Selfish Effective altruism #2:The unfathomed importance of future generations

Hello there!
Here is another installment to my series about "Effective altruism", it is about future generations.

Preface

What do I mean by future generations? And no, I do not mean 'Baby Boomers', 'Generation X', 'Millenials' or 'IGen'. I think these ideas are rather stereotypical and very ignorant of everyone as an individual, Bill Gates and Donald Trump may both be baby boomers and rich, but one is willing to make the world a better place for the greater good and the other wants to make the world a better place for himself.

What I mean by generations are families, for example your grandparents' family or your great grandparent's family and so on. My argument of this article is that the world may most likely become a much greater thing than it is now and we should do something to ensure that this future comes to fruition.

A world bigger than today

It may be hard to believe that this world will probably be more prosperous than it is today, especially towards the incredibly nihilistic people who think that the world is infiltrated by social media and horrible politics. As well as that, over here, Brexit is happening and constantly being pushed back.

There are a number of improvements in society like less people dying from malaria than in the past. There have also been improvements in astrology, like a small set of evidence of water on mars, slightly increasing the likelihood of us moving into another planet before earth perishes, Elon Musk would cry tears of joy upon hearing this. Homosexuality was also far more discriminated 30 years ago than it is now, in the past gay people could have been at best shamed on and at worst discriminated. This is no longer the case as they can even get married - case and point Ellen DeGeneres or Stephen Fry. The world is also much safer now for children than it was in the 1950s and they are less likely to die when they're outside despite the news often talking about children getting raped or murdered. And for good measure, world poverty has also dropped since 1820 and shows no signs of going up.

If you want more facts then watch this TED talk by William McAskhill (co-founder of 80,000 hours). An even greater thing is that we've evolved from a sapiens that were not the strongest, but had a far larger brain size than most other animals as shown in the book "Sapiens" which I have read a little bit. Imagine what we could be like in the next 10,000 or so years - future humans could have even bigger brains than they do now, therefore allowing for more data to be stored and complex thinking systems to be implemented. Granted, I'm no historian or evolutionary scientist so these are mostly just my opinions. Regardless, the possibility of that could certainly make one excited enough to accomplish this vision of a nicer world... even if none of the people from 2019 will be alive in the next 10,000 years.

There are also large advancements in science and technology allowing us to eradicate diseases and use things like google maps to figure out where a hotel, nearest restaurant or even our houses are. This is something that would have been life or death for our ancestors that didn't have such technologies.

Human race extinction

Certainly, the extinction of the human race is possible despite all these advances, in fact much more likely if there is no policy to be implemented, which I'm not going to mention here because it certainly deserves a post of it's own.

This may have had its origins back around after World War 2, I'm not saying that World War 2 or 1 could have not killed all of the human race - very little can be worse than war! What happened after World War 2 was the cold war which wasn't necessarily a war, but more of a power struggle. There were two dominant superpowers in this time period, the USA and the USSR a.k.a. Soviet Russia, in 1945 the USA dropped 2 bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in Japan. This killed over 100,000 people in a short span of time, but this was not the end. This motivated both superpowers to build up nuclear weapons that for the first time in human history, humans can have access to weapons of mass destruction possibly killing all life. Although this never happened (and hopefully never will), there was one time where nuclear weapons were going to be fired.

Because of this man, you are alive today
Credit: New York times

In the early 1980s the USSR found out that the United states had seemingly launched nuclear missiles and the USSR was alerted about this. A nuclear war would have likely come out of this... if it was not for one particular soviet solider. He was known as Stanislav Petrov (1939 - 2017) and he saved your life. Yes you, reading this. He is one of the reasons that we are all standing on this Earth. That seems like a pretty bold statement, so let me tell you what exactly he did. He was on duty in the early warning centre and the computers wrongly interpreted a missile attack from the US, and the alarms were very loud and how long Petrov had to think was pending. On the very last second, he called up his superiors and informed them that this was a false alarm and no action should take place. It turns out that the computers detected sun rays which were confused as components of the missiles.

If this action had not been taken, none of us would be here and the world would have looked like 2300 AD from the video game "Chrono Trigger"; in other words a very unpleasant world to live in. My main point here is that if you want future generations to live, then you need to think about what things may destroy the basic sources of nutrition, environment and shelter. Then try and prevent them by going into relevant careers to solve them. A good example is government work in policy because as I've said before policy is needed to make sure nothing bad happens.

One liberating thing about this is that you don't need to spend a long time training to become a doctor to save many lives. Well, unless you are working on the medical counter measures to stop diseases from spreading, but other than that you don't need the long training. You may not see your impact now, but future generations will enjoy a lot of what good you have given them.

Conclusion

It may not seem important now, but future generations are more so than most people think. Especially if you are one of those people who think that future generations are essentially like people in front of you. For those people who care, some starters could be, for high earners, you could donate to 'giving what we can' to effective charities or do what I'm doing - spreading these ideas via blogs. Or you could do both. Up to you.
Anyway, I hope this blog has widened your visions about the world. Criticisms are welcome as always.

That's all from me!
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See also:
https://80000hours.org/articles/extinction-risk/
https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-effective-altruism/
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/how-much-difference-can-one-person-make/