Similarly, if highly virulent AIDS, which is currently passed through blood or semen, were ever to become airborne, it could be a real species-stopper. That’s unlikely, Ksiazek believes.
“Possibly it could change its transmission route. But the current way is actually advantageous to HIV’s survival because it allows victims to spread it around awhile. It evolved into that niche for a reason.”
Even the deadliest airborne influenzas have failed to wipe out everyone, because people eventually develop immunity and pandemics fizzle. But what if a psychotically obsessed, biochemically trained terrorist creatively spliced something together that evolves faster than we develop resistance—maybe by clipping genetic material into the versatile SARS virus, which could spread both sexually and via the air before Ksaizek helped eradicate it?
It would be possible to design for extreme virulence, Ksaizek allows, although, as in transgenic pesticides, results of genetic manipulation aren’t guaranteed.
“It’s like when they breed mosquitoes to be less capable of transmitting a viral disease. When they release these lab-bred mosquitoes, they don’t compete very well. It’s not as easy as just thinking about it. Synthesizing a virus in the lab is one thing; making it work is another. In order to repackage it as an infectious virus, you need a constellation of genes that will let it infect a host cell, then make a bunch of progeny.”
He chuckles mirthlessly. “People trying might kill themselves in the process. There are a lot of easier things to do with a lot less effort.”
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
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
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.
“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
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
