And yet – especially if there is someone else out there – it’s extremely important that we have this legitimate chance to destroy ourselves.
Space can feel pretty isolating. For all our telescopes and sensors and elaborate guesswork, it’s still torture to the curious mind to be stranded, in this universe of perhaps literally infinite possibilities, on one little Podunk planet with travel capabilities that are the interstellar equivalent of a termite-ridden canoe (if termite-ridden canoes sometimes blew up). It’s going to take us at least a couple centuries to build something that can get us anywhere worth going, and in the meantime we’re stuck here with the ability, and often the inclination, to destroy each other, our civilization, and our planet.
I submit to you the thesis that this interim period is a positive thing, and that having the ability to destroy ourselves is both good and important.
Up until the twentieth century, humanity basically lived in a room with padded walls: we could throw all the tantrums we wanted – murders, wars, genocide – but we had no way of really hurting our species, no way to destroy or even seriously set back human civilization. So no matter how evil or foolish we were, we weren’t going anywhere.
That’s no longer the case. There are, and have been for some time, codes people could enter and buttons people could push that could destroy modern civilization and possibly the human species with it. And it’s not just nuclear war that could trigger The End: there’s biological weapons, pollution and climate change, superviruses, maybe even AI in a few decades. If you think humanity would survive its apocalypse of choice to start rebuilding, then the RESET button is primed and ready; if not, then the EXIT sign is right there, glowing its characteristic cheery red.
So here’s the question: if our civilization is the sort whose members, given the chance, would destroy each other at any cost, do you really want it to spread across the galaxy, encounter whoever else is (or isn’t) out there, and last pretty much forever?
I think we’re living in a period of moral quarantine. We have the societal disease we call selfishness, and we are confined to earth to either get better or let the disease run its course. We’ve been equipped with the means to destroy each other, and if we choose to do so, then planet earth is as far as our civilization will ever get.
But if we don’t choose destruction – if we can finagle peace and make it out alive – then by the time we set out to meet whoever else may be out there, we’ll have faced the question of whether to kill each other so many times, through so many regimes and ideologies and trends across so many decades, that if we still haven’t ever once decided yes, then it won’t be just luck anymore: it’ll mean that we’ve figured out how to live with each other. And if the significance of that achievement is lost upon you, just look around a minute at the “each other” we’re talking about here: not just the insufferable in-laws or sadistic boss or psychotic ex, but the corporate everyman-crushing robber tyrants, the megalomaniacal third-world dictators with improbable haircuts, the unthinkable suicide bombers hiding behind the skirts of children and scriptures; the butchering rapist warlords, the slogan-shouting abortion clinic shooters, the leering thick-walleted human traffickers, the beefy frightened war hawks whose necks strain at their collars; the liars and swindlers and child abusers and stranglers of every inhabited block of the world – if we can learn to get along with each other down here (and there may be some signs that we’re starting to[1]) then there’s a chance we can get along with whoever we meet when we finally make it Out There.
[1] There’s a lot of evidence that global rates of violence have been in steady decline for a long time, according to Stephen Pinker’s tome The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (see Peter Singer’s book review or Pinker’s Ted talk, or Pinker and Andrew Mack’s Slate article)