At first glance this crowd are a sort of polar opposite to the paradise engineers. The goal is eliminating suffering. Paradise engineers want to do it by building. Extinctionists want to do it by removing those capable of perceiving suffering.
But at second glance, there is more going on here.
Even if we are being charitable we would say that extinctionists have a critical lack of ambition. A poverty of the mind. A parochial vision of the possible, narrowed down to such a narrow slice of what might be that it may as well be invisible. They cannot look much beyond their noses. They do not see the natural world as the seething pit of pain and anguish and violent death that it is. They are willing to bow out themselves while condemning animals to that for the foreseeable future. The rational and caring extinctionist would destroy the entire biosphere, but even that is short-sighted, as it doesn't do anything about the rest of the universe and all future time. There will be more biospheres, more tooth and nail evolution.
Extinctionists are fixated on relinquishment, a form of cowardice in the face of being challenged by circumstances and change. They have seen the problem, and their answer is it is to leave the building, making no effort to address the issue. How can that possibly help? It is a pathological lack of ambition taken to its logical conclusion, and weaponized by jealousy of those who feel that, yes, something might be done.
There is suffering. So build the means to end it. If you can't envisage how, then you aren't reading widely enough. Ultimately we can replace all of the natural biosphere. We can rebuild man and animal in reality or emulated environments: all of them, every last thing capable of pain. We can remove the circumstances of suffering from any who suffer and who want that suffering to end. That it will require centuries, molecular nanotechnology, brain emulation, and other technologies of the same ilk? So what? How long has this world waited already for those capable of making this achievement? Seizing the future and continuing the work that our species has barely started on in the quest to eliminate pain is the high road.
And if at the end of the day there are still those who feel that they would like an untrammeled world, well let them build as many as they like - provided that all the species living upon them capable of pain are in fact living in a paradise free from suffering.
But heaven forbid we feel any sympathy for those who want to press the game over button now, who cannot raise their eyes just that little bit to see the golden future we could build with just a little more time.
You seem to have basic presumptions that suffering is avoidably bad and that suffering is an important concern to be addressed.
These people are quitters? Maybe they are, but in other ways then you call them out. Suffering is a condition only to those able to perceive it. Suffering is a creation of perception. Imbuing some moral "high road," upon which, we should seek to travel seems a narrow concern of individuals within such a species. We are lucky enough to be born able to suffer, we suffer - maybe lucky enough to find joy and elation, then we die. We are one of the suffering. Do I sympathize with suffering and seek to help alleviate it? Sure, but I'm not haunted by it. It's the other side of me. Something which propels me.
What's interesting is that via this 1992 website, some tiny sect of people are focusing on something else they consider avoidably bad and an important concern to be addressed which, within a larger context, is even more devoid of contextual reasoning.
Their healthy biosphere will, at some point be lifeless and destroyed when the sun dies out or some other event with slightly greater than 0% chance occurs. For what purpose did they "save" it now?
We each have our own forever. It starts when we are born and it ends when we die. The same is true of the biosphere, the solar system, the galaxy, etc. In between, we experience each moment from a unique perspective... and then that moment is gone as is the person we were at that moment. Our suffering is gone. Our joy is gone. A new moment is hear and it is more lovely are intolerable than the last.
Work towards what you like, but building high roads on a spheroid planet or in emulated circuits still has you going round in circles. Without suffering we'd mostly just sit in a circle, staring around, not enjoying relief or, worse, finding suffering in moments devoid of ecstasy. The golden time is now as it's the only time we certainly have.
Replace the biosphere? If you aren't joking, I think this attitude is part of the problem, one which got us into this mess in the first place. We've gotten along for millions of years without Amazon.com. I don't think VHEM is game over. With VHEM the idea is perhaps you can explore things like what you're saying, but not without understanding that enacting a world without limits implies building a system that will consume all the worlds resources and will one day have to consume itself. Go ahead and dream and explore, but don't make war on the rest of the planet (which is what is implied with "replacing the biosphere".)
Be utilitarian. Make a list of what causes the most suffering and involuntary death, and personally contribute to work on whatever is high in the list and not being aggressively worked on today. Which is most of it. Degenerative aging and farming of animals, for example, being two things to eliminate on the time scale you mention. There is a lot on the list that can't be tackled meaningfully today, such as placing all higher animals into some form of simulation or at least controlled environments in which they can live as close to usual as possible without pain. Or means of human mind engineering to remove suffering without terrible side-effects. For that help to advance enabling technologies in the fields of computation, nanotechnology, and biology.
But at second glance, there is more going on here.
Even if we are being charitable we would say that extinctionists have a critical lack of ambition. A poverty of the mind. A parochial vision of the possible, narrowed down to such a narrow slice of what might be that it may as well be invisible. They cannot look much beyond their noses. They do not see the natural world as the seething pit of pain and anguish and violent death that it is. They are willing to bow out themselves while condemning animals to that for the foreseeable future. The rational and caring extinctionist would destroy the entire biosphere, but even that is short-sighted, as it doesn't do anything about the rest of the universe and all future time. There will be more biospheres, more tooth and nail evolution.
Extinctionists are fixated on relinquishment, a form of cowardice in the face of being challenged by circumstances and change. They have seen the problem, and their answer is it is to leave the building, making no effort to address the issue. How can that possibly help? It is a pathological lack of ambition taken to its logical conclusion, and weaponized by jealousy of those who feel that, yes, something might be done.
There is suffering. So build the means to end it. If you can't envisage how, then you aren't reading widely enough. Ultimately we can replace all of the natural biosphere. We can rebuild man and animal in reality or emulated environments: all of them, every last thing capable of pain. We can remove the circumstances of suffering from any who suffer and who want that suffering to end. That it will require centuries, molecular nanotechnology, brain emulation, and other technologies of the same ilk? So what? How long has this world waited already for those capable of making this achievement? Seizing the future and continuing the work that our species has barely started on in the quest to eliminate pain is the high road.
And if at the end of the day there are still those who feel that they would like an untrammeled world, well let them build as many as they like - provided that all the species living upon them capable of pain are in fact living in a paradise free from suffering.
But heaven forbid we feel any sympathy for those who want to press the game over button now, who cannot raise their eyes just that little bit to see the golden future we could build with just a little more time.