Scott Alexander

In 2014, I wrote, The argument was, suppose humanity ends up occupying millions of galaxies.

People will still remember Earth as a special time.

The mountainous mass of future historians will press down upon a tiny speck of current people.

There's no reason the colony ships won't contain flash drives of the whole 2026 era internet, so rather than being limited to a few prominent figures, these historians can study the generation around the singularity almost in its entirety.

In such a situation, greatness is pathetically easy.

A random woman gave Jesus a washcloth to wipe his face on the way to his crucifixion.

She's now known as Saint Veronica, patroness of laundry workers, and one of every 2,500 girls in America is named in her honor.

She has an annual feast day, approximately 1 million beautiful Renaissance paintings, a chapel in Jerusalem, and lesser churches all around the world, including one here in San Francisco.

The richest olive merchant in Jerusalem that year is long forgotten, but she endures.

Saint Veronica isn't unusual in her charity.

Any one of us might lend a rag to a person in need.

She's special because she happened to commit her random act of kindness at the crucial – fine, pun sort of intended – moment of religious history, when a tiny speck of recorded happenings must support trillions of person-years of later adoration.

If you worry about the permanent underclass meme, then you already believe that we're not not at another crucial moment –

I'm not asking you to give up your dreams of owning a bigger moon than everyone else in order to chase a tiny chance of becoming the future's equivalent of Jesus.

I'm suggesting you give them up in order to offer the future a washcloth and see if it honors your memory.

You have only X years to escape being permanently boring when the weight of galactic humanity descends to scrutinize your life forever.

10 million years from now, do you want transhuman intelligences on a Niven ring somewhere in Dario Amadei's supercluster to briefly focus their deific gaze on your legacy and think, yeah, he spent the whole hinge of history making B2B SaaS products because he was afraid of joining the permanent underclass.

Now he has a 20% bigger moon than the rest of us.

Or do you want them to think, she was one of the heroes who arose when the fate of humanity balanced on a knife edge, fought against the thousand forms of entropy that could have ended our paradise before it began, helped create a vision of broad-based prosperity that benefited all humanity...

and gets 0.000038501% of the credit for our current happy state.