EXCERPT We live in times that confront us with important questions regarding how we will survive as a species, questions which invite radical answers: i. How will we survive catastrophic climate change? Abandon the earth? ii. How will we survive technological self-modification? Radical technoconservatism? iii. How will we survive competition with artificial superintelligence? Enslave it? These questions operate at the limit of what we might call suprapersonal survival. They are the sorts of questions increasingly addressed by philosophers contemplating the possibility of human extinction and extending the horizon of ethical speculation into the far-flung future.2 However, we are equally confronted with questions about the survival of systems at various scales: the persistence of nations, cultures, corporations, families, all the way down to personal survival. I want to suggest that the way in which these questions are posed tends to distort strategic thinking about how we answer them…