The speaker suggests that preventing existential threats may matter to people if they want to send probes into space carrying humanity's cultural ideas rather than its genes.

“we may only want to do that if we want to send probes uh with our vibes and our memes rather than our genes into”

“into space right and then we want those probes there's actually a beautiful book uh the slow time between the stars it's a very short like uh audiobook on amazon i love it um friend of mine steward like uh um recommended that to me like if you want to send those probes then it might make sense to be like our memes as humanity should stay and proliferate in the universe uh that's it yeah”