Thanks! Super-interesting. Please do PM me your contact details.
I’ll try to type up a proper reply within a couple of hours. I’m currently being chased out of my house by the 90+-degree heat in England. Not good with no A/C. I think I’ll be able to add something to the discussion once I’ve gone somewhere cool and downed a pint of ice cream.
Edit: Okay, semi-proper response below.
The presentational suggestions are extremely helpful. Many thanks!
1. How far could we go?: I’m really curious to hear more about how quickly you think we might settle the galaxy, and how we could go about doing that. I’ve heard similar views to yours from some people at GPI, for example Tomi Francis.
I guess I tend to think that settling $2^n$ planets in $n$ centuries might be a bit fast, especially in the short-term. This would put us at just over a million planets in twenty centuries. And while that might not sound like a lot, let’s remember that the closest nearby star (Alpha Centauri) is more than four light years away. So if we’re going to make it to even a few dozen planets in 2,000 years, we need to travel several light years, and drop enough people and supplies to make the settlement viable and worthwhile. And to make it to a million planets, we’d have to rinse and repeat many times.
I certainly wouldn’t want to rule out that possibility in principle. And I have to admit that as a philosopher, I’m a bit under-qualified to pronounce on the future of space travel. But do you have some thoughts about how we might get this far in the near future?
2. Short-term: This is really worth thinking more about. Thanks! I think you must be right to think that settling space would help a great deal with global catastrophic risks, which might be quite bad even if they fall short of existential risks. So for example, there’s a pretty good chance that COVID would not have made it to Mars.
I also tend to agree with you that people are sometimes a bit pessimistic about the possibility of recovery from global catastrophe. That’s one of the reasons I would not consider myself a Pessimist about existential risk in the sense set out in this post.
I think it might be a bit harder to make the case that settling Mars would lead to a substantial drop in existential risk (rather than catastrophic risk), if you have the Pessimist’s view that most existential risk comes from things in the red box. So for example, the Pessimist isn’t thinking about pandemics that start infecting and killing people in a visible manner over a course of weeks or months. Those wouldn’t kill everybody, since even people on earth would have advanced warning. She’s thinking about a bit more science-y scenarios like “someone creates a sleeper virus and spreads that virus to every living person on earth, and only then activates the virus”. I can’t say I place quite as much probability on such scenarios. But if we’re really considering the possibility of infecting every man, woman and child on earth with a deadly sleeper virus, how sure are we that they couldn’t send a few folks with the virus to Mars? It’s not a sure bet that they would manage that, but lots of things in this sleeper virus story fall a fair bit short of sure bets.
Looking forward to chatting more about this in person!
I had another thought on why you might be underrating space settlement. The threat of an engineered pandemic, nuclear war etc constitute a certain type of constantish risk per year per colony. So we can agree that colonies reduce risk on nuclear war, and disagree for now on biorisk.
AIs seem like a separate class of one-off risk. At some point, we’ll create (or become) a superhuman AI, and at that point it will either wipe us out or not. If so, that I agree that even multiple colonies in the solar system, and perhaps even in other stars wouldn’t afford much protection—though they might afford some. But if not, it becomes much harder to envisage another AI coming along and doing what the first one didn’t, since now we presumably have an intelligence that can match it (and had a head start).
On this view, AI has its own built-in time-of-perilsness, and if in the scenario where it doesn’t wipe us all out it doesn’t also permanently fix all our problems, space colonisation now reduces the risk of the remaining threats by a much larger proportion.
Re 1, we needn’t be talking about planets. In principle, any decently sized rocky body in the asteroid belt can be a colony, or you could just build O’Neill cylinders. They might not be long-term sustainable without importing resources, but doing so wouldn’t be a problem in a lot of catastrophic scenarios, eg where some major shock destroyed civilisation on planets and left behind most of the minerals. In this scenario ‘self-sustainability’ is more like a scale than a distinct property, and having more sustainable-ish colonies seems like it would still dramatically increase resilience.
At some point you’ll still hit a physical limit of matter in the system, so such a growth rate wouldn’t last that long, but for this discussion it wouldn’t need to. Even just having colonies on the rocky planets and major moons would reduce the probability of any event that didn’t intentionally target all outposts getting them all would be much closer to zero. At 2^n growth rate (which actually seems very conservative to me in the absence of major catastrophes—Earth alone seems like it could hit that growth rate for a few centuries) I feel like you’d have reduced the risk of non-targeted catastrophes to effectively zero by the time you had maybe 10 colonies?
Re 2, I think we’re disagreeing where you say we’re agreeing :P—I think the EA movement probably overestimates the probability of ‘recovery’ from global catastrophe, esp where ‘recovery’ really means ‘get all the way to the glorious Virgo supercluster future’. If I’m right then they’re effectively existential risks with a 0.1 multiplier, or whatever you think the probability of non-recovery is.
In scenarios such as the sleeper virus, it seems like more colonies would still provide resilience. Presumably if it’s possible to create such a virus it’s possible to detect and neutralise it before its activation, and the probability of doing so is some function of time—which more colonies would give you more of, if you couldn’t activate it til it had infected everyone. I feel like this principle would generalise to almost any technological threat that was in principle reversible.
Thanks! Super-interesting. Please do PM me your contact details.
I’ll try to type up a proper reply within a couple of hours. I’m currently being chased out of my house by the 90+-degree heat in England. Not good with no A/C. I think I’ll be able to add something to the discussion once I’ve gone somewhere cool and downed a pint of ice cream.
Edit: Okay, semi-proper response below.
The presentational suggestions are extremely helpful. Many thanks!
1. How far could we go?: I’m really curious to hear more about how quickly you think we might settle the galaxy, and how we could go about doing that. I’ve heard similar views to yours from some people at GPI, for example Tomi Francis.
I guess I tend to think that settling $2^n$ planets in $n$ centuries might be a bit fast, especially in the short-term. This would put us at just over a million planets in twenty centuries. And while that might not sound like a lot, let’s remember that the closest nearby star (Alpha Centauri) is more than four light years away. So if we’re going to make it to even a few dozen planets in 2,000 years, we need to travel several light years, and drop enough people and supplies to make the settlement viable and worthwhile. And to make it to a million planets, we’d have to rinse and repeat many times.
I certainly wouldn’t want to rule out that possibility in principle. And I have to admit that as a philosopher, I’m a bit under-qualified to pronounce on the future of space travel. But do you have some thoughts about how we might get this far in the near future?
2. Short-term: This is really worth thinking more about. Thanks! I think you must be right to think that settling space would help a great deal with global catastrophic risks, which might be quite bad even if they fall short of existential risks. So for example, there’s a pretty good chance that COVID would not have made it to Mars.
I also tend to agree with you that people are sometimes a bit pessimistic about the possibility of recovery from global catastrophe. That’s one of the reasons I would not consider myself a Pessimist about existential risk in the sense set out in this post.
I think it might be a bit harder to make the case that settling Mars would lead to a substantial drop in existential risk (rather than catastrophic risk), if you have the Pessimist’s view that most existential risk comes from things in the red box. So for example, the Pessimist isn’t thinking about pandemics that start infecting and killing people in a visible manner over a course of weeks or months. Those wouldn’t kill everybody, since even people on earth would have advanced warning. She’s thinking about a bit more science-y scenarios like “someone creates a sleeper virus and spreads that virus to every living person on earth, and only then activates the virus”. I can’t say I place quite as much probability on such scenarios. But if we’re really considering the possibility of infecting every man, woman and child on earth with a deadly sleeper virus, how sure are we that they couldn’t send a few folks with the virus to Mars? It’s not a sure bet that they would manage that, but lots of things in this sleeper virus story fall a fair bit short of sure bets.
Looking forward to chatting more about this in person!
I had another thought on why you might be underrating space settlement. The threat of an engineered pandemic, nuclear war etc constitute a certain type of constantish risk per year per colony. So we can agree that colonies reduce risk on nuclear war, and disagree for now on biorisk.
AIs seem like a separate class of one-off risk. At some point, we’ll create (or become) a superhuman AI, and at that point it will either wipe us out or not. If so, that I agree that even multiple colonies in the solar system, and perhaps even in other stars wouldn’t afford much protection—though they might afford some. But if not, it becomes much harder to envisage another AI coming along and doing what the first one didn’t, since now we presumably have an intelligence that can match it (and had a head start).
On this view, AI has its own built-in time-of-perilsness, and if in the scenario where it doesn’t wipe us all out it doesn’t also permanently fix all our problems, space colonisation now reduces the risk of the remaining threats by a much larger proportion.
Hey :)
Re 1, we needn’t be talking about planets. In principle, any decently sized rocky body in the asteroid belt can be a colony, or you could just build O’Neill cylinders. They might not be long-term sustainable without importing resources, but doing so wouldn’t be a problem in a lot of catastrophic scenarios, eg where some major shock destroyed civilisation on planets and left behind most of the minerals. In this scenario ‘self-sustainability’ is more like a scale than a distinct property, and having more sustainable-ish colonies seems like it would still dramatically increase resilience.
At some point you’ll still hit a physical limit of matter in the system, so such a growth rate wouldn’t last that long, but for this discussion it wouldn’t need to. Even just having colonies on the rocky planets and major moons would reduce the probability of any event that didn’t intentionally target all outposts getting them all would be much closer to zero. At 2^n growth rate (which actually seems very conservative to me in the absence of major catastrophes—Earth alone seems like it could hit that growth rate for a few centuries) I feel like you’d have reduced the risk of non-targeted catastrophes to effectively zero by the time you had maybe 10 colonies?
Re 2, I think we’re disagreeing where you say we’re agreeing :P—I think the EA movement probably overestimates the probability of ‘recovery’ from global catastrophe, esp where ‘recovery’ really means ‘get all the way to the glorious Virgo supercluster future’. If I’m right then they’re effectively existential risks with a 0.1 multiplier, or whatever you think the probability of non-recovery is.
In scenarios such as the sleeper virus, it seems like more colonies would still provide resilience. Presumably if it’s possible to create such a virus it’s possible to detect and neutralise it before its activation, and the probability of doing so is some function of time—which more colonies would give you more of, if you couldn’t activate it til it had infected everyone. I feel like this principle would generalise to almost any technological threat that was in principle reversible.