The topic of human extinction — its possibility, its likelihood, even its inevitability — is everywhere right now. Major media outlets publish articles and broadcast interviews on the subject, and prominent political figures in several countries are beginning to take the idea seriously. Some environmental activists are warning that climate change could threaten humanity’s survival over the coming centuries, while “AI doomers” are screaming that the creation of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, in the near future could lead to the death of literally everyone on Earth.
Having studied the history of thinking about human extinction, I can tell you that this is a unique moment in our history. Never before has the idea of human extinction been as widely discussed, debated and fretted over as it is right now. This peculiarity is underlined by the fact that only about two centuries ago, nearly everyone in the Western world would have agreed that human extinction is impossible. It isn’t how our story ends—because it isn’t how our story could end. There is simply no possibility of our species dying out the way the dodo and dinosaurs did, of disappearing entirely from the universe. Humanity is fundamentally indestructible, these people would have said, a pervasive assumption that dates back to the ancient Greek philosophers.
