He concluded that this meant the true extinction, of any natural “Species”, was impossible.

What should appear as the extinction of value and life – instanced in the destruction of populous planets – was explained away as just the cosmic circulation of these things. (The same, of course, applies to their generation.) If we could see the whole, we would know that all remains balanced. Writers from the 1600s to 1800s were enthralled by this theodicy-derived excuse to ignore the observational evidence of a physical universe imprudently dying for no reason whatsoever.

10. Augustine, Enchiridion, Caput 12.

11. Augustine, Contra aduersarium legis et prophetarum, Book 1, Caput 6.

Having woken up to the fact that the universe was not designed for the immutable benefit of evaluating beings, and that value is therefore mutable within it, it quickly became clear that humans could, across future history, effect consequential change upon the “good” in the world.

But, by the turn of the 1900s, many people were waking up to the fundamental fact that all valuable things (whatever they might be) require energy. People were starting to acknowledge that almost all complex systems – from ecosystems to sentient brains to civilisation itself – run entirely on translated sunlight.

Given advancement of knowledge far beyond the early modern observation of sunspots, scientists had, since the birth of thermodynamics in the mid-1800s, been attempting to accurately estimate our sun’s continued lifetime. And where previously the death of our sun would have been cheerily justified (in the mode of theodicy) by belief in the compensatory birth of another sun (and Earth) elsewhere, this was no longer believable.

Why? Because, in 1865, German mathematician and physicist Rudolf Clausius announced “entropy”. Thermodynamics showed that while energy is conserved over time, the amount of useful energy is irreversibly running down. Entropy is the recognition that all change requires disbalance and our cosmos is tending towards balance and so universal stasis. Clausius concluded, once and for all, that our universe does not go in “never-ending cycles” of destruction and renewal, but tends towards a “state of unchanging death” where “no further change can ever more take place”. ¹⁸

Not long after, in 1900, Nikola Tesla declared that the “great problem of science” is harnessing more of the sun’s energy. The reason why no one had previously articulated this “great problem” before Tesla’s generation was because they frequently assumed useful energy cosmically unlimited and indestructible. They didn’t acknowledge that, in cosmic timescales, it is scarce.

But Clausius’ entropy revealed an insuperable cosmic budget of value creation, here and everywhere, forever. The endowment may be gargantuan, but it is finite. Suns may perish and others be born, but over time the direction of travel is toward universal caput mortuum. There could now no longer be any serious belief that the good – reliant as it is, whatever it is, upon energy – remains eternally indestructible.

Some reacted with dejection and disillusion. Historian Henry Adams prophesied that the “final equilibrium” means humanity can only “look forward only to a diversified agony” without “hope of escaping imbecility”. 19 Yet precisely because there was an ultimately finite amount of resource and time available with which to channel it toward valuable things, it suddenly became possible to have a meaningful impact upon the total amount of good that will be eventually realised. It is in fact the elder belief in an eternal reservoir of unlimited energy and value that makes our actions and works meaningless and trivial. The exculpations of eternity are intoxicating. Against the hasty pessimism of Adams, then, it is the ultimate scarcity of potential goodness that makes maximising it meaningful.

The amount of time left was swiftly calculated to be stupendous. In 1929, physicist James Jeans calculated that “earth is likely to remain a possible abode of life for something of the order of a million million years to come”.²⁰ We are thus potentially standing “at the first flush of the dawn of civilization”. ²¹

Jeans had a remarkable way of envisioning this: imagine stacking a postage stamp on a penny, and then balancing both upon the pinnacle of a 20-metre-high obelisk. The thickness of the stamp is the extent of recorded history, the thickness of the stamp and penny is the extent of our species’ existence, and the distance from the stamp to the obelisk’s base is the age of our Earth. He went on:

Now stick another postage-stamp on top of the first to represent the next 5000 years of civilization, and keep sticking on postage-stamps until you have a pile as high as Mont Blanc … The first postage-stamp was the past of civilization; the column higher than Mont Blanc its future. Or, to look at it in another way, the first postage-stamp represents what man has already achieved; the pile which out-tops Mont Blanc represents what he may achieve.

Of course, “accidents may happen” to the species. Jeans listed the calamities known in the early 1900s, from “celestial collisions” to solar explosions:

Accident may replace our Mont Blanc of postage-stamps by a truncated column of only a fraction of the height of Mont Blanc. Even so, there is prospect of tens of thousands of millions of years before our race … We have come into being in the fresh glory of the dawn, and a day of almost unthinkable length stretches before us with unimaginable opportunities for accomplishment … We are still too much engulfed in the greyness of the morning mists to be able to imagine, however vaguely, how this world of ours will appear to those who will come after us and see it in the full light of day. But by what light we have, we seem to discern that the main message [is] one of responsibility: of responsibility because we are drawing plans and laying foundations for a longer future than we can well imagine.

The preponderance of achievement lies in a future pregnant with possibility, rather than within the already realised wisdom of the past – the perfect inversion of the ancient Greek attitude.

In 1935, the historian Arnold J. Toynbee pointed exactly this out.²² He explained that with the help of modern knowledge – from palaeoanthropology to the aging of the Earth – we can now refute the “brilliant conjectures” of Plato and Aristotle and their speculations upon a past immensity pregnant filled with forgotten wonders. In neat reversal, the expanse of achievement and greatness lies ahead. Toynbee calculated that given the number of civilisations humanity had created in the 6,000 years since they first emerged, Jeans’ prospect affords us a further 1,743,000,000 civilisational lifespans yet to come before the sun renders Earth uninhabitable.

18. R. Clausius, ‘On the Second Fundamental Theorem of the Mechanical Theory of Heat’, Philosophical Magazine 35 (1868), pp. 417–19.

19. H. Adams, The Tendency of History (New York: 1929), p. 48.

20. J. Jeans, The Universe Around Us (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929), p. 352.

21. J. Jeans, Eos: Or, the Wider Aspects of Cosmogony (London: Kegan Paul, 1928), pp. 12–13, 83–84.

22. A.J. Toynbee, A Study of History: Volume 1, The Geneses of Civilizations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 173, 460–63.