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“I have to fix this before I go,” Matthew McConaughey tells his character’s daughter, Murphy, in Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster Interstellar. 

McConaughey’s character, Cooper, is preparing to leave Earth with a team of other scientists to search for a new planet for an increasingly desperate humanity. In Nolan’s vision of the near future, we have nearly run out of time on our home planet: dust storms, droughts and famine have made it barely habitable. 

Because of relativity, when – and if – Cooper returns to bring salvation to the humans condemned to the mercy of our dying home planet, he will look as though no time has passed. His daughter, on the other hand, will have aged by decades or more. 

Murphy is unable to understand his prioritisation of humanity’s long-term future over knowing, loving and raising his daughter. “So I’ll keep it broken, so you have to stay,” she cries. Cooper leaves for deep space without resolving his daughter’s grief. 

Long-term thinking has become somewhat of a buzzword for discussions around sustainability, progress and our fate as a species – for good reason. Toby Ord, a senior research fellow focusing on existential threats at Oxford University, predicts that there is a one in six chance of total human extinction by the end of this century given the current threats that we face, including climate change, biological threats and AI. Astrophysicist Martin Rees estimated that civilisation has a 50/50 chance of making it to 2100, while linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky has said that “the human species is facing a situation that is unprecedented in the history of Homo sapiens.” 

It’s clear that we need to begin expanding our horizons of thought if we are to tackle some of the greatest threats to our survival. And thinking long-term has a seemingly beautiful philosophy beneath the surface. Cooper leaves Earth in the noble pursuit of a better future for all of humanity – or indeed a guarantee of any future at all. 

But there is a dark side to long-term thinking: the Murphys of the story who will be left behind. Is there a way for long-term thinking to be compassionate? 

Nurture not nature 

Two million years ago, when the first Homo species appeared, the world looked very different. Average lifespan was less than 20 years. Opposable thumbs had only just evolved. Threats were mostly all life or death, and mostly all immediate. The environment that they evolved in – and that we evolved from – demanded attention to the now. Short-term threats were rife, and required short-term responses. They didn’t have to think about saving for retirement, they just had to outsmart predators and source food for that day. 

But around the same time, something else happened that changed the way our Homo ancestors could think. The prefrontal cortex developed at the front of the brain, creating the ability to imagine the future. Today, it allows us to think about situations that are weeks, months or even decades ahead and map out complex plans and goals over long time spans.  

“In your left hand, you’ll find a squishy pink marshmallow,” says Roman Krznaric in The Good Ancestor. “In your right hand there is a shiny green acorn. Together they symbolise the fascinating tension that exists within the time horizons of the human mind.” 

Krznaric’s metaphor demonstrates the two different ways that we’re capable of thinking: we all have a marshmallow brain, focused on short-term desires and rewards. But we also all have an ‘acorn brain’ – capable of envisioning distant futures and working towards long-term goals. 

Which mindset we prioritise is a different question – a constant tug of war. Should we stick to the diet or have the second slice of cake? Will we save for our retirement or splurge on a holiday? Will our politicians make decisions fit for the next 100 years, or prioritise popularity and quick wins for the next election?Will business leaders invest in employee retention and sustainability, or prioritise maximising next quarters’ profits? 

Anthropologist and author of Deep Time Reckoning (2020), Vincent Ialenti, points towards many facets of modern life as facilitators of short-term thinking: “I use the term ‘shallow time discipline’ – rapid throwaway consumerism, frenzied culture wars, sudden stock market shifts, the hustle of the gig economy, fickle pop culture trends, and dopamine-modulating social media attention economies.”

These all contribute towards our prioritisation of the short over the long term. Globally, we spend more on ice cream than governments collectively do on planning for the long-term, according to Sophie Howe, former Future Generations Commissioner for Wales. “You wouldn’t think it was completely groundbreaking for a country to have a long-term vision, but it is. There’s no other country in the world that has a long-term vision set out in law.” 

Ialenti also points to the social factors that prohibit people from the freedom to ponder our the enormity of space, or where the human race might end up in 500 years’ time: “Billions across the world are confined to even more precarious short-terms: living without ample paychecks or, in more dire conditions, fighting day-to-day to secure shelter, safety, and their next meals.”

Going long

Learning to think more long-term is crucial if we are to create a sustainable and prosperous world for generations of humans to come, but it is just the beginning. Thinking long-term without compromising on our commitment to the people and threats in the present – that’s the real challenge. The Murphs of the story.

Elon Musk’s pursuit of a new home for currently Earth-bound humans has a ring of the same compromise. He has put his hat firmly in the ring for prioritising investment in space travel and planet colonisation over fixing our increasingly volatile climate, with the intention of doing “the most good for the most number of people”. Like a building condemned, perhaps it’s better to just up sticks and start afresh somewhere else. 

On the other hand, he is venturing into the distant future of humanity, ensuring that our species will have a future beyond our rapidly suffering home planet. He has both zealous supporters and critics. 

Taking bold and counterintuitive moves based on objective data is something that the Centre for Effective Altruism is purporting. The movement, started by a group of thinkers based in Oxford including Toby Ord and Will MacAskill, is about “doing good better” by using evidence-based approaches to find the best way to do the maximum good for humanity. It’s a logical, unemotional approach to philanthropy and has garnered support from politicians to business leaders (including Musk). 

One of the core concepts behind it offers a new way to think about our future: longtermism. Coined in 2017 by Ord and MacAskill, but relying on philosophical thought stretching back centuries, longtermism argues that positively influencing the long-term future is a key priority of our time.

But it is not such a simple story. For most of the ride, the case for longtermism looks great. Of course we should consider future generations. Of course we should make decisions based on how they will fare in hundreds or thousands of years into the future. Clearly, we should mitigate climate change now because the consequences for individuals in the future are going to be far worse than it is for us today. 

Yet, as you get further down the ‘longtermism’ line, things begin getting a little murky. At the core of the longermist argument is the idea that the greatest good that we can do is to ensure the survival of the human race. The survival of some of the people alive today is not strictly necessary to that. 

Nick Bostrom, a fellow Oxford longtermism philosopher, states: “A non-existential disaster causing the breakdown of global civilisation is, from the perspective of humanity as a whole, a potentially recoverable setback: a giant massacre for man, a small misstep for mankind.” 

That’s the end of the line. An uncomfortable assessment that sees things like nuclear war or climate disasters as a forgivable collateral to the overall prosperity of humanity in a far-reaching future.   

“Some longtermists argue that, from the perspective of thousands or millions or billions of years, the devastation things like climate change will cause will ultimately be a brief episode in a longer civilizational story,” says Ialenti. “There is no justification for ignoring the ethical imperatives of the present.”

In other words, does the survival of the human race in the long-term future justify leaving people to suffer in the present? 

Halfway through Interstellar, Cooper finds out that their mission was never meant to save the people on Earth. The scientists who sent him into space had no hope for the current population – only the hope that Cooper and his team would be the start of a new colony. 

Cooper watches as Murphy, now the same age as him, cries on a video file transmitted to their spaceship. “Dad, did you know? Did you leave me here to die?” 

Staying human 

As Krznaric argued with his marshmallow and acorn, human brains are capable of two things at once. We’re clearly able to think in the short-term – sometimes all too readily. But we’re also very clearly capable of conceiving of distant futures, long-term benefits and things that have not yet happened. The question is not whether we can do both at once, but whether we can do both in a way that foregrounds compassion, humanity and kindness in both the short and long-term. 

In the short-term, it means making decisions that remain steeped in the moral significance and realism of the people alive today. In the long-term, that means decision making that does not hinder, harm or neglect people in the future. 

Beatrice Erkers is Chief of Operations at the Foresight Institute, an organisation focused on advancing technology for the long-term benefit of life. She is also Project Manager of its Existential Hope project, which advocates for looking at the long-term future of humanity with a positive lens of possibility and opportunity. 

“Hope is optimism with a plan,” Erkers says. “I think it’s sad that often when we think about caring for the future, we ask ourselves how we can delete our footprint from the planet.” 

By thinking about how we can reduce our footprint, we are erasing ourselves from the equation of the future. And when we put the emotion back into reckoning with humanity’s long-term future, we have a higher likelihood of reaching a positive future. 

“We want to inspire people to focus on what they actively want to happen. It’s the best strategy for creating a long-term future for humanity in a way that includes the people alive today,” Erkers adds. 

Howe, as former Future Generations Commissioner for Wales, is more familiar than most with what it means to grapple with the reality of balancing present and future needs. “Often people think that doing good things for the future and doing good things for the present are mutually exclusive. They’re not. There are a number of mutual benefits there for current and future generations.” 

MacAskill is also adamant that we can do both. “Does advocating for future generations mean neglecting the interests of those alive today? Not at all.”