VITALIK BUTERIN: MY TECHNO OPTIMISM
We are the brightest star
I love technology because technology expands human potential. Ten thousand years ago, we could build some hand tools, change which plants grow on a small patch of land, and?build basic houses. Today, we can build?800-meter-tall towers, store the entirety of recorded human knowledge in a device we can hold in our lands, communicate instantly across the globe, double our lifespan, and live happy and fulfilling lives without fear of our best friends regularly dropping dead of disease.
I believe that these things are deeply good, and that expanding humanity's reach even further to the planets and stars is deeply good, because?I believe humanity is deeply good. It is fashionable in some circles to be skeptical of this: the?voluntary human extinction movement?argues that the Earth would be better off without humans existing at all, and many more want to see?much smaller number of human beings?see the light of this world in the centuries to come. It is common to?argue?that?humans are bad?because we cheat and steal, engage in colonialism and war, and mistreat and annihilate other species. My reply to this style of thinking is one simple question:?compared to what?
Yes, human beings are often mean, but we much more often show kindness and mercy, and work together for our common benefit. Even during wars we often take care to protect civilians - certainly not nearly enough, but also far more than?we did 2000 years ago. The next century may well bring widely available non-animal-based meat, eliminating the?largest moral catastrophe?that human beings can justly be blamed for today. Non-human animals are not like this. There is no situation where a cat will adopt an entire lifestyle of refusing to eat mice as a matter of ethical principle. The Sun is growing brighter every year, and in about?one billion years, it is expected that this will make the Earth too hot to sustain life. Does the Sun even?think?about the genocide that it is going to cause?
And so it is my firm belief that, out of all the things that we have known and seen in our universe,?we, humans, are the brightest star. We are the one thing that we know about that, even if imperfectly, sometimes make an earnest effort to care about "the good", and adjust our behavior to better serve it. Two billion years from now, if the Earth or any part of the universe still bears the beauty of Earthly life, it will be human artifices like space travel and?geoengineering?that will have made it happen.
We need to build, and accelerate. But there is a very real question that needs to be asked: what is the thing that we are accelerating towards? The 21st century may well be?the?pivotal century?for humanity, the century in which our fate for millennia to come gets decided. Do we fall into one of a number of traps from which we cannot escape, or do we find a way toward a future where we retain our freedom and agency? These are challenging problems. But I look forward to watching and participating in our species' grand collective effort to find the answers.
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