Not sure we need to classify extinction as human descendants dying, or even make extinction a binary.
I think this is worth looking into. My first thoughts, not really meant to establish any proposition:
You can kind of plug this into the models above, and just treat reference to human-descendants as Earth-originating life. Obviously you’ll lose some fidelity, and the time-insensitivity problem would start to look more of a concern
In particular, on the timescales on which new intelligent non-mammalian species would emerge (I’m imagining 10-100 million years if most mammals go extinct), we might actually start losing significant expected value from the delay
The timescale doesn’t actually seem enough for fossil fuels to replenish, so if that turns out to be the major problem facing our descendants, a new species probably wouldn’t fare any better
So for it to be a major factor, you’d probably have to believe both that whatever stopped humans from becoming interstellar was a relatively sudden extinction event rather than a drawn out failure to get the requisite technology, and that whatever killed us left a liveable planet behind
we can try to genetically modify the earth’s habitats
This feels like it would be a very expensive project and very sensitive to natural selection un-modifying itself unless those traits would have been selected for anyway!
However, humans can invent renewable resources
If I understand you right, you’re imagining human resources generally leading to efficiency gains in a virtuous circle? If so, I would say I agree that’s plausible from our current state in which we’re lucky enough to have plenty of energy spare to devote to such work (though maybe even now it [could be tough](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wXzc75txE5hbHqYug/the-great-energy-descent-short-version-an-important-thing-ea)) - but the worse your starting technology, the higher a proportion of your population need to work in agriculture and other survival-necessary roles, and so the harder it becomes to do the relevant research.
what if we figure out how to create phosphorus
Phosphorus is an atom, so not something we can create or destroy (at least without very advanced technology). The problem is its availability—how much energy it costs to extract in a useable form. At the moment, we’re extracting the majority of what we use from high-density rocks, which will run out, and we’re flushing most of that into lakes and oceans where, from what I understand (though I’ve found it hard to find work on this), it’s basically impossible to reclaim even with modern technology. So future civilisations will have less energy with which to extract it, and lower energy efficiency of the extraction process.
or a new fertilizer that we can make
What makes phosphorus useful both in growing plants and in us eating those plants is it’s a major component of human chemistry. In this sense, you can’t replace it (at least, not without dramatically altering human chemistry). Less phosphorus basically = fewer humans.
If we leave sufficient energy production for the next civilization and a blueprint for spaceships, perhaps they can liftoff before an inevitable military buildup gets especially perilous.
If you mean actually building spare energy technology for them, in a sense that’s what all our energy technology is—we put it in the places where it’s most useful to current humans, who are living there because they’re the most habitable places. But windmills, solar panels, nuclear reactors etc need constant maintenance. Within a couple of generations they’d probably all have stopped functioning at a useful level. So what you need to leave future generations is knowledge of how to rebuild them, which is both trivial in the sense that it’s what we’re doing by scattering technology around the world for them to reverse engineer and extremely hard in the sense that leaving anything more robust requires a lot of extra work both to engineer it well enough and to protect it from people who might destroy it before understanding (or caring about) its value.
I can think of a few organisations working on this—I think it’s a big part of Allfed’s mission, there’s the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on a Norwegian Island, and in some sense knowledge preservation is the main value of refuges and fallout shelters—but I haven’t looked into it closely, and I’d be surprised if there weren’t many others (I think it’s something Western governments have at least some contingency plans for).
It doesn’t seem realistic to let them develop the economy to settle other planets without getting any harmful tech, though. We don’t have good enough rocket technology to send much mass other planets yet, so the future civilisations would have to leapfrog our current capabilities without getting any time to develop eg biotech on the way. And Robert Zubrin, the main voice for Mars colonisation strategies before Elon Musk, thinks it would be almost impossible to set up a permanent Mars base without nuclear technology, so you’d need to develop nuclear energy without getting nuclear weaponry.
responding to this super late but two quick things.
But windmills, solar panels, nuclear reactors etc need constant maintenance. Within a couple of generations they’d probably all have stopped functioning at a useful level
Does anyone have incentives to make long-lasting renewable resources? Curious about what would happen if a significant portion of energy tech switched from trying to optimize efficiency to lifespan (my intuition here is that there isn’t much incentive to make long-lasting stuff). Seems like this could be low-hanging fruit and change the decay paradigm—of course, possible this has been extensively looked at and I’m out of my depth.
It doesn’t seem realistic to let them develop the economy to settle other planets without getting any harmful tech, though. We don’t have good enough rocket technology to send much mass other planets yet, so the future civilisations would have to leapfrog our current capabilities without getting any time to develop eg biotech on the way. And Robert Zubrin, the main voice for Mars colonisation strategies before Elon Musk, thinks it would be almost impossible to set up a permanent Mars base without nuclear technology, so you’d need to develop nuclear energy without getting nuclear weaponry.
I guess I wouldn’t see this as a binary. Can we set up a civilization that will get to space before creating nukes, via well-placed knowledge about spaceships that conveniently don’t include stuff about weapons? probably not, but it’s not a binary. We could in theory push in this direction to reduce the time of perils length or magnitude.
and regarding the phosphorus stuff, I’ve unfortunately exposed my knowledge of the hard sciences.
Thanks Charlie… there’s a lot to unpack here!
I think this is worth looking into. My first thoughts, not really meant to establish any proposition:
You can kind of plug this into the models above, and just treat reference to human-descendants as Earth-originating life. Obviously you’ll lose some fidelity, and the time-insensitivity problem would start to look more of a concern
In particular, on the timescales on which new intelligent non-mammalian species would emerge (I’m imagining 10-100 million years if most mammals go extinct), we might actually start losing significant expected value from the delay
The timescale doesn’t actually seem enough for fossil fuels to replenish, so if that turns out to be the major problem facing our descendants, a new species probably wouldn’t fare any better
So for it to be a major factor, you’d probably have to believe both that whatever stopped humans from becoming interstellar was a relatively sudden extinction event rather than a drawn out failure to get the requisite technology, and that whatever killed us left a liveable planet behind
This feels like it would be a very expensive project and very sensitive to natural selection un-modifying itself unless those traits would have been selected for anyway!
If I understand you right, you’re imagining human resources generally leading to efficiency gains in a virtuous circle? If so, I would say I agree that’s plausible from our current state in which we’re lucky enough to have plenty of energy spare to devote to such work (though maybe even now it [could be tough](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wXzc75txE5hbHqYug/the-great-energy-descent-short-version-an-important-thing-ea)) - but the worse your starting technology, the higher a proportion of your population need to work in agriculture and other survival-necessary roles, and so the harder it becomes to do the relevant research.
Phosphorus is an atom, so not something we can create or destroy (at least without very advanced technology). The problem is its availability—how much energy it costs to extract in a useable form. At the moment, we’re extracting the majority of what we use from high-density rocks, which will run out, and we’re flushing most of that into lakes and oceans where, from what I understand (though I’ve found it hard to find work on this), it’s basically impossible to reclaim even with modern technology. So future civilisations will have less energy with which to extract it, and lower energy efficiency of the extraction process.
What makes phosphorus useful both in growing plants and in us eating those plants is it’s a major component of human chemistry. In this sense, you can’t replace it (at least, not without dramatically altering human chemistry). Less phosphorus basically = fewer humans.
If you mean actually building spare energy technology for them, in a sense that’s what all our energy technology is—we put it in the places where it’s most useful to current humans, who are living there because they’re the most habitable places. But windmills, solar panels, nuclear reactors etc need constant maintenance. Within a couple of generations they’d probably all have stopped functioning at a useful level. So what you need to leave future generations is knowledge of how to rebuild them, which is both trivial in the sense that it’s what we’re doing by scattering technology around the world for them to reverse engineer and extremely hard in the sense that leaving anything more robust requires a lot of extra work both to engineer it well enough and to protect it from people who might destroy it before understanding (or caring about) its value.
I can think of a few organisations working on this—I think it’s a big part of Allfed’s mission, there’s the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on a Norwegian Island, and in some sense knowledge preservation is the main value of refuges and fallout shelters—but I haven’t looked into it closely, and I’d be surprised if there weren’t many others (I think it’s something Western governments have at least some contingency plans for).
It doesn’t seem realistic to let them develop the economy to settle other planets without getting any harmful tech, though. We don’t have good enough rocket technology to send much mass other planets yet, so the future civilisations would have to leapfrog our current capabilities without getting any time to develop eg biotech on the way. And Robert Zubrin, the main voice for Mars colonisation strategies before Elon Musk, thinks it would be almost impossible to set up a permanent Mars base without nuclear technology, so you’d need to develop nuclear energy without getting nuclear weaponry.
responding to this super late but two quick things.
Does anyone have incentives to make long-lasting renewable resources? Curious about what would happen if a significant portion of energy tech switched from trying to optimize efficiency to lifespan (my intuition here is that there isn’t much incentive to make long-lasting stuff). Seems like this could be low-hanging fruit and change the decay paradigm—of course, possible this has been extensively looked at and I’m out of my depth.
I guess I wouldn’t see this as a binary. Can we set up a civilization that will get to space before creating nukes, via well-placed knowledge about spaceships that conveniently don’t include stuff about weapons? probably not, but it’s not a binary. We could in theory push in this direction to reduce the time of perils length or magnitude.
and regarding the phosphorus stuff, I’ve unfortunately exposed my knowledge of the hard sciences.