/lit/ - Literature

How come this whole debate is so anthropocentric? It doesn't make any sense at all. If you're already doing utilitarian calculus why stop at humans? You could argue for mass sterilization campaigns for most sentient animals way easier than for humans. Very few people give shits about anything other than cetaceans, primates and fluffy looking carnivores. There's a huge sentience space to eradicate besides those and humans and it's fairly overlooked.

Animal farms have near 1/10th of neuronal mass of humanity combined if we only take into account pigs(150m humanbrain), cattle(500m HB) and chickens(50m HB). Factory mammals outmass wild mammals 15/1. Rough distribution of arguably somewhat sentient and somewhat weighted(lower value for fish, exclude insects etc) brain mass ratio is propably in 1/1 in humans and all other animals combined. All this absolutely pales in comparison to historical and hypothetical non human future, former of which lasted 500 million years as would the latter, were the humans to disappear.

By going voluntarily extinct the total homo sapiens experience would be out experienced in less than a thousand years and this would go on for a half a billion years unless other civilisation appears. This becomes way way worse if you discount pleasurable experiences or other similar aspects of cognition and just use the Benatars table(and broaden it to arguably sentient animals) since numbers wise other animals are way more plentiful and have faster reproduction cycles.

A non solution to suffering, self correcting, info hazardous to very depressed people and gay idea overall. One good thing about it though personally. I occasionally check out r/antinatalism as an quick depression med/ pick me up. Those people manage to make suffering and brooding so cringe that i just can't go through it anymore and my mood instantly improves.

Either kill every cell on planet earth or strive to achieve pan species utopia by applying the hedonistic imperative. Every other option is a non solution if you want to rid the planet of suffering. Universal solutions are a tad bit more challenging.