If I did believe animals were going to be brought on space settlement, I would think the best wild-animal-focussed project would be to prevent that from happening, by figuring out what could motivate people to do so,
One way this could happen is if the deep ecologists or people who care about life-in-general “win”, and for some reason have an extremely strong preference for spreading biological life to the stars without regard to sentient suffering.
I’m pretty optimistic this won’t happen however. I think by default we should expect that the future (if we don’t die out), will be predominantly composed of humans and our (digital) descendants, rather than things that look like wild animals today.
Another thing that the analysis leaves out is that even aside from space colonization, biological evolved life is likely to be an extremely inefficient method of converting energy to positive (or negative!) experiences.
One way this could happen is if the deep ecologists or people who care about life-in-general “win”, and for some reason have an extremely strong preference for spreading biological life to the stars without regard to sentient suffering.
I’m pretty optimistic this won’t happen however. I think by default we should expect that the future (if we don’t die out), will be predominantly composed of humans and our (digital) descendants, rather than things that look like wild animals today.
Another thing that the analysis leaves out is that even aside from space colonization, biological evolved life is likely to be an extremely inefficient method of converting energy to positive (or negative!) experiences.