How to Save the World

The world is being destroyed by humans. Thousands of acres of rainforest are being burned down every day, the screams of orangutans and flying squirrels being swallowed up by the fire and smoke. There is a giant patch of garbage larger than the state of Texas floating around the Pacific Ocean. Over half of all the animals in the world have been killed off since 1970. Poisons pour into our water and skies every single second, contaminating the lifeblood that runs our planet. Nine out of ten people worldwide breathe air containing high levels of pollutants, and seven million people die every year due to air pollution, along with who knows how many animals and plants. Farm animals around the world suffer in horrific concentration camps, crushed together in filthy suffocation for the duration of their lives before being ripped apart for our consumption without a second thought to their pain. Any place that comes into contact with humans is inevitably trashed and spoiled. Bombs are dropped and missiles fired in more than forty currently active wars on planet Earth, and only 11 countries are free from involvement in any war. And one of those countries, Switzerland, itself exports an extremely high amount of weapons. Another one of those countries is Vietnam: nothing needs to be said there. War destroys everything, from the environment to cities to people. Even the humans that escape war in their lifetimes pervasively live in suffering; from the poverty and slavery experienced by the poor of the world to the numbing disconnection and spiritual poverty of the rich. Drugs and addiction are everywhere we turn, and with their enslavement of us they ruin us from the inside even as we tear apart the world around us with our brutal dominion over it. Humans may not have been born this way, in the state of nature, but we have irrevocably become this way after thousands of years of agriculturalization and industrialization. We are creatures that cannibalize and ruin whatever we touch.

So what's going to happen? Are we going to pull out a miraculous turnaround, change everything, and save the world? No. It's simply not going to happen. What's going to happen is, sometime in the next couple of hundred years, nuclear weapons WILL be used in war, and this could result in global nuclear war. Up to and beyond that point, the environment will continue to be obliterated. Meanwhile, the global population will continue exploding, with more and more humans coming into a world that is less and less able to support them. There is no solution.

Every species in the world, and all the mountains, oceans, and winds that surround us, are unconditionally worse off with humans around. The only exceptions are ourselves, obviously, dogs, and the few other domestic animals we treat well. Besides that, all of the other life on Earth would be much better off if humans disappeared. So we are weighing the fate of millions and millions of species, along with the fate of the planet itself, against the interests of about five species.

What do I think should be done about all of this? I think the only ethical solution is the sterilization of every human on earth, including myself, so that humans will eventually disappear from the earth and the planet can thrive and be reborn in our absence. Is forced sterilization wrong? Yes. Would I want it to happen to me? No. But I think in the grand scheme of things it is a small wrong compared to the immeasurable good that would come as a result. And we are in all likelihood going to kill each other off anyway at some point before the sun explodes, so it's really just controlling that process in a peaceful way.

When you think about it, there really is no moral argument against bringing about the end of the human species in some way. Someone might have a moral argument against my chosen method, mass sterilization, forced if necessary, but against general advocation for the end to humanity there really is no argument. The only arguments you can think of inevitably cluster around human-centricness or fundamentalism. One might argue that supporting the extinction of any species, even one species, is a crime against life itself, but I think the only way to truly create an ethical framework is for it to be able to respond to the requirements of circumstances rather than to be shackled by black-and-white absolute maxims. An illustration: if I traveled back in time and was in a room with Adolf Hitler, would I be morally justified in killing him? I think I absolutely would. Would it be morally wrong on some level? Absolutely. But everything has to be weighed and balanced, and I think the evil of taking a life would be greatly outweighed by all the evil that that action had a good chance of preventing.

And we take life all the time. It is part of our very nature as omnivores. We were never morally pure in the first place; no animal is. We naturally exist in a gray area where in order to survive we must commit some moral wrongs, we must extract from the earth and the creatures around us some way to survive. We are all part of the same cycle, eating and being eaten by each other. We can't drink sunlight. Most people would insist here, as my own internal psychology does itself, that that is not human life; that there is a difference between taking the life of humans and the life of other animals or plants. But there is absolutely no moral backing behind that. The ONLY justification for that line of thinking is human-centricness. Human supremacy might be part of someone's professed value system, but that is so obviously totally invalid as a moral principle. All that is is our own biological natures and our societal upbringing telling us that we are more important than everything else, just as every species thinks. We are not inherently more important than any other creature. It is unequivocally clear that there is no ethical argument against that. Taking a human life is no different ethically than taking the life of any other animal. Both are equally wrong. Killing some kind of creature that we are designed to eat, so we can eat it for sustenance, is ethically wrong but not very much; we can't be blamed for how we were designed. However, killing a human or some other animal purely for sport, whether it is a pigeon or an elephant, is one of the highest moral wrongs. Killing Adolf Hitler, I feel, would lie somewhere in the middle.

And it is the same way with my support for the extinction of Homo sapiens sapiens. When you realize that there is no verifiable difference in the value of a human life versus the life of any other creature, and all the implications of that, you realize how totally wound up we are in human-centricness and how screwed up our thinking is by conformity and never actually thinking things through. Is working to bring about the end of the human species a moral wrong? Yes. Is it really that bad? No!! Hundreds of species go extinct every day, mostly because of humans ourselves, and humans are just one species out of millions on earth. The only way to prevent the destruction of all of that, of the entire planet, is to do what we can to leave this earth. Maybe something different will happen in the future, maybe some alien race will come here and save us, maybe God will descend from the heavens and actually do something, but we can't rely on wild hopes. We have to rely on the evidence in front of us, and in the thousands of years of suffering that came before us. And all the evidence shows us that humanity is incompatible with the health of the Earth, and that we must act before it's too late. The fate of a planet is in our hands.

I really don't like being negative; I am naturally repulsed by negativity and support optimism as a personal principle. I really hate being negative like this, it doesn't feel good. But I have to tell the truth. I can't sit by and lie and say I think everything's going to be all right. It doesn't help anyone for me to lie. And I clearly see that there is no hope for redemption.

So to the question of sterilization. I think this is the best solution and would save the world. Mass murder of humanity would obviously be absolutely horrible, and would almost certainly entail all-out global war and the destruction of so much else. Sterilization is very painless in comparison. The remaining seven billion humans would live out the rest of our lives, and after probably 150 years at most humans would no longer be a living species on earth. Thank God. Hopefully we wouldn't have irreversibly destroyed everything by then.

Am I happy that this is the proper solution? No. I wish there was another way, I wish more than anything that we could learn from our mistakes and save the world. But it just isn't going to happen. We failed, time to move on so that everything else can live.

Do I love children? Yes. Do I love dogs more than anything? Yes. Do I wish there to be a world where there are many dogs roaming around, lonely and lost without the human guidance that they are biologically ingrained to seek? Absolutely not. As someone who loves family and life and the cycle of birthdays and seasons and dreams, do I want there to be a world where there are no human children laughing and playing? No. But it's not about what I want. You can't always get what you want. We learned that in kindergarten, it's about time we listened. It's not about what I want, it's about what the right thing is.

Forcing sterilization on the entire human population would be in itself repulsive, but that doesn't mean it's not the right thing. Our ancestors and our own selves forfeited the right for us to have children a long time ago. When you are poisonous to everything around you, especially when you are consciously aware of it, you lose the right to carry on. If some other animal was as destructive to the entire planet as we are, if pigs suddenly started burning down forests and cities and being an existential threat to the earth, we wouldn't hesitate an instant to try to exterminate them. It's only because it's us that we think this is different.

So sterilization of humanity is the way to save the world, but is this going to happen? No. Humans would never willingly forfeit our survival as a species, carrying on is just way too ingrained in us as animals. And it would take some kind of massive movement in order to push things to the point for everyone to be sterilized on a single continent, let alone the entire earth. It could not just be dictated from the top, it would just not be possible for it to truly work, even if in some future one government controls the whole world. Even if 100 million people were sterilized, that would barely make a dent in the earth's population. And even if in some way in the future some totalitarian government controls the entire world, if somehow they can keep the gigantic planet and its limitless geography under one reign, from the Sahara Desert to the Arctic North to the Amazon Rain Forest, and even if they can somehow actually succeed in having the iron control to ensure they sterilize everybody and nobody slips through the cracks, there's no way that government would have the desire to sterilize humanity, it's just very very unlikely, at least if it was run by humans. A government with that absolute power would run on its own self-interest, not on any moral concerns, and causing the extinction of humanity would in no way match up with its own self-interest. And all of those hypotheticals are very very unlikely to happen anyway. No, what's going to happen is we're going to carry on as always, and we're going to destroy the earth.

Unless some sociopath like myself happens to take control of the entire world, there's no way it's going to happen. And if I somehow had the ability to bring about the sterilization of every human in the world, if I could really visit that upon every human being, would I be able to bring myself to do it? I don't know. I really don't know.

So what's going to happen? There will be nuclear war, and hopefully that wipes us out before we damage the environment past the point where it can eventually recover and flourish again. I'm just trying to live out my days before I can finally leave this world. I like life, but it also goes on so incredibly long. And I just want to rest. And I want the earth to be able to rest too, but that's not going to happen as long as humans are around. Hopefully humans go extinct at some point, and then the planet can breathe a sigh of relief. Could another dangerously intelligent species evolve from the ecosystem and the collection of life on earth, just like we did, and become just as bad as us? It's definitely possible. But hopefully that doesn't happen, or at least if it happens hopefully that creature is a lot better than us.

If there was any other way, if there was a way that we would solve everything and coexist with nature and each other in relative harmony, I would be the first to support the solution. But I really just don't see any way. Even if we overthrow capitalism, even if we somehow devise some actually good system of political and economic arrangement and spread it around the world. Even if we had the perfect system for human society, where inequality is vanquished and humans really thrive together, we would still be incredibly poisonous to everything else around us. There's just too many of us, and we're just too good at manipulating our environment to our interests and our needs. We have become the most dangerous creatures that have ever existed, and there is no going back to when we were relatively harmless hominid scavengers roaming the plains of Africa. If it was any other creature that was destroying the earth like this, we would easily see why they would need to be gotten rid of. With all of our vanity, it's pretty ironic that the most difficult thing of all for us is to just look in the mirror.