I would therefore say that large-scale catastrophes related to biorisk or nuclear war are quite likely (~80–90%) to merely delay space colonization in expectation.[17] (With more uncertainty being not on the likelihood of recovery, but on whether some outlier-type catastrophes might directly lead to extinction.)
You seem to be highly certain that humans will recover from near-extinction. Is this based on solely the arguments in the text and footnote, or is there more? It seems to rest on the assumption that only population growth/size is the bottleneck, and key technologies and infrastructures will be developed anyway.
There isn’t much more except that I got the impression that people in EA who have thought about this a lot think recovery is very likely, and I’m mostly deferring to them. The section about extinction risk is the part of my post where I feel the least knowledgeable. As for additional object-level arguments, I initially wasn’t aware of points such as crops and animals already being cultivated/domesticated, metals already mined, and there being alternatives to rapid growth induced by fossil fuels, one of which being slow but steady growth over longer time periods. The way cultural evolution works is that slight improvements from innovations (which are allowed to be disjunctive rather than having to rely on developing a very specific technology) spread everywhere, which makes me think that large populations + a lot of time should go far enough eventually. Note also that if all-out extinction is simply very unlikely to ever happen, then you have several attempts left to reach technological maturity again.
You seem to be highly certain that humans will recover from near-extinction. Is this based on solely the arguments in the text and footnote, or is there more? It seems to rest on the assumption that only population growth/size is the bottleneck, and key technologies and infrastructures will be developed anyway.
There isn’t much more except that I got the impression that people in EA who have thought about this a lot think recovery is very likely, and I’m mostly deferring to them. The section about extinction risk is the part of my post where I feel the least knowledgeable. As for additional object-level arguments, I initially wasn’t aware of points such as crops and animals already being cultivated/domesticated, metals already mined, and there being alternatives to rapid growth induced by fossil fuels, one of which being slow but steady growth over longer time periods. The way cultural evolution works is that slight improvements from innovations (which are allowed to be disjunctive rather than having to rely on developing a very specific technology) spread everywhere, which makes me think that large populations + a lot of time should go far enough eventually. Note also that if all-out extinction is simply very unlikely to ever happen, then you have several attempts left to reach technological maturity again.