Preventing Human Extinction

Comment on: Why Doomsday Prepping Needs Better PR: The New Extinction Mitigation Economy

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I love growing plants. Southern California, where I live, is a great place to grow a wide variety of plants outdoors year around. Well… it’s usually a great place. A few years back it actually got cold enough to freeze. After a few days, when the full extent of the cold damage was abundantly apparent, I realized that one of my orchids… Cattleya Portia… was a total goner. It had been happily growing on a lemon tree… but then the cold killed it completely. Surprisingly, just a few feet away on the same lemon tree, was an orchid that was entirely untouched by the freeze. What made it surprising was that it was a division of the same exact Cattleya Portia that had frozen to death just a few feet away. The two orchids were identical in every way… they were both even growing on the same tree… the only difference was their location on the tree.

This confirmed, yet again, a lesson that I had learned a long time ago… don’t keep all your eggs in one basket. Right now humans are all in the same basket… Earth. It might seem like a relatively safe and big basket… but no basket is ever safe enough to put all your eggs in it.  

So the priority, in terms of preventing human extinction, should be putting humans into as many different baskets as possible…. space stations, the moon, mars and so on. 

The problem is that people can’t choose where their taxes go. At first glance it might appear to be an absurd idea to allow everybody to decide for themselves which government organizations (GOs) they give their taxes to. But preventing people from deciding for themselves is the same thing as putting too many eggs in one basket. 

Let’s say that I convince you that getting enough humans off the planet should be our number one priority in terms of preventing extinction. Can you adjust your tax allocation accordingly? Can you go to the NASA website and give them more of your tax dollars? Nope. Neither can I. Neither can anybody else…. except for an extremely small group of government planners… congress.

Centralization blocks human diversity. This is a problem because our natural diversity naturally leads us to put our eggs in different baskets. Our natural diversity is our greatest protection against extinction. Yet our government is structured to block nearly all of our natural diversity. Therefore, the government is the greatest threat to our survival. 

This doesn’t mean that we have to get rid of the government. It simply means that taxpayers should be free to choose where their taxes go. People will put their eggs (taxes) in different baskets… and they will appreciate the importance of having their eggs in different baskets… and they will appreciate the importance of having humans in different baskets. 

So we hedge our bets and greatly increase our chances of survival by allowing people to choose where their taxes go. To learn more… here’s the pragmatarianism FAQ.

I didn’t just attach Cattleya Portia to my lemon tree. I also attached some divisions to my Cedar tree… none of which were killed by the cold. Here’s a photo of Cattleya Portia blooming on my Cedar tree…