Following up my earlier comment with a hodgepodge of miscellaneous speculations and (appropriately!) leaving the Long Reflection / Von-Neumann stuff for later-to-never. Here are some thoughts, arranged from serious to wacky:
Here is a link to a powerpoint presentation summarizing some personal research that I did into how bad it would be if GPS was taken 100% offline for an extended period. I look into what could cause a long-term GPS failure (cyberattack or solar storm maybe, deliberate ASAT attacks most likely — note that GPS is far from LEO so kessler syndrome is not a concern), how different industries would be affected, and bad the how the overall impact would be. I find that losing GPS for a year would create an economic hit similar in scale to the covid-19 pandemic, although of course the details of how life would be affected would be totally different — most importantly, losing GPS likely wouldn’t be an isolated crisis, but would occur as part of a larger catastrophe like great-power war or a record-breaking solar storm.
I have a lot of thoughts about how EA has somewhat of a natural overlap with many people who become interested in space, and how we could do a better job of trying to recruit / build connections there. In lieu of going into lots of detail, I’ll quote from a facebook comment I made recently:
For a lot of ordinary folks, getting excited about space exploration is their way of visualizing and connecting with EA-style ideas about “humanity’s long term future” and contributing to the overall advancement of civilization. They might be wrong on the object-level (the future will probably depend much more on technologies like AI than technologies like reusable rockets), but their heart is often in the right place, so I think it’s bad for EA to be too dismissive/superior about the uselessness of space exploration. I believe that many people who are inspired by space exploration are often natural EAs at heart; they could just use a little education about what modern experts think the future will actually look like. It’s similar to how lots of people think climate change is an imminent extinction risk, and it obviously isn’t, but in a certain sense their “heart is in the right place” for caring about x-risk and taking a universal perspective about our obligations to humanity and the Earth, so we should try to educate/recruit them instead of just mocking their climate anxieties.
EA talks about space as a potential cause area. But I also think that NASA’s recent success story of transitioning from bloated cost-plus contracts to a system of competitive public-private partnerships has some lessons that the EA movement could maybe use. As the EA movement scales up (and becomes more and more funding-heavy / “talent-constrained”), and as we start digging into “Phase 2” work to make progress on a diverse set of technically complicated issues, it will become less possible to exercise direct oversight of projects, less possible to assume good-faith and EA-value-alignment on the part of collaborators, and so forth. Organizations like OpenPhil will increasingly want to outsource more work to non-EA contractors. This is mostly a good thing which reflects the reality of being a successful movement spending resources in order to wield influence and get things done. But the high-trust good-faith environment of early EA will eventually need to give way to an environment where we rely more on making sure that we are incentivizing external groups to give us what we want (using good contract design, competition, prizes, and other mechanisms). NASA’s recent history could provide some helpful lessons in how to do that.
Space resources: I am an engineer, not an economist, but it seems like Georgism could be a helpful framework for thinking about this? The whole concept of Georgism is that economic rents derived from natural resources should belong equally to all people, and thus should be taxed at 100%, leaving only the genuine value added by human labor as private profit. This seems like a useful economic system (albeit far from a total solution) if we are worried about “grabby” pioneers racing to “burn the cosmic commons”. Just like the spectrum-auction processes I mentioned, individuals could bid for licenses to resources they wish to use (like an asteroid containing valuable minerals or a solar-power orbital slot near the sun), and then pay an ongoing tax based on the value of their winning bid. Presumably we could turn the tax rate up and down until we achieved a target utilization rate (say, 0.001% of the solar system’s resources each year); thus we could allocate resources efficiency while still greatly limiting the rate of expansion.
One potential “EA megaproject” is the idea of creating “civilizational refuges” — giant sealed bunkers deep underground that could help maintain civilization in the event of nuclear war, pandemic, or etc. I think this project has a lot of overlap with existing knowledge about how to build life-support systems for space stations, and with near-future projects to create large underground moonbases and mars cities. It would certainly be worth trying to hire some human-spaceflight engineers to consult on a future EA bunker project. I even have a crazy vision that you might be able to turn a profit on a properly-designed bunker-digging business — attracting ambitious employees with the long-term SpaceX-style hype that you’re working on technology to eventually build underground Martian cities, and earning near-term money by selling high-quality bunkers to governments and eccentric billionaires.
Following up my earlier comment with a hodgepodge of miscellaneous speculations and (appropriately!) leaving the Long Reflection / Von-Neumann stuff for later-to-never. Here are some thoughts, arranged from serious to wacky:
Here is a link to a powerpoint presentation summarizing some personal research that I did into how bad it would be if GPS was taken 100% offline for an extended period. I look into what could cause a long-term GPS failure (cyberattack or solar storm maybe, deliberate ASAT attacks most likely — note that GPS is far from LEO so kessler syndrome is not a concern), how different industries would be affected, and bad the how the overall impact would be. I find that losing GPS for a year would create an economic hit similar in scale to the covid-19 pandemic, although of course the details of how life would be affected would be totally different — most importantly, losing GPS likely wouldn’t be an isolated crisis, but would occur as part of a larger catastrophe like great-power war or a record-breaking solar storm.
I have a lot of thoughts about how EA has somewhat of a natural overlap with many people who become interested in space, and how we could do a better job of trying to recruit / build connections there. In lieu of going into lots of detail, I’ll quote from a facebook comment I made recently:
EA talks about space as a potential cause area. But I also think that NASA’s recent success story of transitioning from bloated cost-plus contracts to a system of competitive public-private partnerships has some lessons that the EA movement could maybe use. As the EA movement scales up (and becomes more and more funding-heavy / “talent-constrained”), and as we start digging into “Phase 2” work to make progress on a diverse set of technically complicated issues, it will become less possible to exercise direct oversight of projects, less possible to assume good-faith and EA-value-alignment on the part of collaborators, and so forth. Organizations like OpenPhil will increasingly want to outsource more work to non-EA contractors. This is mostly a good thing which reflects the reality of being a successful movement spending resources in order to wield influence and get things done. But the high-trust good-faith environment of early EA will eventually need to give way to an environment where we rely more on making sure that we are incentivizing external groups to give us what we want (using good contract design, competition, prizes, and other mechanisms). NASA’s recent history could provide some helpful lessons in how to do that.
Space resources: I am an engineer, not an economist, but it seems like Georgism could be a helpful framework for thinking about this? The whole concept of Georgism is that economic rents derived from natural resources should belong equally to all people, and thus should be taxed at 100%, leaving only the genuine value added by human labor as private profit. This seems like a useful economic system (albeit far from a total solution) if we are worried about “grabby” pioneers racing to “burn the cosmic commons”. Just like the spectrum-auction processes I mentioned, individuals could bid for licenses to resources they wish to use (like an asteroid containing valuable minerals or a solar-power orbital slot near the sun), and then pay an ongoing tax based on the value of their winning bid. Presumably we could turn the tax rate up and down until we achieved a target utilization rate (say, 0.001% of the solar system’s resources each year); thus we could allocate resources efficiency while still greatly limiting the rate of expansion.
One potential “EA megaproject” is the idea of creating “civilizational refuges” — giant sealed bunkers deep underground that could help maintain civilization in the event of nuclear war, pandemic, or etc. I think this project has a lot of overlap with existing knowledge about how to build life-support systems for space stations, and with near-future projects to create large underground moonbases and mars cities. It would certainly be worth trying to hire some human-spaceflight engineers to consult on a future EA bunker project. I even have a crazy vision that you might be able to turn a profit on a properly-designed bunker-digging business — attracting ambitious employees with the long-term SpaceX-style hype that you’re working on technology to eventually build underground Martian cities, and earning near-term money by selling high-quality bunkers to governments and eccentric billionaires.