The title of this post is hardly a new sentiment. Still, add this one to the list:

Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?

Written by Todd May, a professor of philosophy at Clemson University, this opinion piece argues that because humans screw up the ecosystem and the climate, and farm animals for their tasty, tasty meat, we are a plague on this Earth and all the other critters would be better off without us. This line of argument is not new, and at a *certain* level makes some *small* amount of sense. But it is manifestly wrong, ultimately.

Go to that op-ed, and hit Ctrl-F. That will bring up a little box in which you can type terms to search for within the text of the piece. Do a search for words such as “space,” “asteroid colony,” “Mars,” “terraform,” “Oort cloud.” Guess what: you won’t find them.  And that is why geniuses like professor May are dead wrong in their conclusions. Yes, humans mess things up on earth. But Earth is not the sum total of the universe. The universe is a *vast* assortment of resources that, as far as we can tell, are going completely unused. Even if you think it’s a tragic evil to turn a chicken into nuggets, it’s unlikely (though not impossible) that you will find it tragic to turn a dead asteroid into a  series of O’Neill colonies with the effective surface area of a continent. We can pummel dead Mars with a few thousand dead comets, sprinkle it with bacteria and algae and lichen and seeds, and make that dead world bloom. We could even terraform the *Moon* with some effort, and, eventually, plant fusion engines on an asteroid out in the Oort cloud, accelerate it to a good fraction of lightspeed and plow it into Venus, blowing that planet up and creating a dandy asteroid belt ripe for plunder. We can create so much life that the eventual and inevitable loss of the earth and all life on it will be minor blip, of no greater consequence than a brushfire burning out a termite mound in Africa somewhere. We can build habitats around red dwarf stars: a million times the surface area of Earth around stars that will last ten thousand times longer than the Sun.

*Humans* can do this. Not deer, not bunnies, not cats, not dogs, not chimps or whales or ducks or cows or pigs. HUMANS. A failure to understand this is common among the human extinction promoting idiot class.

And I found this line especially entertaining:

To be sure, nature itself is hardly a Valhalla of peace and harmony.

If you are going to culturally appropriate religious concepts such as “Valhalla,” perhaps you should spend a few seconds actually learning about them. Valhalla ain’t about peace and harmony, buddy. It’s about daily slaughter, followed by partying and consuming vast quantities of things like fresh boar.

The good professor does not call for actually wiping out humanity. What he does seem to call for is the cessation of breeding. Not having kids, in his view, is no great tragedy and imposes no suffering, and would lead to the end of humanity and the end of humans endless evils perpetrated on the critters. But here again we see a failure in logic. His goal is *already* underway: the western world – the world of high-tech and relatively clean environments, of enough free time and freedom to ponder the philosophical ramifications of humans disappearing – is already well  under replacement rates. We are selecting ourselves for extinction. But the species as a whole is not. The west will disappear and simply be replaced by people who don’t think twice about having a whole bunch of kids, environment be damned. If and when our replacements cultures evolve to be similar to ours in terms of philosophical navel-gazing, they are unlikely to be as suicidal as we were as they will have our recent example of smart idiocy to look and laugh at.