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L Part of the TESCREAL bundle

Longtermism

The future is so big it cancels the present.

The view that positively influencing the long-term future is a — or the — key moral priority of our time. The final letter of TESCREAL and, critics argue, the philosophy that turns the whole bundle into a mandate: a justification for almost any present-day cost in the name of trillions of unborn people.

Longtermism starts from a premise few would reject — that future people matter — and runs it through utilitarian arithmetic until it arrives somewhere alarming. If the future could hold 10²⁴ or 10⁵⁸ people, then even a vanishingly small reduction in the risk of extinction outweighs curing every present disease, ending every present famine, reversing every present injustice. Born inside Effective Altruism and built on the foundations of Transhumanism and Cosmism, longtermism reframes existential risk — above all AI — as the supreme moral priority, and the present eight billion as a rounding error on the way to the stars.

Overview

What it is

An innocent premise, an alarming conclusion

Longtermism begins with a claim almost no one disputes: future people matter morally just as much as present people. A child who will suffer in a thousand years counts no less than a child suffering today; distance in time, like distance in space, is not a reason to discount someone's welfare.

From this gentle seed grows something far stranger. If future people count equally, and if there could be astronomically many of them, then the sheer scale of the future swamps every present concern. As philosophers Hilary Greaves and William MacAskill put it in their founding paper, the far future contains so much potential value that affecting it becomes “the thing we should focus on” — what they call strong longtermism. The premise is humane. The conclusion is that the present is a rounding error.

The arithmetic of astronomical stakes

The engine of longtermism is multiplication. Nick Bostrom's 2003 essay “Astronomical Waste” argued that every century we delay colonizing the cosmos forfeits an unimaginable number of possible lives. MacAskill and Greaves estimate roughly 10²⁴ future humans; Bostrom's upper figures reach 10⁵⁸ digital posthuman lives. Against numbers like these, any action that nudges the probability of a vast future upward — even by a millionth of a percentage point — mathematically outweighs helping everyone alive today.

This is expected-value reasoning taken to its limit. When the payoff is large enough, the probability almost stops mattering. Critics call this structure Pascal's Mugging: a tiny chance of an enormous reward can be used to justify almost anything, because the math always says yes.

From a charity movement to a cosmic mandate

Longtermism is the youngest letter of TESCREAL and, in a sense, the keystone. It grew out of Effective Altruism — which began with malaria nets and cost-effectiveness spreadsheets — through what insiders call the movement's “longtermist turn” of the late 2010s. By 2022, AI existential risk had become EA's dominant cause, consuming the bulk of Open Philanthropy's grantmaking and reshaping the movement's identity.

It also supplies the missing justification for the rest of the bundle. Transhumanism wants to build the posthuman; Cosmism wants to fill the universe; longtermism explains why this is the most important thing anyone could possibly do. As Émile P. Torres warns, “when you believe the stakes are cosmically high, you'll use extraordinary means to stop anyone who stands in your way.” The collapse of FTX — whose founder Sam Bankman-Fried funneled fortunes into longtermist causes — gave the world a first look at what those extraordinary means can become.

Core tenets

What its believers hold

The doctrines that recur across the movement's founders, theorists, and builders.

01

Future people count equally

A person who will live in ten thousand years matters exactly as much as a person alive now. Temporal distance carries no moral discount — the foundational, and most defensible, longtermist claim.

02

The future is astronomically large

Humanity's potential lifespan spans millions of years and possibly the whole reachable universe. The number of people who could exist dwarfs the number who already have by factors of 10²⁴ and beyond.

03

Therefore the far future dominates

If future people matter and there are unimaginably many of them, then influencing the long-term trajectory of civilization outweighs almost any present-day good. This is the move to “strong” longtermism.

04

Existential risk is the supreme priority

Extinction or permanent collapse would erase the entire astronomical future. Preventing it — “safeguarding humanity's potential” — therefore becomes the most important thing we can do.

05

Expected value over huge numbers

Decisions are judged by probability times payoff. When the payoff is trillions of lives, even a microscopic change in the odds outranks certain, immediate benefits to the living.

06

AI is the biggest risk of all

Misaligned artificial general intelligence is framed as the most probable and most total existential threat — which makes AI alignment, by the math, the most consequential problem in human history.

Key concepts

The vocabulary

The specialized terms you need to read the movement in its own words.

Existential risk (x-risk)
Any event that would cause human extinction or permanently and drastically curtail humanity's potential. The category longtermism treats as overriding all others.
Strong longtermism
Greaves and MacAskill's thesis that affecting the far future is not merely important but the most important feature of our actions — the thing we should focus on above all.
The astronomical numbers game
The rhetorical core: estimates of 10²⁴ future humans, 10⁵⁶ potential beings, or 10⁵⁸ digital lives, deployed to make every present concern look trivially small by comparison.
Astronomical waste
Bostrom's idea that each moment of delay in reaching technological maturity and cosmic settlement forfeits an enormous number of possible future lives — making speed a moral imperative.
The cosmic endowment
The vast supply of reachable resources — stars, galaxies, matter convertible into minds — that longtermists see as humanity's inheritance to be claimed and optimized.
Pascal's Mugging
A decision-theory trap in which a tiny probability of a colossal payoff justifies almost any action, because expected value always favors the enormous number. Critics say longtermism runs on it.
Expected value maximization
Choosing the action with the highest probability-weighted outcome. Over astronomical stakes it collapses into: pursue the big future, whatever the cost to the present.
Trajectory change
A persistent shift in civilization's long-run path — argued to be as valuable as preventing extinction, and used to justify deciding which kinds of futures, and people, are worth bringing about.
Timeline

How it unfolded

2003
Bostrom — “Astronomical Waste”
Nick Bostrom argues that every century of delayed cosmic expansion forfeits an astronomical number of possible lives. The essay supplies longtermism with its core intuition: the future is so large that speed and survival eclipse everything else.
2005
Future of Humanity Institute founded
Bostrom establishes the FHI at Oxford, the institutional home that fuses transhumanism with “existential risk” studies. Torres, then inside the movement, was told x-risk was “the most important concept ever invented.”
2011
Centre for Effective Altruism
William MacAskill and Toby Ord co-found the CEA, organizing the EA movement. Within a decade its center of gravity will shift from global poverty to the far future and AI.
2019
“The Case for Strong Longtermism”
Hilary Greaves and William MacAskill publish the Global Priorities Institute working paper that names and formalizes strong longtermism — the claim that influencing the far future is the key feature of our actions.
2020
Ord — “The Precipice”
Toby Ord's book popularizes existential risk for a general audience, estimating a roughly 1-in-6 chance of human extinction this century and 1-in-10 from unaligned AGI. Longtermism enters the mainstream.
2022
MacAskill — “What We Owe the Future”
MacAskill's bestselling manifesto brings longtermism to the masses. Elon Musk calls it “a close match for my philosophy”; Ezra Klein and others blurb it. Critics note its dismissal of climate and nature.
2022
FTX and the funding collapse
Sam Bankman-Fried — EA's largest longtermist donor and architect of the FTX Future Fund — collapses in fraud. Billions earmarked for longtermist causes vanish, exposing where “the stakes are cosmically high” logic can lead.
2024
TESCREAL names the bundle
Gebru and Torres's First Monday paper places longtermism as the bundle's capstone — the philosophy that turns transhumanist and cosmist ambitions into a moral mandate, and shares its roots with eugenics.
Key figures

The cast

Founders, theorists, builders, and financiers of the project.

William MacAskill
Founder

William MacAskill

b. 1987

Co-founded Effective Altruism and formalized longtermism. Author of “What We Owe the Future”; estimated 10²⁴ future people. Mentored and later defended Sam Bankman-Fried.

Wikipedia →
Hilary Greaves
Theorist

Hilary Greaves

b. 1978

Oxford philosopher and founding director of the Global Priorities Institute. Co-author with MacAskill of “The Case for Strong Longtermism,” the movement's defining paper.

Wikipedia →
Nick Bostrom
Progenitor

Nick Bostrom

b. 1973

Founded the Future of Humanity Institute; wrote “Astronomical Waste” and estimated up to 10⁵⁸ future digital lives. The bridge from transhumanism to existential risk.

Wikipedia →
Toby Ord
Theorist

Toby Ord

b. 1979

Co-founded the CEA and Giving What We Can. “The Precipice” put a number on doom — ~1-in-6 this century, 1-in-10 from unaligned AGI.

Wikipedia →
Nick Beckstead
Strategist

Nick Beckstead

—

His thesis argued shaping the far future is overwhelmingly important — and that saving lives in rich countries is worth more because they drive “substantially more” innovation. Ran the FTX Future Fund.

Sam Bankman-Fried
Financier

Sam Bankman-Fried

b. 1992

EA's biggest longtermist donor via FTX. Radicalized by MacAskill's “earn to give,” he built the FTX Future Fund — then collapsed in one of history's largest frauds.

Wikipedia →
Elon Musk
Patron

Elon Musk

b. 1971

Called MacAskill's “What We Owe the Future” “a close match for my philosophy.” His drive to make humanity multiplanetary is longtermism in corporate form.

Wikipedia →
Ezra Klein
Amplifier

Ezra Klein

b. 1984

Influential journalist who engaged sympathetically with longtermism and blurbed MacAskill's book; co-author of “Abundance,” a politics of techno-optimist growth.

Wikipedia →
Derek Thompson
Amplifier

Derek Thompson

b. 1986

Journalist and co-author with Klein of “Abundance.” Critics read the book's growth-at-all-costs futurism as longtermism's neoliberal cousin.

Wikipedia →
Key texts

The canon

The essays, declarations, and books that built the doctrine.

The Case for Strong Longtermism

Hilary Greaves & William MacAskill

The founding statement. Argues that influencing the far future is not just important but the most important feature of our actions — the paper that named the doctrine.

Read ↗
2021

Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development

Nick Bostrom

The intuition pump beneath it all: every century of delay forfeits an astronomical number of possible lives, so survival and speed eclipse all else.

Read ↗
2003

Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios

Nick Bostrom

Defined the category that longtermism elevates above all others — threats that would erase humanity's entire potential future.

Read ↗
2002

On the Overwhelming Importance of Shaping the Far Future

Nick Beckstead

The doctoral thesis that built the academic scaffolding for longtermism — and contained the notorious argument that rich-country lives are worth more.

Read ↗
2013

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity

Toby Ord

Brought existential risk to a mass audience with hard numbers on extinction and a call to “safeguard humanity's potential.”

Read ↗
2020

What We Owe the Future

William MacAskill

The bestselling popular manifesto. Endorsed by Elon Musk as “a close match for my philosophy” — and criticized for treating nature and climate as expendable.

Read ↗
2022
In their own words

On the record

Worth reading. This is a close match for my philosophy.
— Elon Musk, on “What We Owe the Future”
When you believe the stakes are cosmically high, you'll use extraordinary means to stop anyone who stands in your way.
— Émile P. Torres, Current Affairs
Positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time.
— William MacAskill (paraphrased)
Even a tiny reduction in existential risk outweighs the benefit of saving billions of lives today.
— Longtermist expected-value reasoning (paraphrased)
The critique

The case against

Longtermism markets itself as moral seriousness extended across time — caring about people simply because they don't exist yet. Critics, led by Émile P. Torres (who calls it “the world's most dangerous secular credo”), argue the arithmetic launders a far older and uglier project: deciding which lives, and which kinds of people, are worth bringing into the future.

The present becomes a rounding error

If 10²⁴ future lives are at stake, then poverty, famine, and injustice today shrink to statistical noise. Torres and others note this lets adherents wave away present suffering as trivial next to the cosmic jackpot.

Nature and climate dismissed

MacAskill argues wild-animal lives are “worse than nothing on average” — so habitat loss can be net positive — and that even 7–10°C of warming is “hard to see” causing collapse, with fossil fuels saved for a post-collapse second industrial revolution. In the sixth mass extinction, critics call this monstrous.

Prioritizing the rich

Nick Beckstead's thesis argued that saving lives in rich countries is worth more because those countries produce “substantially more” innovation that shapes the far future. The neutral-sounding math reaches an unmistakably hierarchical conclusion.

Who deserves the future?

Torres and Gebru argue that choosing which futures and which “kinds of people” to bring about is eugenic logic at cosmic scale — the same selection premise as 20th-century eugenics, rebranded as concern for the unborn.

Inside the bundle

How it connects

Transhumanism does not stand alone. It feeds — and is fed by — the other letters of TESCREAL.

The network

The full web

People, organizations, and the ideologies this one bleeds into. Drag nodes, hover to isolate, scroll to zoom — or pop it out fullscreen.

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Sources

Citations & further reading

Primary documents and reporting used on this page. See the full References library → for the complete source list.

  1. 01
    Longtermism ↗Wikipedia
  2. 02
    The Case for Strong Longtermism (GPI Working Paper) ↗Greaves & MacAskill · Global Priorities Institute
  3. 03
    Astronomical Waste ↗Nick Bostrom · Utilitas (2003)
  4. 04
    Longtermism and Eugenics: A Primer ↗Émile P. Torres · Truthdig
  5. 05
    The Dangerous Ideas of Longtermism and Existential Risk ↗Émile P. Torres · Current Affairs
  6. 06
    The Effective Altruism Movement Has a Longtermism Problem ↗Vox · Future Perfect (2022)
  7. 07
    The TESCREAL Bundle: Eugenics and the Promise of Utopia through AGI ↗Gebru & Torres · First Monday (2024)
  8. 08
    What We Owe the Future ↗Wikipedia
  9. 09
    The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity ↗Wikipedia
  10. 10
    TESCREAL ↗Wikipedia
Longtermism — connection network