Visions of the Future

This paper posits that the most significant long-term existential risk to human civilization is not an acute technological or environmental catastrophe, but a chronic, systemic decay driven by the psychological and demographic consequences of a biologically capped lifespan. The entrenched expectation of mortality before 120 years fosters a condition of "temporal myopia," which cultivates cultural short-termism, consumerist nihilism, and demographic apathy. A critical and compounding aspect of this risk is the observed strong negative correlation between high cognitive ability and reproductive rates, leading to a systematic, dysgenic drain on humanity's problem-solving capacity. This creates a recursive threat…