In his book Our Final Hour, Lord Martin Rees suggested that those of us alive today are living at the most important time since the Big Bang
13.8 billion years ago. We agree 1,000 per cent with Lord Rees and think it is fundamentally important that every educator, every parent, and every human being understand the full weight of decisions that life as we know it has thrust on us, and that everyone understand why we are living at the most critical time in history since the Big Bang.
We hope we have begun to paint the picture of why our era is so critical. In Chapter Five, we explained that we are convinced that if— if— humanity can come together and use technology for the good of all in a safe way, we can create a world of Super Abundance, a sort of utopia where everyone lives in a high-income world of no poverty, hunger or even the need to work.
In Chapter Seven, we made clear that we have never been closer as a species to extinction than we are today, and worse, the trendlines are deteriorating rather than getting better.
There can be no doubt that humanity is at a crossroads. As we have seen and will see, technological change has transformed our world. Moreover, the technological change coming our way, change that began with the Lunar Society in Birmingham, England, some 250 years ago, has continued to accelerate at an exponential rate of change until this day; such that we can be confident that today will be the slowest day for the rest of our lives.
Two hundred fifty years after the emergence of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, those of us alive today are going to need to determine how we are going to use the all-powerful tools that we have inherited. Will we find ways to avoid destroying our species and build a world of Sustainable Super Abundance, or will we instead fall prey to an abundance of unimaginable stupidity that wipes out the only known conscious life-forms in a universe that we know stretches at least 93 billion light years across?
The decisions we make in the coming years and decades will determine whether the next trillion human beings, the grandchildren of our grandchildren and beyond, will ever see the light of day, as it is those of us alive today who will determine whether humanity learns to flourish or perish.
In this chapter, we want to introduce the philosophy, Long Termism, that makes today’s existential challenge super clear.
Proponents of long-termism argue that we have an obligation not just to every human being alive today but to future generations who have no voice, as they are yet to be born.
Long-termist philosophers believe that those of us alive today are living at a critical, pivotal time in human history; in fact, they assert that we are living at the hinge of history.
Living at the Hinge of History
The principal thinking behind Long Termism comes from Oxford University. One of the first Oxford professors to put forward this view was Derek Parfit, who wrote in the final pages of On What Matters (2011) that “We live during the hinge of history. Given the scientific and technological discoveries of the last two centuries, the world has never changed as fast. We shall soon have greater powers to transform, not only our surroundings, but ourselves and our successors. If we act wisely in the next few centuries, humanity will survive its most dangerous and decisive period. Our descendants could, if necessary, go elsewhere, spreading through this galaxy.”
Parfit subsequently made the same claim in even stronger terms during a talk sponsored by Giving What We Can at the Oxford Union in June 2015:
“I think that we are living now at the most critical part of human history. The twentieth century, I think, was the best and worst of all centuries so far, but it now seems fairly likely that there are no intelligent beings anywhere else in the observable universe. Now, if that’s true, we may be living in the most critical part of the history of the universe…(The reason) why this may be the critical period in the history of the universe is we are the only rational intelligent beings, it’s only we who might provide the origin of what would then become a galaxy-wide civilization, which lasted for billions of years, and in which life was much better than it is for most human beings. Well, if you look at the scale there is between human history so far and what could come about, it’s enormous. And what’s critical is that we could blow it, we could end it.”
Parfit leaves no doubt that we are living at a pivotal time in human history and that the actions we take today have the potential to help our earthly civilization flourish or perish.
Our Obligation to the Trillions Yet to Be Born
At One World, our first essential principle is that all human beings share an essential human connection. We have long believed that our obligation to help other human beings does not begin and end with our national boundaries. Indeed, One World was founded precisely to share and promote this kind of globalist thinking.
However, we had not previously thought of our obligation to future human beings, yet to be born, who have no voice as of today.
In his book, What We Owe the Future, William MacAskill, one of the leading Long Termist thinkers, explains that the average mammalian species tends to last about one million years. He then tells us that if we assume a constant level of population and another one million years from today, there are another 80 trillion human beings waiting to be born and explore the universe.
As MacAskill makes clear, the decisions we make today have the potential to impact 80 trillion human beings yet to be born. Again, that is “trillion,” with a “t.”
The idea that those of us alive today are living at a unique, pivotal time in human history, combined with the idea that we have a moral obligation not only to every human being alive today to every human being yet to be born, is called Long Termism.
Another professor who works on the idea of Long Termism is MacAskill’s Oxford colleague Toby Ord, who wrote The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. Ord explains that we are on the precipice of self-extinction with a one in six chance of self-annihilation.
The central theme of The Precipice is Long Termism, and Ord argues that humanity is at a critical juncture—the “Precipice”—a period of unprecedented technological power paired with insufficient wisdom, where existential risks like nuclear war, artificial intelligence (AI), and pandemics threaten our survival. This period, starting with the 1945 atomic bomb, is uniquely dangerous but temporary; if we navigate it, we could secure a flourishing future for millions of generations.
He argues that humanity is like an adolescent in that we have acquired immense power but are not yet mature or wise enough to use it responsibly. In Precipice, he writes:
Like an adolescent who is given more freedom and responsibility as they grow older, humanity has gained more power and technological advancement as our societies have progressed. However, we have not necessarily gained the wisdom to use this power in a responsible and beneficial way.
We still struggle with issues such as inequality, conflict, and environmental degradation, which threaten our future and the future of our planet. If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years – enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to flourish in ways unimaginable today.
But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential catastrophes – those from which we could never come back. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pathogens and artificial intelligence. If we do not act fast to reach a place of safety, it will soon be too late.
Ord concludes that humanity is at a pivotal moment, with the power to either destroy itself or unlock a future of unimaginable flourishing. The one in six risk of catastrophe this century is unacceptably high, but we can reduce it through global coordination, targeted research, and individual action. The Long Reflection—a period of collective deliberation after achieving safety—is key to avoiding rushed decisions that could lock in suboptimal values or outcomes. Ord’s tone is optimistic yet urgent, emphasizing that our generation’s choices will shape whether humanity survives the Precipice to reach a future of vast potential or not.
To be Alive Today is an Exceptional Opportunity & Pro- found Responsibility
In this article published in the New York Times, MacAskill explains, like Ord, that we have a vast, long future in front of us if we can avoid self- destruction. He then asks us what kind of decisions we would make if we were ourselves to live this long future in front of us.
“If you knew you were going to live all these future lives, what would you hope we do in the present? How much carbon dioxide would you want us to emit into the atmosphere? How careful would you want us to be with new technologies that could destroy, or permanently derail, your future? How much attention would you want us to give to the impact of today’s actions on the long term?”
Interesting questions that should inform our discussions. If we are looking at another 700,00 to 800,000 years in front of us, of course, I would insist on a 10-year pause until we can dramatically reduce the chances of self-destruction.
MacAskill goes on to explain that we are not living at the end of history but the very beginning of a very long history.
“These are some of the questions that motivate longtermism: the idea that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time.”
“Longtermism is about taking seriously just how big the future could be and how high the stakes are in shaping it. If humanity survives to even a fraction of its potential life span, then, strange as it may seem, we are the ancients: we live at the very beginning of history, in its most distant past. What we do now will affect untold numbers of future people. We need to act wisely. It took me a long time to come.”
He concludes by telling us that it took him a long time to come around to Long Termist thinking because the idea just seemed so wild, the idea that we could impact the long-term future of humanity for hundreds of thousands of years to come. However, he eventually realized that we are indeed living at an extraordinary era, an extraordinary period such that it does make sense that those of us alive today can shape the long-term future in front of us. MacAskill writes,
“. . .to be alive at such a time is both an exceptional opportunity and a profound responsibility:
“The idea that we could affect the long-term future, and that there could be so much at stake, might just seem too wild to be true. This is how things initially seemed to me. But I think this wildness comes not from the moral premises that underlie longtermism but from the fact that we live at such an unusual time.
“Our era is undergoing an unprecedented amount of change. Currently, the world economy doubles in size about every 19 years. But before the Industrial Revolution, it took hundreds of years for the world economy to double; and for hundreds of thousands of years before that, growth rates were close to zero. What’s more, the current rate of growth cannot continue forever; within just 10,000 years, there would be a trillion civilizations’ worth of economic output for every reachable atom.
“All this indicates that we are living through a unique and precarious chapter in humanity’s story. Out of the hundreds of thousands of years in humanity’s past — and potentially billions of years in its future — we find ourselves living now, at a time of extraordinary change.
“A time marked by thousands of nuclear warheads standing ready to fire. A time when we are rapidly burning fossil fuels, producing pollution that might last hundreds of thousands of years. A time when we can see catastrophes on the horizon — from engineered viruses to A.I.-enabled totalitarianism — and can act to prevent them.
“To be alive at such a time is both an exceptional opportunity and a profound responsibility: We can be pivotal in steering the future onto a better trajectory. There’s no better time for a movement to stand up, not just for our generation or even our children’s generation, but for all the generations yet to come”.
–William MacAskill
We have quoted extensively from the closing remarks MacAskill makes in the New York Times article because we agree wholeheartedly with him that everyone alive today needs to understand that to be alive is indeed an exceptional opportunity and a profound responsibility. And one of the goals of this book is to help stand up the movement that will be pivotal in steering the future onto a better trajectory. A movement of Co-Creators of the Universe committed to making certain that their next acts tip the balance on the positive side of things improving the chances of building a world of Super Abundance.
For those interested in learning more about MacAskill’s thinking on these topics, click here for a summary of his book: What We Owe the Future