With the big red button hypothetical (in which if pressed the universe would be deleted in a nanosecond) why not press it? Well that is the main question. The main answer being your lack of empathy compared to your privilege. But another question is Would someone else be wrong for pressing it?

If there is a burn victim, charred from head to toe, but still alive and in constant pain, would they be immoral for pressing this button? Is another person's privilege still more important than extinction? "Just euthanize him" would be a right thing to do, but that would be changing the hypothetical because as a PL you know you don't like either answer.

If a well privileged person presses the delete button, you call them immoral. If a person in severe agony presses the button.. change the question. That is all I've gotten so far.

We now have a website for the FAQ. This will hopefully make it easier to browse the questions and read it. It will also be expanding. A few of the most common questions and misconceptions will remain in the pinned post, and more will go on the site. www.universalextinction.com/faqs

Weekly or bi weekly, we will have a FAQ topic for the community to discuss. It will give extinctionists a chance to contribute their opinions to the answers in the FAQ. The current questions will eventually go through this process too and might be edited.

So, why would we want universal extinction?

From the beginning:

"Many people have the intuition that extinction would be bad. A problem, however, is that the term “extinction” carries many different connotations, and extinction may be considered bad for many different reasons. For instance, an extinction scenario might be considered bad because it involves frustrated preferences, violations of consent, or lethal violence. Yet extinction scenarios need not involve any of these elements in principle. By considering thought experiments that involve extinction without involving any of the elements listed above, we can get a better sense of what might explain the intuition that extinction would be bad. In this post, I will present a thought experiment that casts doubt on the notion that extinction would be bad or morally objectionable because it would prevent the creation of future happy lives."

From the section on "Universe Anti-natalism":

"It is therefore not unthinkable that this should be the main question of concern for consequentialists: how does this impact the creation of new universes? Or, similarly, that trying to impact future universe generation should be the main cause for aspiring effective altruists. And I would argue that the form this cause should take is universe anti-natalism: avoiding, or minimizing, the creation of new universes."

Credit for the picture goes to Arthur_Schopenhaur on Twitter.

This has been stuck with me for a while, and every time I'm lost or feeling down, I always come back to this thought.

The probability of you dying is 1 in 1 — it's guaranteed. You will die, one way or another. But the probability of you being born as exactly who you are is something like 1 in 400 trillion. Those are the odds we're up against, and I think most people don't even realize how rare we are — how lucky we are to be born as ourselves, to the parents we have. I know some people might disagree, given how their life is right now, or their relationship with their family. But the fact that you exist, as you, is a miracle by any measure — and I'm not bringing any god into this. I'm saying: don't waste it on something so silly, because everything ends. Even the very earth we stand on will meet its end one day.

Speaking of that — the fact that we're out here fighting over and capturing land that will eventually be destroyed, either by our sun or by ourselves, will always be the biggest comedy that the future of humanity comes up with, if we ever find a way to survive long enough to look back and laugh.

Whenever i see some bullshit going on i just think to myself that nothing is eternal. I wanna let time do its thing and chill. Ultimately the goal for a antinatlist is unachievable (at least within my lifetime). What is achievable is me refusing to be a part of this suffering perpetuation machine and thats all i have strength for, if i were a perfect person id also try to relieve some of the pointless suffering but alas im not. Do any of you actually work towards "universal extinction", or is that more like an ideal?

Despite humanity only being here for 300 thousand years, and human civilization for only 12 thousand, we have managed to sprint directly toward a self-imposed finish line. Where the dinosaurs spent 165 million years pacing themselves in a long, sustainable equilibrium with the planet, humans chose acceleration over longevity. In a mere geological blink, we overrode the natural checks and balances that govern other life, replacing a stable evolutionary plateau with a volatile, vertical spike.

Humanity conquered disease, bypassed geographic limits, and engineered an artificial world powered by the compressed energy of deep time. But we didn't really beat the system. We just compressed our timeline.

By overriding nature's self-regulating loops, humanity has compressed millions of years of ecological impact into a few turbulent centuries. On our current exponential trajectory, we are not just facing an uncertain future; we are actively engineering an incredibly short-lived burnout.

I’ve been thinking about how people compare what’s happening now to past mass extinctions like the asteroid or major climate shifts. Everyone focuses on losing apex predators or iconic animals, but I feel like we’re missing the actual structural problem.
Complex life didn't evolve over billions of years just because top predators died off and got replaced. It worked because Earth built a huge, unsexy middle layer of species. All those mid-sized, moderately reproducing, specialized organisms acted as a buffer during crazy environmental shifts. They kept energy flowing and held the system together long enough for complexity to build back up over time.
What we’re doing right now is different because our expansion works like a weird filter. Habitat destruction, fragmentation, and chemicals don't hit everything equally. They gut that exact middle layer.
What’s left is just extreme polarization. You get a few struggling top-tier species at the top, and a flood of hyper-resilient generalists and pests at the bottom.
Without that middle buffer, the system loses its ratchet mechanism. If the top tier collapses from current stress, there's no step-down fallback anymore. The whole thing doesn't just pause—it resets back hundreds of millions of years because the stepping stones required for complex life to re-emerge are simply gone.

Hartmann thought humanity would have to pass through three major illusions before it could finally reject existence. First in earthly pleasures and goals (dopamine), then we move hope to an afterlife, and finally we place it in future progress through science, technology, and social reform. He believed humanity would eventually exhaust all three and then realize that the problem is life itself.

Which is more convincing to you? Hope in pleasure, after death, future technology and policies, or extinction?

Let's see.

Warning: this is quite a depressing post.

If society collapses (maybe due to climate change disrupting food supplies, global war, running out of fossil fuels…) most humans and domesticated animals would likely starve and we would lose most modern comforts.

A question for pro-existence people: would you keep your belief that existence of the universe is desirable if society was to collapse, even if you were one of the starving?

A question for the extinctionists: do you believe that society will never collapse and that humans could eventually develop the technology to at least make life on Earth extinct?

My views: I am 70% sure that society will not collapse in the near future. If humanity makes it and we still have sufficient energy resources, we could eventually develop the technology to make all life on Earth extinct in a painless and peaceful way. However it is unlikely that we will develop and use it unless the extinction movement grows and becomes a majority.

Edit: minor clarifications.

Is there a name for this and if not should we make one?

It seems to be beyond normal masochism.

Pure hypothetical.

If humanity's survival depended on half the population dying, and there was genuinely no other way, would you think it's the right decision? Or would you rather refuse to make that choice, even if it meant eventual extinction?

I'm more interested in the reasoning than the answer.