Humanity present and future

In “Stubborn Attachments,” Tyler Cowen presents a fascinating thought experiment to stress test our responsibilities to future generations. He says to imagine a space traveler leaving Earth now and taking a somewhat long journey (for us) at close to the speed of light (99.995%). People on earth would experience about 100 years for every 1 year the traveler experiences. What expectations would the traveler have about the planet they return to? Importantly, to the traveler, what rights do they have to return to a planet that is hospitable? They can’t expect the planet to be unchanged (in fact that would be pretty depressing), or that their job is waiting for them (or even that they would be qualified for any job). But if they returned to planet in a vastly worse state they would probably be very concerned, and might even feel like their rights were violated.

There’s a normative question here for us planetary custodians as well: what kind of planet should we be maintaining, for us and for that traveler? This question is challenging because a verdant and healthy planet in itself (however we may measure such a thing, maybe as a combination of fraction of CO2 ppm resulting from human activity and non-human biomass weighted by species distribution) may be orthogonal to humans thriving. In fact given the past 200 years we have no right to expect that human-driven CO2 ppm is not directly correlated with human progress — but we can set that aside for now. The point is that there may be reasonable productivity trade-offs that could be made with environmental factors, but there’s almost no progress milestone that could compensated for a ruined earth.

All that is to say the traveler might be happy to return to a quaint luddite society with animals roaming free everywhere and air quality better than ever (something out of Pocahontas), but not at the expense of medical advancement or the freedom to pursue one’s goals rather than spending all one’s time building cabins and farming. Rather we should, at minimum, try to continue making progress in the important axes of human productivity (energy, medicine, housing, food scarcity, and happiness) while also minimizing or reversing negative impacts on the environment. In this sense, we are not mere custodians. We need to be more forward-thinking than that. We can’t spend all of our time and treasure preparing for the eventual return of the traveler.

If the traveler returned to a society with better life expectancy, more leisure time, positive social interactions, etc, on a planet whose climate resembled the one they left or better, we should assume they would be happy.

Cowen’s point is obviously that we should give future generations the same consideration. His objective is for us to critically examine the discount we apply to these future people, just like we should examine the discount we apply to our own future selves and wellbeing. His tangible example is the greasy, fatty cheeseburger that tastes great but is (generally) the wrong culinary decision from a health perspective, and might even detract significantly from our wellbeing in the future, by increasing our chances of having a heart attack, or reinforcing our desire for cheeseburgers which will in aggregate increase our chances of having a heart attack even more.

The traveler helps us overcome the inability for our brains to reason about future or nonlocal events. Just because someone will live 100 years from now doesn’t make them any less real than if they were alive now. Cowen’s pithy and memorable way of reinforcing this point: “The present is so real and vivid, and the future seems so distant and abstract. Many people cannot fully grasp that when the future comes, it will be just as real as the present is right now.”

But if that future in 100 years were us in 1 year, what would we have wanted the custodians to have done with the planet and civilization? What should we be actively doing now to make progress in both those dimensions?

Of course, those aren’t rhetorical questions. There are right and wrong answers, and it’s disappointing that many people discount too sharply those future people (including themselves, their children, and grandchildren). The most obvious places we can improve are energy (and energy-consuming) processes, which harm the planet disproportionately compared to many available alternatives, and unnecessary human suffering caused by war. In 2026, the US is actively engaged in malicious activity on both realms. Wind farms that have already been built have been turned off, presumably partly for spite and partly to enhance the market share of coal and natural gas plants; and new funding is being issued for coal plants. New funding… for coal. And the conflict in Iran presents an unimaginably ironic scenario where public opinion has actually turned against a military operation that sought to depose a totalitarian despot because of the ways it is being waged (irresponsibly targeting infrastructure and civilian buildings like schools, universities, and mosques). Much more can be said about this, but I’ll leave it at this: the removal of Khomani and his government should have been heralded by all freedom-loving people, but the execution was bungled so badly that it’s not at all clear the world will arise from this conflict any better off.

Both of these approaches are wrong, dumb, and bad for human productivity and the climate. We need to be better custodians of the planet and more forward-thinking agents on behalf of humanity, present and future.