It is understandable that we want to prioritise those who are closer to us. It’s natural, instinctive, and often helps society to function—like when parents prioritise their kids. But it can also create harmful barriers and division.
History is full of examples of humans devaluing those who seem different or distant to them: just think about how different religions have treated each other, 19th Century slavery, or even the way people prefer to give to local charities over global development.
We should be really cautious when discounting the value of other people. Time is different to space or race, but is it that different? In the past, people thought it was natural and obvious to draw moral distinctions between people on the basis of geography, religion, race or gender. There’s a risk that we might be making the same mistake when it comes to time. After all, future humans are still humans who will live, feel, cry and laugh just like we do. Wouldn’t it be awesome if we allowed this moral empathy to cross the great divide of time as well?
Imagine people in the future could look back and see how we, today, had consciously made decisions to improve their lives. It might feel like walking into a grand cathedral and knowing that the people who built it a thousand years ago knew that it would still be used for millennia. Or it might feel like what Isaac Newton called “standing on the shoulders of giants”—like when Covid vaccine developers used findings from biology and chemistry first discovered by Victorians. Our shared story on this planet would be so much richer and more beautiful if we acknowledged that just as it doesn’t matter where you were born, it shouldn’t matter when you are born.
It is understandable that we want to prioritise those who are closer to us. It’s natural, instinctive, and often helps society to function—like when parents prioritise their kids. But it can also create harmful barriers and division.
History is full of examples of humans devaluing those who seem different or distant to them: just think about how different religions have treated each other, 19th Century slavery, or even the way people prefer to give to local charities over global development.
We should be really cautious when discounting the value of other people. Time is different to space or race, but is it that different? In the past, people thought it was natural and obvious to draw moral distinctions between people on the basis of geography, religion, race or gender. There’s a risk that we might be making the same mistake when it comes to time. After all, future humans are still humans who will live, feel, cry and laugh just like we do. Wouldn’t it be awesome if we allowed this moral empathy to cross the great divide of time as well?
Imagine people in the future could look back and see how we, today, had consciously made decisions to improve their lives. It might feel like walking into a grand cathedral and knowing that the people who built it a thousand years ago knew that it would still be used for millennia. Or it might feel like what Isaac Newton called “standing on the shoulders of giants”—like when Covid vaccine developers used findings from biology and chemistry first discovered by Victorians. Our shared story on this planet would be so much richer and more beautiful if we acknowledged that just as it doesn’t matter where you were born, it shouldn’t matter when you are born.
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