This is not a book for a popular audience. Also, it's a first draft. That said, you needn't apologize for saying anything "cruel."

But, based on your comments, I've now revised my opening to the following...

Compared to science, philosophy moves at a slow pace. A few decades after the Wright Brothers flew their spruce-wood plane for half the length of a football field, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Meanwhile, philosophers are still debating the questions Plato raised more than two millennia ago.

But the world is about to change. Maintaining philosophy’s slow pace and not solving certain philosophical problems in the next two centuries may lead to the extinction of the human species.

This extinction would result from...

It's still not like the opening of a Richard Dawkins book, but it's not supposed to be like a Richard Dawkins book.