> The DCF makes sense because receiving a dollar tomorrow doesn't have the same value as receiving one today because in the second case I could invest it in th

> The DCF makes sense because receiving a dollar tomorrow doesn't have the same value as receiving one today because in the second case I could invest it in the risk free asset and get more than one dollar tomorrow. This doesn't apply to human life. Sure it does, since it's Effective Altruism we're talking about, so it's (i) literally about socially investing money and (ii) it's choosing between spending it on things anticipated to generate compounding returns like economic growth or carbon control or health and education (all likely to have indirect long term benefits to solving whatever humanity's future challenges are too) versus spending it on stuff which serves no purpose in the foreseeable future but is hypothetically critical to the hypothetical risks faced by hypothetical humans in the hypothesised future. And also because even if cash couldn't be invested [risk free], humans would still apply a discount rate to the future because of uncertainty and time preference the author discusses. Needless to say, there's a lot of uncertainty about the needs of future generations, and just as it's pretty normal to care more about your own child than kids in a faraway land, it's pretty normal to consider hypothetical third millenium transhumans on Alpha Centurai essentially irrelevant to your priorities. (I mean, trying to avoid human extinction is pretty worthwhile for its own sake anyway; invoking billions upon billions of future humans spread across the galaxy because everyone thinks your project has an astronomically small chance of actually saving humanity is just Pascal's Wager in scifi form)