Space settlers will favour meat alternatives?
Thesis: The psychological profile of the first space settlers will be unusually pro-technology, which will correlate with liking meat alternatives, which will reduce the number of farmed animals in the far future. Great news if true!
Predicting the future is hard, and understanding value systems is also hard, so we may expect predicting the future of values to be even harder. But this isn’t necessarily the case—as ably demonstrated here we can sometimes make (speculative, but still informative) predictions about future values and their implications.
The default assumption of many futurists is that by the time we are settling space humanity will be sufficiently technologically advanced that the idea of farming animals for meat will seem horribly antiquated and thoroughly unnecessary (example).[1] Indeed, in expectation, most of the value of the future will probably consist of non-biological beings (digital people), who would presumably have no use for physical animal products. However, past prominent posts by Fai and AbrahamRowe have argued that there will in expectation be many animals in the future, so I wrote this in response to that vein of reasoning (though this isn’t meant as a rebuttal to those posts, just an additional consideration).
Here is my basic argument:
Most moral value is (in expectation) in the far future.
Most moral value in the future will be in space.
The early adopters of space settlement will have an outsized influence on the future of space settlement.
The early adopters will have unusually pro-technology values relative to the rest of earth-bound humanity.
People with pro-technology values are more open to non-traditional food sources (such as plant-based and cultured meat, and nutritionally complete powders/drinks) than the average human.
C1. Space settlements will favour non-animal foods relatively more than most humans.
C2. There will be fewer farmed animals in the future than we would naively expect by extrapolating forward current human preferences and actions.
Premises 1 and 2 are optional, and just set the scene for why we should care about this. They seem especially plausible under something like total utilitarianism, but I think other moral views could also endorse them.
Premise 3 isn’t guaranteed, but seems likely to me given the path dependencies created by institutions and cultures being sticky. For instance, the fact that some early environmentalists campaigned against nuclear power generation has plausibly continued to influence green politics to the present day.[2] Maybe some historians/anthropologists could comment more on to what extent ‘founder effects’ generally matter.[3] An important counter-point is that the bulk of later space settlement may be quite causally and culturally distinct from early settlement; for instance, there could be some small human colonies on the moon or Mars in several decades, but large-scale space colonisation happens later, with AIs and digital people. Overall my argument mainly only works if earth-originating civilisation doesn’t become digital for some (strange) reason, I think.
Premise 4 seems clearly directionally correct, but I am unsure how large this effect will be. My guess is that it will be relatively large, as initial space settlements will probably be quite a small fraction of humanity, and so the most technophilic people will self-select in. There could also be some effect whereby more educated people are more likely to pass any entry tests required for the space settlement program, and are more pro-tech on average.
Premise 5 again seems clearly directionally correct as intuitively it is less likely that the people who are against the ‘artificial’ and ‘unnatural’ ‘fake meat’ products would like the (far more artificial and unnatural) idea of space settlement. But again I am unsure how strong this correlation would be, and we probably would need survey data to find out.[4] A counter-point is that higher openness-to-experience, pro-tech people may also be more amenable to insects as a food source, and quite possibly insects would be the animals most suited to space farming due to their high conversion efficiency. I don’t know how big an effect this is, I am guessing not big enough to flip the sign.
Conclusion 1 follows straightforwardly. Another, somewhat separate, argument for this conclusion is that resource limitations will likely be especially severe in early space settlements, which would cause food production to not involve (inefficient) animals. Then, even if later space settlements become very wealthy and resources are less constraining, early food-production practices may persist because of inertia, and farming animals wouldn’t re-emerge.
Conclusion 2 is somewhat vague. I would be interested in suggested crisper/more quantitative versions of this argument and conclusion; for now I just wanted to share the high-level approach. If we care mainly about the very long-run future, then the early culture of space settlements doesn’t matter, so arguably the pro-meat-alternative attitudes will wash out in the long run. I think the main way early attitudes could matter in the distant future is if humanity quickly sends off many separate colonists to different galaxies. In that case, ensuring the culture of the parent solar-system civilisation is great seems quite valuable, as values change after the colonists have left matters less.[5]
I think a similar argument could also work about the number of wild animals in the future, as the technophilic space settlers will probably also place less emphasis on wilderness than other humans. I am less confident about this though; a counter-story would be that more educated people are more fond of hiking and other nature-based activities than average, so might actually care more about creating wild ecosystems in space. Psychology and sociology surveys seem to be the main way to get clarity on this.
If I am roughly right this seems like (incredibly) good news! But therefore there is even more danger than usual of motivated reasoning towards a happier conclusion.
Thanks to @bruce , Clare, Fin, Hanna, @jojo_lee , Laura, Nathan, Sarah, and Tom for lots of great comments on a draft!
^ Resource constraints could be especially binding in (early) space settlements, making efficiency of food production systems very important.
^ Of course it is hard to guess, but I can imagine alternate worlds where environmentalists were very pro-nuclear from the outset, given the low land/material footprint of fission.
^ A concrete bad way in which space culture could evolve is if animal-meat is seen as a status-symbol because of how resource-intensive and expensive it is to produce in space. However, at least this would mean there is far less animal-meat consumed than if meat is a cheap staple food.
^ Admittedly I have also been exposed to a very biased sample of a lot of EAs who like their huel and plant-based meat.
^ Early values about animals could matter for later norms about digital minds, or aliens, or acausal trade or whatever other high-stakes moral issues arise. Maybe the sorts of people who eat animal-meat will be systematically worse at other moral reasoning too?
Nice post! Copying the comment I left on the draft (edited for clarity) —
I agree with both conclusions, but I don’t think your argument is the strongest reason to buy those conclusions.
My picture of how large-scale space expansion goes involves probes (not humans) being sent out after AGI. Then a reasonable default might be that the plans and values embedded in humanity’s first large-scale space settlement initiatives are set by the plans and values of some very large and technologically advanced political faction at the time (capable of launching such a significant initiative by force or unanimity), rather than a smaller number of humans who were early to settle some part of the Solar System.
I then picture most human-originating life to not resemble biological humans (more like digital people). In this case it’s very hard to imagine how farming animals would make any sense.
Even with shorter-term and human-led space settlement, like bases on the Moon and Mars, I expect it to make very little logistical sense to farm animals (regardless of the psychological profile of whoever is doing the settlement). The first settlements will be water and space and especially labour constrained, and raising animals is going to look needlessly painful and inefficient without the big economies of scale of factory farms.
That said, if animals are farmed in early settlements, then note that smaller animals tend to be the most efficient at converting feed into human-palatable calories (and also the most space-efficient). For that reason some people suggest insect farming (e.g. crickets, mealworms), which does seem much more likely than livestock or poultry! But another option is bioreactors of the kind being developed on Earth. In theory they could become more efficient than animals and would then make most practical sense (since the capital cost to build the reactor isn’t going to matter; taking anything into space is already crazy expensive). Also a lot of food will probably be imported as payload early on; unsure if that’s relevant.
So I think I’m saying the cultural attitudes of early space settlers is probably less important than the practical mechanisms by which most of space is eventually settled. Especially if most future people are not biological humans, which kind of moots the question.
I do think it’s valuable and somewhat relieving to point out that animal farming could plausibly remain an Earth-only problem!
Thanks, makes sense, I think I roughly agree with these takes. I think I wanted to write about this version of the argument in particular as I think the resource-based and technological obsoletion of farming animals arguments have mostly already been made. Unsurprising perhaps if the better arguments are already made first and the secondary arguments are left!
Executive summary: Early space settlers will likely have pro-technology values that correlate with preferring meat alternatives, potentially reducing farmed animals in the far future.
Key points:
Early space settlers will disproportionately influence future space settlement culture.
These settlers will likely have unusually pro-technology values compared to Earth-bound humans.
Pro-technology values correlate with openness to non-traditional food sources like plant-based and cultured meat.
Resource constraints in early space settlements may further discourage animal farming.
This could lead to fewer farmed animals in the future than expected based on current human preferences.
Similar reasoning may apply to wild animals, though with less certainty.
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