All else equal, would you prefer to see marginal dollars invested in fundamental research in this area (e.g., legal scholarship on space property law from an EA perspective) or advocacy (building better institutions or more political support for improved space governance)? I kinda suspect we’re more limited by the latter currently.
Why is that? I don’t know much about the area, but my impression is that we currently don’t know what space governance would be good from an EA perspective, so we can’t advocate for any specific improvement. Advocating for more generic research into space-governance would probably be net-positive, but it seems a lot less leveraged than having EAs look into the area, since I expect longtermists to have different priorities and pay attention to different things (e.g. that laws should be robust to vastly improved technology, and that colonization of other solar systems matter more than asteroid mining despite being further away in time).
All else equal, would you prefer to see marginal dollars invested in fundamental research in this area (e.g., legal scholarship on space property law from an EA perspective) or advocacy (building better institutions or more political support for improved space governance)? I kinda suspect we’re more limited by the latter currently.
Why is that? I don’t know much about the area, but my impression is that we currently don’t know what space governance would be good from an EA perspective, so we can’t advocate for any specific improvement. Advocating for more generic research into space-governance would probably be net-positive, but it seems a lot less leveraged than having EAs look into the area, since I expect longtermists to have different priorities and pay attention to different things (e.g. that laws should be robust to vastly improved technology, and that colonization of other solar systems matter more than asteroid mining despite being further away in time).