The World Without Us

“Suppose we all agree to stop procreating. Or that the one virus that would truly be effective strikes, and all human sperm loses viability. The first to notice would be crisis-pregnancy centers, because no one would be coming in. Happily, in a few months abortion providers would be out of business. It would be tragic for people who kept trying to conceive. But in five years, there would be no more children under five dying horribly.”

The lot of all living children would improve, he says, as they became more valuable rather than more disposable. No orphan would go un-adopted.

“In 21 years, there would be, by definition, no juvenile delinquency.” By then, as resignation sinks in, Knight predicts that spiritual awakening would replace panic, because of a dawning realization that as human life drew toward a close, it was improving. There would be more than enough to eat, and resources would again be plentiful, including water. The seas would replenish. Because new housing wouldn’t be necessary, so would forests and wetlands.

“With no more resource conflicts, I doubt we’d be wasting each other’s lives in combat.” Like retired business executives who suddenly find serenity by tending a garden, Knight envisions us spending our remaining time helping rid an increasingly natural world of unsightly and now useless clutter, in pursuit of which we’d once swapped something alive and lovely.

“The last humans could enjoy their final sunsets peacefully, knowing they have returned the planet as close as possible to the Garden of Eden.”

IN AN AGE when the decline of natural reality is paralleled by the rise of something called virtual reality, VHEMT’s antipode is not just those who find the promise of better living through human extinction deranged, but also a group of respected thinkers and noted inventors who consider extinction possibly a career move for Homo sapiens. Transhumanists, as they call themselves, hope to colonize virtual space by developing software to upload their minds into circuitry that would outperform both our brains and bodies on numerous levels (including, incidentally, never having to die). Via the self-accruing wizardry of computers, an abundance of silicon, and vast opportunities afforded by modular memory and mechanical appendages, human extinction would become merely a jettisoning of the limited and not very durable vessels that our technological minds have finally outgrown.

Prominent in the transhumanist (sometimes called posthuman) movement are Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom; heralded inventor Ray Kurzweil, originator of optical character recognition, flat-bed scanners, and print-to-speech reading machines for the blind; and Trinity College bioethicist James Hughes, author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future. However Faustian, their discussion is compelling in its lure of immortality and preternatural power—and almost touching in its Utopian faith that a machine could be made so perfect that it would transcend entropy.

The great barrier to robots and computers leaping the chasm between mere objects and life-forms, it’s often argued, is that no one has ever built a machine that is aware of itself: without being able to feel, a supercomputer might calculate rings around us, but still never be able to think about its place in the world. A more fundamental flaw, though, is that no machine has performed indefinitely without human maintenance. Even stuff without moving parts breaks down, and self-repair programs crash. Salvation, in the form of backup copies, could lead to a world of robots desperately trying to stay one clone up on the latest technology to which competitive knowledge was migrating—an all-consuming form of tail chasing that hearkens to the behavior of lower primates, who undoubtedly have more fun.

Even if posthumanists succeed in transferring themselves to circuitry, it won’t be anytime soon. For the rest of us, sentimentally clinging to our carbon-based human nature, voluntary-extinction advocate Les Knight’s twilight prophecy hits a vulnerable spot: the weariness that genuinely humane beings feel as they witness the collapse of much biology and beauty. The vision of a world relieved of our burden, with its flora and fauna blossoming wildly and wonderfully in every direction, is initially seductive. Yet it’s quickly followed by a stab of bereavement over the loss of all the wonder that humans have wrought amid our harm and excess. If that most wondrous of all human creations—a child—is never more to roll and play on the green Earth, then what really would be left of us? What of our spirit might be truly immortal?