The World Without Us

HAVING YET TO perfect contraception, thus far we have little to fear from misanthropic plots to sterilize the entire human race. From time to time, Nick Bostrom, who directs Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, computes the odds (increasing, he believes) that human existence is at risk of ending. He is particularly intrigued by the potential of nanotechnology going awry, accidentally or deliberately, or superintelligence running amuck. In either case, however, he notes that the skills needed to create atom-sized medical machines that would patrol our bloodstreams, zapping disease until they suddenly turned on us, or self-replicating robots that end up crowding or outsmarting us off the planet, are “at least decades away.”

In his morose 1996 scholarly tome The End of the World, cosmologist John Leslie of Ontario’s University of Guelph concurs with Bostrom. He cautions, however, that there’s no assurance that our current dallying with high-energy particle accelerators won’t crack the very physics of the vacuum in which our galaxy twirls, or even touch off a whole new Big Bang (“by mistake,” he adds, with scant consolation).

Each of these men, philosophers taking ethical measure of an age in which machines think faster than humans but regularly prove at least as flawed, repeatedly smack into a phenomenon that never troubled their intellectual predecessors: although humans have obviously survived every pox and meteor that nature has tossed at us until now, technology is something we toss back at our own peril.

“On the bright side, it hasn’t killed us yet, either,” says Nick Bostrom, who, when not refining doomsday data, researches how to extend the human life span. “But if we did go extinct, I think it would more likely be through new technologies than environmental destruction.”

To the rest of the planet, it would make little difference, because if either actually took us out, many other species undoubtedly would go with us. The chance that zookeepers from outer space might make this whole conundrum moot by rapturing us away but leaving everything else is not only slim but narcissistic—why would they only be interested in us? And what would stop them from the alien equivalent of salivating over the same enticing resource repast that we’ve gorged on? Our seas, forests, and the creatures that dwell in them might quickly prefer us to hyper-powered extraterrestrials who could stick an interstellar straw into the planetary ocean for the same purposes that induce us to siphon entire rivers out of their valleys.

“By definition, we’re the alien invader. Everywhere except Africa. Every time Homo sapiens went anywhere else, things went extinct.”

Les Knight, the founder of VHEMT—the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement—is thoughtful, soft-spoken, articulate, and quite serious. Unlike more-strident proponents of human expulsion from an aggrieved planet—such as the Church of Euthanasia, with its four pillars of abortion, suicide, sodomy, and cannibalism, and a Web site guide to butchering a human carcass that includes a recipe for barbeque sauce—Knight takes no misanthropic joy in anyone’s war, illness, or suffering. A schoolteacher, he just keeps doing math problems that keep giving him the same answer.

“No virus could ever get all 6 billion of us. A 99.99 percent die-off would still leave 650,000 naturally immune survivors. Epidemics actually strengthen a species. In 50,000 years we could easily be right back where we are now.”

War doesn’t work either, he says. “Millions have died in wars, and yet the human family continues to increase. Most of the time, wars encourage both winners and losers to repopulate. The net result is usually an increase rather than a decrease in total population. Besides,” he adds, “killing is immoral. Mass murder should never be considered a way to improve life on Earth.”

Although he lives in Oregon, his movement, he says, is based everywhere—meaning on the Internet, with Web sites in 11 languages. At Earth Day fairs and environmental conferences, Knight posts charts that acknowledge U.N. predictions that, worldwide, population growth rates and birthrates will both decline by 2050—but the punch line is the third chart, which shows sheer numbers still soaring.

“We have too many active breeders. China’s down to 1.3 percent reproduction, but still adds 10 million a year. Famine, disease, and war are harvesting as fast as ever, but can’t keep up with our growth.”

Under the motto “May we live long and die out,” his movement advocates that humanity avoid the agonizing, massive die-off that will occur when, as Knight foresees, it becomes brutally clear that it was naive to think that we could all have our planet and eat it, too. Rather than face horrific resource wars and starvation that decimate us and nearly everything else as well, VHEMT proposes gently laying the human race to rest.