Читать книгу The Expanse and Philosophy - Группа авторов - Страница 29

Even if humans manage to expand to other habitats in the solar system, the human species we are now—Homo sapiens—might eventually be replaced by other human species. Does this defeat the point of expansion, which was to avoid extinction in the long run? I don’t think so. The survival of humanity matters to us not because it is important that our particular species survives forever (which is not possible in any case). Rather, we are deeply invested in the existence of beings who can contemplate and attempt to understand the universe, as well as themselves. The existence of such beings certainly seems to be a good thing in itself. At the end of the second volume of his magnum opus On What Matters, Derek Parfit claims that “What now matters most is that we avoid ending human history. If there are no rational beings elsewhere, it may depend on us and our successors whether it will all be worth it, because the existence of the universe will have been on the whole good.”³⁵

Human interplanetary expansion offers not only the prospect of human survival, but also the continuation of human history into the far future, the long‐term prospect of the continued existence of rational beings, and of life itself, in the solar system, for as long as that existence is sustainable. If that life is composed of descendants of Earth life, and those rational beings are the descendants of Homo sapiens, so much the better. I don’t know what greater legacy into the deep future we could possibly hope for.