I’m still confused about the hypothetical. If aliens eliminate disease and death by violent means, there’s nothing left to kill humans, right? If aliens eliminate “pretty much anything else that is a problem right now, 100% guaranteed.”, why doesn’t that include death, which is pretty much our number one problem right now? When you say “long life”, is that 115 years, after which we die of a disease like heart failure? (wait, I thought all diseases were eliminated?)
I would decline. With that option, there’s hope for eventually conquering death and making everyone immortal, or maybe at least live a hundred million or so years until our sun starts to go red giant. And even then, we know interstellar travel is possible, so maybe we can live billions of years and colonize other planets. With the accept option, we’re all doomed to die. Even if we discover the fountain of youth the next day after accepting the alien’s help, the aliens would forbid us from using it, because accepting their help mandated our species go extinct. We would feel pretty fucking stupid for making this bargain in that case.
OK, cutting out the sci-fi wrapper (as you termed it), and in its most basic terms, what is your question? And what is your own answer to it?
I think you and I have rather different ideas for what is meant by ‘inspired’.
Not really, anyway give human capabilities to pretty much any randomly chosen non-human species on the planet and you’ve have a glowing radioactive wasteland before you could say, “Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea after all”.
I question your use of the word ‘robust’ for a generation of 43’750 people, never mind one of 5! Human cabilities would drop off a precipice with this scenario, we might be able to come up with reverse-engineered non-dangerous tech by the third generation, but I’m not ready to bet humanities long term survival on it.
Anyway, this is fighting the hypothetical, the OP states that if humanity accepts the tech offered by the aliens then we as a species are doomed. And personally I think that if we were willing to accept the tech then we deserve to be, thankfully most people are against the idea.
Well, let’s say the pandas are in trouble. We can either let the pandas bumble along, or we can capture all the wild pandas, sterilize them, and put them in zoos and keep them in comfort until the last panda dies.
We prevent panda suffering by causing panda extinction. What’s the point? Why would we want to save currently existing pandas if it means the extinction of pandas?
Now replace pandas with humans, and this is your hypothetical. And how would it be ethical to force sterilization on people who might be suffering today, but don’t want to be sterilized? I mean, I chose to have children, despite the cost of many sleepless nights, years where I have to pay for their needs leaving less for myself, covering them with a comfy blanket while I head out into the howling wind and snow to scratch out a living in the blasted hellscape that is modern day office work.
The point is, I’ve already sacrificed my health, comfort, pleasure, free time and peace of mind in exchange for having children. And lots of people have made that choice over the centuries, despite having lives that were a lot tougher than mine.
And your argument is that it would be better if my children had never been born, because by being born they are guaranteed to suffer, just like every human being who has ever lived has suffered. And eliminating human suffering is worthwhile, even if the cost is human extinction. My Giant Space Kaboom is just a simpler and more efficient way of accomplishing the same goal. We can already eliminate all human suffering, people who are dead can’t suffer and if everyone is dead there won’t be anyone to suffer because their loved ones are dead.
No, it’s not, unless the pandas in your hypothetical have all of the problems that humans have (not to mention that the sterilisation is entirely arbitrary in your scenario).
No, I am not arguing that.
No, it doesn’t
And that is a different scenario. A different argument from any I have made in this thread.
If I have made any argument in this thread, it is this: Are not the needs of extant, living, badly-suffering people not more important than the bringing into existence of possible future people?
But not every human being is experiencing intolerable suffering. I’m not, you’re not, even most African subsistence farmers aren’t. Yes, some people are suffering and if they’d rather not exist than suffer, then I’ll pass them the cyanide pills or point them to the elevator to the 13th floor balcony.
Or maybe I should put it another way. The inability to have and care for children would cause me intolerable suffering. So your method of alleviating all human suffering causes me and lots of people like me suffering. How can that be? Oh, the alien tech works so well that it turns out that now I don’t care, and not having children and grandchildren doesn’t actually cause me to suffer? If you killed me right now I wouldn’t suffer either.
The point is, eliminating suffering is not the highest good that can be achieved, if it was I wouldn’t have had kids because I have experienced some intense pain and suffering because of those goddam brats. And I KNEW before I had kids that I was signing up for pain and suffering, so it’s not like I went into it blindly. So if I believed that eliminating suffering was the highest good, why would I have done that?
Or maybe I should put it a third way. I could shoot you full of heroin, and any suffering you’re feeling would float away on a wave of chemically-induced euphoria. And I could do the same thing to everyone on the planet, and keep people in a heroin-induced stupor until they starved to death, all without pain or suffering. Yay?
Well I think you know my answer to that one, a very firm no.
But how many people need to be suffering badly and how do you define the metric of suffering to say that their needs outweigh the majority of people who aren’t suffering to any great extent. And again how do you define that? For one person having their legs blown off might be an awful thing to happen to them but they can deal with it, someone else might lose it entirely over getting a splinter in their finger.
I am sure that the answers correlate strongly with the posters’ outlook on humanity. People who are optimistic that humanity will solve its ills, who believe that despite all our problems, things are generally improving and moving forward, will vote to decline.
Those that are pessimistic about our future, and believe things will get worse, would vote to accept.