At first glance this crowd are a sort of polar opposite to the paradise engineers. The goal is eliminating suffering. Paradise engineers want to do it by building. Extinctionists want to do it by removing those capable of perceiving suffering.

But at second glance, there is more going on here.

Even if we are being charitable we would say that extinctionists have a critical lack of ambition. A poverty of the mind. A parochial vision of the possible, narrowed down to such a narrow slice of what might be that it may as well be invisible. They cannot look much beyond their noses. They do not see the natural world as the seething pit of pain and anguish and violent death that it is. They are willing to bow out themselves while condemning animals to that for the foreseeable future. The rational and caring extinctionist would destroy the entire biosphere, but even that is short-sighted, as it doesn't do anything about the rest of the universe and all future time. There will be more biospheres, more tooth and nail evolution.

Extinctionists are fixated on relinquishment, a form of cowardice in the face of being challenged by circumstances and change. They have seen the problem, and their answer is it is to leave the building, making no effort to address the issue. How can that possibly help? It is a pathological lack of ambition taken to its logical conclusion, and weaponized by jealousy of those who feel that, yes, something might be done.

There is suffering. So build the means to end it. If you can't envisage how, then you aren't reading widely enough. Ultimately we can replace all of the natural biosphere. We can rebuild man and animal in reality or emulated environments: all of them, every last thing capable of pain. We can remove the circumstances of suffering from any who suffer and who want that suffering to end. That it will require centuries, molecular nanotechnology, brain emulation, and other technologies of the same ilk? So what? How long has this world waited already for those capable of making this achievement? Seizing the future and continuing the work that our species has barely started on in the quest to eliminate pain is the high road.

And if at the end of the day there are still those who feel that they would like an untrammeled world, well let them build as many as they like - provided that all the species living upon them capable of pain are in fact living in a paradise free from suffering.

But heaven forbid we feel any sympathy for those who want to press the game over button now, who cannot raise their eyes just that little bit to see the golden future we could build with just a little more time.