tl;dr: The resources in our light cone will decrease even if we don’t make use of them. It’s quite plausible that even a few months of a massive, highly advanced civilization could have more moral worth than the total moral worth of the next 500 years of human civilization. So accelerating development by even a small amount, allowing an eventual advanced civilization to be slightly larger and last slightly longer, is still massively important relative to other non x-risk causes.
I discussed some quantitative estimates of this here, with a general argument for why it would be small in light of model uncertainty. Overall it seems at least a few orders of magnitude smaller than other issues that favor faster progress.
Another response to this is Nick Bostrom’s astronomical waste argument.
tl;dr: The resources in our light cone will decrease even if we don’t make use of them. It’s quite plausible that even a few months of a massive, highly advanced civilization could have more moral worth than the total moral worth of the next 500 years of human civilization. So accelerating development by even a small amount, allowing an eventual advanced civilization to be slightly larger and last slightly longer, is still massively important relative to other non x-risk causes.
I discussed some quantitative estimates of this here, with a general argument for why it would be small in light of model uncertainty. Overall it seems at least a few orders of magnitude smaller than other issues that favor faster progress.