“Such considerations have led many scholars to acknowledge that, as Stephen Hawking wrote in The Guardian in 2016, ‘we are at the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity.’ . And Max Tegmark contends that ‘it’s probably going to be within our lifetimes … that we’re either going to self-destruct or get our act together.’ Consistent with these dismal declarations, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 2020 set its iconic Doomsday Clock to a mere 100 seconds before midnight (or doom), the closest it’s been since the clock was created in 1947, and more than 11,000 scientists from around the world signed an article in 2020 stating ‘clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency’, and without ‘an immense increase of scale in endeavours to conserve our biosphere [we risk] untold suffering due to the climate crisis.’ As the young climate activist Xiye Bastida summed up this existential mood in a Teen Vogue interview in 2019, the aim is to ‘make sure that we’re not the last generation’, because this now appears to be a very real possibility.”
Why longtermism is the world’s most dangerous secular credo | Aeon Essays
https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo
via Instapaper
Why longtermism is the world’s most dangerous secular credo | Aeon Essays
https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo
via Instapaper