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We can now return to the debate between Gao and Avasarala. Clearly, Gao underestimated the potential benefits of rapid expansion by means of the Ring System. Not only could doing so provide better opportunities for billions of humans today, it could make possible orders of magnitude more human lives in the future.

But the debate is not over. We have only looked at one side of the ledger.

The risks involved with using the Ring System are clear from the Eros Incident. Gao acknowledges this, but she maintains that, given the “unimaginable opportunities” provided by the Ring System, the “real danger of Eros is that we only react to it in fear.” Always ready with the pithy rejoinder, Avasarala retorts that the real danger of the Eros Incident was “that it was about to kill everybody on Earth” (“Oppressor”). She is concerned with the fates of the 40 or so billion human beings alive at the time of The Expanse. In order for her response to Gao to convince us, Avasarala needs to expand her circle of moral concern beyond those alive today to those who will live in the future. Risking the lives of 4 × 10¹⁰ humans for the sake of the lives of as many as 10⁷¹ humans seems more than reasonable. At that level, the population of the solar system is a rounding error at more than 50 decimal places.

However, this line of thought is flawed. It involves comparing the gains for all humans who will ever live if we successfully colonize the galaxy with the losses for all humans who exist right now if we go extinct as a result of using the Ring System. This calculation ignores all the humans who would have existed if we either did not use the Ring System or were more cautious in its use, as Avasarala suggests. In other words, Avasarala’s response to Gao is most convincing when we think of using the Ring System as what philosophers call an “existential risk.”

Ord defines existential risk as “a risk that threatens the destruction of humanity’s long‐term potential.”⁷ If use of the Ring System kills the current generation of humans, 40 billion people die. As bad as that is, the result is actually much worse. It also prevents the existence of all future human beings.

Recall Parfit’s point: even if we remain earthbound, we might live here for another billion years during which time about 10¹⁶ humans can live sustainably. Yet, our comparison is not the number of humans on Earth, but the number in The Expanse. Humans have already begun interstellar travel and colonizing the galaxy. Even at radically subluminal speeds that will delay colonization of the galaxy by tens or hundreds of millions of years, the potential number of human lives could come within several orders of magnitude of the potential number of humans if we did successfully use the Ring System.

Here, then, is Parfit’s second main insight (promised earlier): the value of preventing human extinction and thereby making the fulfillment of humanity’s long‐term potential more likely is much, much higher than it might seem. Given what is at stake, Avasarala’s response to Gao seems strongest when it is framed in terms of existential risk. As noted, the protomolecule has already come close to driving our species to extinction. More importantly, use of the Ring System is closely related to whatever killed its mysterious creators 2 billion years before the events of the series. Those creators were destroyed despite having advanced their technology to something indistinguishable from magic. It might not be possible to say with any precision just how hazardous use of the Ring System is, and we do not want to minimize the difficulty of making rational choices under conditions of ignorance. Despite the benefits the Ring System might offer, it does not seem like an existential risk worth taking. Our future, flawed as it is, is too good to endanger.

Therefore, Avasarala should have won the debate with Gao, and humanity should say “Thanks but no thanks” to using the Ring System—or at least use the system with far more caution than Gao advocates.

Or so says this philosopher.

Unfortunately, history has witnessed a long, sad tradition of philosophers playing the role of Cassandra, the mythological priestess of Apollo who was cursed to utter true prophecies that no one believed until it was too late. This tradition goes back at least as far as Socrates, who argued (correctly!), though to no avail, against the execution of the generals of the Battle of Arginusae and later of Leon of Salamis. Eventually execution came for Socrates too.

We have to wonder whether Avasarala and her cautious approach ever had a chance. The colonists on Ilus arrived by running the blockade maintained by the truce between Earth, Mars, and the Belt. That truce could not last forever; eventually one of the three powers in the solar system would break with the others and attempt to use the Ring System. Avasarala goes so far as to leak classified video from Ilus in order to frighten the electorate enough to side with her (“The One‐Eyed Man”). Yet scare tactics like these will only work in the short run, if at all. Hundreds of ships from Earth waited outside Abaddon’s Gate as the season began. With pirates like Marco Inaros picking them off, it seems likely that many of the would‐be colonists would eventually prefer to take their chances running the blockade. While UN ships were willing to destroy Belters who tried to run the blockade, they probably wouldn’t have done so if the ships were full of their fellow citizens. Gao was likely more right than she knew when she said, “Colonization of the Ring systems is inevitable” (“Subduction”).

While philosophers might imagine that truth will always win in the marketplace of ideas, Avasarala had no such illusions after losing the election. She left the incoming Secretary General a remarkable message: “As for policy and the direction you’re taking Earth and all her peoples, well, we disagree. One of us is wrong. I think it’s you. But I hope it’s me” (“Cibola Burn”).