Why Longtermism Is the World's Most Dangerous Secular Credo — Émile Torres, Aeon (October 19, 2021)

![Scarecrow figures in yellow protective suits on a desolate sandy landscape under a cloudy sky, with industrial smoke in the distance.](https://images.aeonmedia.co/images/58d9e359-d77e-4d11-98b0-e1374794b4d2/essay-final-nn11440305.jpg?width=3840&quality=75&format=auto)

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## Against longtermism

# It started as a fringe philosophical theory about humanity’s future. It’s now richly funded and increasingly dangerous

by Émile P Torres+ BIO

Scarecrows keep away migratory birds from the dangers of the tailing ponds created by the exploitation on the tar sands at Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. _Photo by Larry Towell/Magnum_

There seems to be a growing recognition that humanity might be approaching the ‘end times’. Dire predictions of catastrophe clutter the news. Social media videos of hellish wildfires, devastating floods and hospitals overflowing with COVID-19 patients dominate our timelines. Extinction Rebellion activists are shutting down cities in a desperate attempt to save the world. One survey even found that more than half of the people asked about humanity’s future ‘rated the risk of our way of life ending within the next 100 years at 50 per cent or greater.’

‘Apocalypticism’, or the belief that the end times are imminent, is of course nothing new: people have warned that the end is nigh for millennia, and in fact many New Testament scholars believe that Jesus himself expected the world to end during his own lifetime. But the situation today is fundamentally different than in the past. The ‘eschatological’ scenarios now being discussed are based not on the revelations of religious prophets, or secular metanarratives of human history (as in the case of Marxism), but on robust scientific conclusions defended by leading experts in fields such as climatology, ecology, epidemiology and so on.

We know, for example, that climate change poses a dire threat to civilisation. We know that biodiversity loss and the sixth mass extinction could precipitate sudden, irreversible, catastrophic shifts in the global ecosystem. A thermonuclear exchange could blot out the Sun for years or decades, bringing about the collapse of global agriculture. And whether or not SARS-CoV-2 came from a Wuhan laboratory or was cooked up in the kitchen of nature (the latter seems more [probable](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/covid-19-us-intelligence-rules-out-biological-weapon-origin) right now), synthetic biology will soon [enable](https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/d9aaad_4d3e08f426904b8c8be516230722087a.pdf) bad actors to design pathogens far more lethal and contagious than anything Darwinian evolution could possibly invent. Some philosophers and scientists have also begun sounding the [alarm](https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/d9aaad_b2e7f0f56bec40a195e551dd3e8c878e.pdf) about ‘emerging threats’ associated with machine superintelligence, molecular nanotechnology and stratospheric geoengineering, which look no less formidable.

Such considerations have led many sc

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