Yes but going to another planet is so useless to known x-risks that it doesn’t even work as a heuristic. Allocating government funding towards any other area would be just as good along general civilization-robustness lines.
It’s bad if evaluated in the reference class of “things that work for known x-risks”. But heuristics should be used from various levels of abstractions. It looks great on robustness, resilience, redundancy grounds—i.e. in the reference class of “things that stop things from dying”. Or if you look at all of human civilization in the reference class of species, or in the reference class of civilizations.
When not looking at specific risks, I still don’t see how it works well in generic robustness/resiliency/redundancy grounds compared to other things. Better healthcare, more education, less military conflict… tons of things seem to be equally good if not better along those lines, when it comes to improving the overall strength of the human race.
They may be good for improving the overall strength of the human race but to say that improves the robustness and resiliency is a non sequitur.
The idea (see e.g. here, here just to take my top two google results) is to work on modularity, back-ups, and decentralized, adaptivity, et cetera. Things like healthcare and education are centralized and don’t adapt.
I know you said “I don’t see how...” but in order to see how, probably the best thing is to read around the topic, and likewise for other puzzled readers.
These are sufficiently generic criteria that all kinds of systems can improve them. Healthcare, for instance: build more advanced healthcare centers in more areas of the world. This will give any segment of the population more redundancy and resiliency when performing healthcare related functions. Same goes with education: provide more educational programs so that they are redundant and resilient to anything that happens to other educational programs and provide varied methods of education. If you take an old-fashioned geopolitical look at the world then sure it seems like being on another planet makes you really robust, but if we’re protecting against Unknown Unknowns then you can’t assume that far-away-and-in-space is a more valuable direction to go in, out of all the other directions that you can go for improving resilience and redundancy.
Making healthcare centers more advanced would prima facie reduce the resiliency of healthcare systems by making them more complex and brittle. One would have to argue for more specific changes.
You don’t need to resort to a geopolitical stance to want to be on another planet. Physical separation and duplication is useful for redundancy of basically everything. Any reasonable reference class makes this look good.
For the last two layers of nested comments you have not actually addressed my arguments, which can be seen if you look carefully over them, nor have you given any impression of really engaging seriously with the issue, so this is my final comment for the thread.
Making healthcare centers more advanced would prima facie reduce the resiliency of healthcare systems by making them more complex and brittle.”
I said to build more healthcare centers. The more healthcare centers you have, the more redundancy you have. If you add very advanced healthcare centers or very basic ones without removing existing ones, then you have the option of providing more and different types of healthcare. This provides adaptiveness and redundancy in the form of different types of healthcare provision. If you add more healthcare professionals, you are achieving redundancy and adaptiveness by adding new talent and new ways of thinking to the field. And so on.
The whole redundancy-adaptiveness-etc stance is perfectly useful when you have some idea of what the risk actually is. If you really want to protect against “unknown unknowns” then you have no reason to think that the problem with humanity is going to be that we’re all on the same planet, as opposed to the problem being that we don’t have enough hospitals or didn’t learn how to cure cancer or something of the sort.
You don’t need to resort to a geopolitical stance to want to be on another planet. Physical separation and duplication is useful for redundancy of basically everything.
A colony on another planet is not some sort of parallel civilization that can support and replace the critical functions of the Earth-based one like an electric power generator. You can’t use facilities and resources on Mars or the Moon to prop up a failing system on Earth and vice versa without extremely high costs and time delays. The combined Earth + space colony civilization within the current technological horizon isn’t an integrated, resilient, adaptive system where strengths of one area can rapidly support the other. Even if the extraterrestrial colony were self-sustaining, there would essentially be two independent systems with their own possible failure modes, which is worse than systems which can flexibly support each other.
Physical separation can be taken in a bunch of different ways. Maybe the next x-risk will be best mitigated by minimizing the number of people who are within a five meter radius of another. Maybe the next x-risk will be best mitigated by increasing the number of people who are more than 25 meters beneath the surface of the planet. Maybe it will be mitigated by evening the distribution of people across the planet, to be less focused in cities and more distributed across the countryside or oceans.
In any case, protecting Earth’s civilization has a much higher payoff than protecting a small civilization on an extraterrestrial body.
For the last two layers of nested comments you have not actually addressed my arguments, which can be seen if you look carefully over them, nor have you given any impression of really engaging seriously with the issue, so this is my final comment for the thread.
Hmm, well that’s puzzling to me, because it looks like I answered them pretty directly.
Yes but going to another planet is so useless to known x-risks that it doesn’t even work as a heuristic. Allocating government funding towards any other area would be just as good along general civilization-robustness lines.
It’s bad if evaluated in the reference class of “things that work for known x-risks”. But heuristics should be used from various levels of abstractions. It looks great on robustness, resilience, redundancy grounds—i.e. in the reference class of “things that stop things from dying”. Or if you look at all of human civilization in the reference class of species, or in the reference class of civilizations.
When not looking at specific risks, I still don’t see how it works well in generic robustness/resiliency/redundancy grounds compared to other things. Better healthcare, more education, less military conflict… tons of things seem to be equally good if not better along those lines, when it comes to improving the overall strength of the human race.
They may be good for improving the overall strength of the human race but to say that improves the robustness and resiliency is a non sequitur.
The idea (see e.g. here, here just to take my top two google results) is to work on modularity, back-ups, and decentralized, adaptivity, et cetera. Things like healthcare and education are centralized and don’t adapt.
I know you said “I don’t see how...” but in order to see how, probably the best thing is to read around the topic, and likewise for other puzzled readers.
These are sufficiently generic criteria that all kinds of systems can improve them. Healthcare, for instance: build more advanced healthcare centers in more areas of the world. This will give any segment of the population more redundancy and resiliency when performing healthcare related functions. Same goes with education: provide more educational programs so that they are redundant and resilient to anything that happens to other educational programs and provide varied methods of education. If you take an old-fashioned geopolitical look at the world then sure it seems like being on another planet makes you really robust, but if we’re protecting against Unknown Unknowns then you can’t assume that far-away-and-in-space is a more valuable direction to go in, out of all the other directions that you can go for improving resilience and redundancy.
Making healthcare centers more advanced would prima facie reduce the resiliency of healthcare systems by making them more complex and brittle. One would have to argue for more specific changes.
You don’t need to resort to a geopolitical stance to want to be on another planet. Physical separation and duplication is useful for redundancy of basically everything. Any reasonable reference class makes this look good.
For the last two layers of nested comments you have not actually addressed my arguments, which can be seen if you look carefully over them, nor have you given any impression of really engaging seriously with the issue, so this is my final comment for the thread.
I said to build more healthcare centers. The more healthcare centers you have, the more redundancy you have. If you add very advanced healthcare centers or very basic ones without removing existing ones, then you have the option of providing more and different types of healthcare. This provides adaptiveness and redundancy in the form of different types of healthcare provision. If you add more healthcare professionals, you are achieving redundancy and adaptiveness by adding new talent and new ways of thinking to the field. And so on.
The whole redundancy-adaptiveness-etc stance is perfectly useful when you have some idea of what the risk actually is. If you really want to protect against “unknown unknowns” then you have no reason to think that the problem with humanity is going to be that we’re all on the same planet, as opposed to the problem being that we don’t have enough hospitals or didn’t learn how to cure cancer or something of the sort.
A colony on another planet is not some sort of parallel civilization that can support and replace the critical functions of the Earth-based one like an electric power generator. You can’t use facilities and resources on Mars or the Moon to prop up a failing system on Earth and vice versa without extremely high costs and time delays. The combined Earth + space colony civilization within the current technological horizon isn’t an integrated, resilient, adaptive system where strengths of one area can rapidly support the other. Even if the extraterrestrial colony were self-sustaining, there would essentially be two independent systems with their own possible failure modes, which is worse than systems which can flexibly support each other.
Physical separation can be taken in a bunch of different ways. Maybe the next x-risk will be best mitigated by minimizing the number of people who are within a five meter radius of another. Maybe the next x-risk will be best mitigated by increasing the number of people who are more than 25 meters beneath the surface of the planet. Maybe it will be mitigated by evening the distribution of people across the planet, to be less focused in cities and more distributed across the countryside or oceans.
In any case, protecting Earth’s civilization has a much higher payoff than protecting a small civilization on an extraterrestrial body.
Hmm, well that’s puzzling to me, because it looks like I answered them pretty directly.