you might want to read these, the short is that it’s not obvious that if we collapse the modern economy that we can actually get back to interstellar, because we will have way less non renewables (phosphorus, oil/coal) at our disposal next time (don’t totally agree, but worth considering).
Point 1, strong agree esp w/ we don’t know if per human (or human descendant) ev is positive or negative (relative to counterfactual, which could be nothing or aliens), wish this was more mainstream dogma here, not sure why longtermists think they can just not engage with this.
Point 3, again I’ll re route to my response to point 2. Covid (the virus) wasn’t even that bad in a sense and it was still catastrophic (for how much it affected society). Imagine something slightly worse than covid + a record heat wave that causes a massive refugee crisis or + a war. I’m not so confident this wouldn’t massively collapse the global economy, and then route back to the fruit picking, we might only get 1-3 tries to go interstellar, so collapsing the global economy prob not == death but would == reduced chance of becoming grabby, which is ~= death from POV of total utilitarian.
Re point 2,
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CxMusuX8E5hiTXEWX/fruit-picking-as-an-existential-risk
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Nc9fCzjBKYDaDJGiX/what-is-the-likelihood-that-civilizational-collapse-would-1
you might want to read these, the short is that it’s not obvious that if we collapse the modern economy that we can actually get back to interstellar, because we will have way less non renewables (phosphorus, oil/coal) at our disposal next time (don’t totally agree, but worth considering).
Point 1, strong agree esp w/ we don’t know if per human (or human descendant) ev is positive or negative (relative to counterfactual, which could be nothing or aliens), wish this was more mainstream dogma here, not sure why longtermists think they can just not engage with this.
Point 3, again I’ll re route to my response to point 2. Covid (the virus) wasn’t even that bad in a sense and it was still catastrophic (for how much it affected society). Imagine something slightly worse than covid + a record heat wave that causes a massive refugee crisis or + a war. I’m not so confident this wouldn’t massively collapse the global economy, and then route back to the fruit picking, we might only get 1-3 tries to go interstellar, so collapsing the global economy prob not == death but would == reduced chance of becoming grabby, which is ~= death from POV of total utilitarian.