Toby Ord just released a collection of quotations on Existential risk and the future of humanity, everyone from Kepler to Winston Churchill (in fact, a surprisingly large number are from Churchill) to Seneca to Mill to Nick Bostrom - it’s one of the most inspirational things I have ever read, and when taken together makes it clear that there have always been people who cared about long-termism or humanity as a whole. Some of my favourites:
The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject … And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them … Let us be satisfied with what we have found out, and let our descendants also contribute something to the truth. … Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced.
— Seneca the Younger, Naturales Quaestiones, 65 CE
The remedies for all our diseases will be discovered long after we are dead; and the world will be made a fit place to live in, after the death of most of those by whose exertions it will have been made so. It is to be hoped that those who live in those days will look back with sympathy to their known and unknown benefactors.
— John Stuart Mill
There will certainly be no lack of human pioneers when we have mastered the art of flight. Who would have thought that navigation across the vast ocean is less dangerous and quieter than in the narrow, threatening gulfs of the Adriatic, or the Baltic, or the British straits? Let us create vessels and sails adjusted to the heavenly ether, and there will be plenty of people unafraid of the empty wastes. In the meantime, we shall prepare, for the brave sky-travellers, maps of the celestial bodies—I shall do it for the moon, you Galileo, for Jupiter.
— Johannes Kepler, in an open letter to Galileo, 1610
I’m imagining Kepler reaching out across four hundred years, to a world he could barely imagine, and to those ‘brave sky-travellers’, that he helped prepare the way for.
Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination. That is the point in human destinies to which all the glories and toils of men have at last led them. They would do well to pause and ponder upon their new responsibilities. … Surely if a sense of self-preservation still exists among men, if the will to live resides not merely in individuals or nations but in humanity as a whole, the prevention of the supreme catastrophe ought to be the paramount object of all endeavour.
— Winston Churchill, ‘Shall We All Commit Suicide?’, 1924
Toby Ord just released a collection of quotations on Existential risk and the future of humanity, everyone from Kepler to Winston Churchill (in fact, a surprisingly large number are from Churchill) to Seneca to Mill to Nick Bostrom - it’s one of the most inspirational things I have ever read, and when taken together makes it clear that there have always been people who cared about long-termism or humanity as a whole. Some of my favourites:
I’m imagining Kepler reaching out across four hundred years, to a world he could barely imagine, and to those ‘brave sky-travellers’, that he helped prepare the way for.