Oliver stared at the number on his screen. He'd run the calculation a thousand times, and it never stopped being vertigo-inducing.
10^38. That was the lower bound—the conservative estimate of the number of conscious beings who could exist if humanity survived and expanded through the reachable universe. Ten to the thirty-eighth power. A number so large it made every other number in ethics feel like a rounding error.
His colleague knocked. "The malaria funding report came back. The foundation wants to know if we're reallocating."
Oliver felt the familiar tension. The malaria nets saved lives. Real lives, now, today. Children who would die without them. Every utilitarian instinct he had screamed that saving a child's life was good.
But the calculation said something else. The calculation said that if there was even a 0.001% chance that his existential risk work could prevent human extinction, the expected value dwarfed every malaria net on Earth. Not because malaria didn't matter. But because 10^38 was a very, very large number.
He made the recommendation. He didn't feel good about it. He didn't feel bad about it either. He felt the specific numbness of someone who has followed a chain of logic to its conclusion and found the conclusion monstrous and irrefutable at the same time.
His mother called that evening. She was raising money for a local food bank. "Could you donate?" she asked.
"Of course," he said. He donated. It was a rounding error in his annual giving. Most of his income went to existential risk organizations.
He looked at the stars that night—not with wonder, but with a sense of obligation so vast it felt like gravity. All those potential minds. All that potential flourishing. The weight of a future that might never exist pressed down on him like an atmosphere made of mathematics.
He went to bed and dreamed of numbers.