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Nothing new, "public intellectual" just discovered ideas vigorously debated on youtube, tumblr and reddit at least for 10 years and feels very very smart.
Everyone here knows about antinatalism, now look at efilism.
Efil = life backward, recognition that all life is suffering, extinction of all life is the only way to stop all suffering and is therefore absolute moral necessity.
Yes, all comic book super villains who wanted to destroy the world were the real heroes, and the super heroes who stopped them were the real villains.
Efilism is the next logical step after understanding Anti-natalism.
https://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2014/07/10/a-little-lexicon-childfree-antinatalist-efilist/
Now, let us look at the practical problems: is ending all suffering possible?
Yes, and it is easier and cheaper you would imagine.
Do not think about super plagues, nuclear weapons or asteroid hits - look at chemical compound called sulfur hexafluoride.
Ordinary non toxic, non flammable, non explosive gas, fully legal to buy and possess, useful for many industrial applications and goofy party tricks, that just happens to be 23,900 times more effective greenhouse gas than CO2.
It could be affordable for single billionaire to manufacture in secret enough HF6 to turn Earth's climate into Venus' one.
All life will cook out in few days/weeks and then all suffering will end for forever. Some bacteria might survive deep in Earth's crust, but they will not be complex enough to feel pain.
Mission accomplished.
Priors strongly against the feasibility of this sort of cartoon supervillain plot. Even ignoring the dynamics of heavy gases in the atmosphere and existence of tons of known and hypothetical stabilising processes that are bound to pull Earth back to equilibrium temperature and just modelling the setting as "one unit of SF6 is equivalent to 23900 units of CO2", that factor is not that big. Is a lab synthesis involving fickle reagents like F2 really doable in less than 23900 times the cost per unit of the hypothetical billionaire just setting-things-on-fire-maxing for CO2, or do you think that a billionaire could also cook earth with that if they were not disturbed in the process? (Another back-of-the-envelope calc.)
Back of envelope from another angle... SF6 is $5/kg, ~3x molar weight cf CO2. Mad scientist has $100B to play with, gets around 20M tons (ignoring that current global market for SF6 is $300M; probably not the biggest issue, plenty of S and F around), maybe 5M tons CO2 equivalent. 40B tons CO2 produced annually, gives us a factor of 8000. 24k/8k = you get 3 years worth of global warming from your $100B.
I'm surprised by how much bang for buck you get, but that's a pretty flaccid doomsday device. And you'd definitely attract attention anyway.
It's a fun problem, how to destroy all life. You only get one shot really; humans probably would be the most competitive vertebrate in most conditions and even probably most multicellular organisms, so if we can destroy ourselves, we probably have most other things covered. But you'd also want to wipe out anything that could conceivably evolve later on into something worthy of moral consideration, which seems insurmountable unless there's something like Ice-9 or a way to trigger a false vacuum collapse out there.
Also, if there's a good chance that extraterrestrial life is out there, isn't it our duty to first find and destroy them before ourselves, to save them from the vicissitudes of existence?
Damn I feel old, but -- you may be interested in the Usenet archive of the group alt.pave.the.earth and related alt.destroy.the.earth, which consist(ed) of engineering nerds endlessly hashing out this and related questions.
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I don't understand how antinatalism or elifism are given any credence at all on an intellectual basis.
Not in that I disagree with them, but they are so.. simple. Most edgy 4th graders hit their friends with a variation of "we can end hunger by nuking Africa huehuehue". It's the same idea, if there is some sort of universal accumulator, and you want to maximize the number there. If something is a net negative, you are best off stopping everything once and for all. Maybe in 11th grade, you can incorporate the concept of the expected value into that philosophy.
If anything its utilitarianism (with trepdiations) taken to its logical extent.
Simpler arguments are easier to onboard people onto than complex arguments.
I'm not sure whether high level philosophy is iterating on them much.
But they're really easy for young intellectuals to get into and develop strong feelings about. So it makes sense that they propagate.
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