Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's really an impossible calculation. There's no way to appraise the consequences to assign a value. If it were possible to say, that a future mutation was necessary to save humanity (ie. we are doomed without entering that future) well then perhaps we'd be willing to sacrifice a lot of us now. It's all academic of course, we'll never make such a decision, and never know what could have been. It's just another remin…
> a future mutation was necessary to save humanity Even in that scenario, it is very simple, we protected the people today and use vaccines to induce the necessary mutation. The moral choice in my book is to always err on the side of the living than "potential of the living".
For instance, the British military planners allowed soldiers to die on the battlefield, who they could have saved, in order to protect the secret that they had cracked German encryption during WWII. That was a place where the needs of the many, were deemed more valuable than the lives of the few.
I'm not judging one way or the other, but it has happened in human history more than once. And in the imaginary scenario where leaders had perfect knowledge of the future, it would likely happen again.