Is eventually expanding beyond our solar system necessary for achieving a long period with very low extinction risk?
As part of the discussion of “Effective size of the long-term future”, Ajeya and Rob discussed the barriers to and likelihood of various forms of space colonisation. I found this quite interesting.
During that section, I got the impression that Ajeya was implicitly thinking that a stable, low-extinction-risk future would require some kind of expansion beyond our solar system. (Though I don’t think she said that explicitly, so maybe I’m making a faulty inference. Perhaps what she actually had in mind was just that such expansion could be one way to get a stable, low-extinction-risk future, such that the likelihood of such expansion was one important question in determining whether we can get such a future, and a good question to start with.)
If she does indeed think that, that seems a bit surprising to me. I haven’t really thought about this before, but I think I’d guess that we could have a stable, low-extinction-risk future—for, let’s says, hundreds of millions of years—without expanding beyond our solar system. Such expansion could of course help[1], both because it creates “backups” and because there are certain astronomical extinction events that would by default happen eventually to Earth/our solar system. But it seems to me plausible that the right kind of improved technologies and institutions would allow us to reduce extinction risks to negligible levels just on Earth for hundreds of millions of years.
But I’ve never really directly thought about this question before, so I could definitely be wrong. If anyone happens to have thoughts on this, I’d be interested to hear them.
[1] I’m not saying it’d definitely help—there are ways it could be net negative. And I’m definitely not saying that trying to advance expansion beyond our solar system is an efficient way to reduce extinction risk.
Is eventually expanding beyond our solar system necessary for achieving a long period with very low extinction risk?
As part of the discussion of “Effective size of the long-term future”, Ajeya and Rob discussed the barriers to and likelihood of various forms of space colonisation. I found this quite interesting.
During that section, I got the impression that Ajeya was implicitly thinking that a stable, low-extinction-risk future would require some kind of expansion beyond our solar system. (Though I don’t think she said that explicitly, so maybe I’m making a faulty inference. Perhaps what she actually had in mind was just that such expansion could be one way to get a stable, low-extinction-risk future, such that the likelihood of such expansion was one important question in determining whether we can get such a future, and a good question to start with.)
If she does indeed think that, that seems a bit surprising to me. I haven’t really thought about this before, but I think I’d guess that we could have a stable, low-extinction-risk future—for, let’s says, hundreds of millions of years—without expanding beyond our solar system. Such expansion could of course help[1], both because it creates “backups” and because there are certain astronomical extinction events that would by default happen eventually to Earth/our solar system. But it seems to me plausible that the right kind of improved technologies and institutions would allow us to reduce extinction risks to negligible levels just on Earth for hundreds of millions of years.
But I’ve never really directly thought about this question before, so I could definitely be wrong. If anyone happens to have thoughts on this, I’d be interested to hear them.
[1] I’m not saying it’d definitely help—there are ways it could be net negative. And I’m definitely not saying that trying to advance expansion beyond our solar system is an efficient way to reduce extinction risk.