This post is important and I agree with almost everything it says, but I do want to nitpick one crucial sentence:
There may well come a day when humanity would tear apart a thousand suns in order to prevent a single untimely death.
I think it is unlikely that we should ever pay the price of a thousand suns to prevent one death, because tradeoffs will always exist. The same resources used to prevent that death could support trillions upon trillions of sentient beings at utopic living standards for billions of years, either biologically or in simulation. The only circumstances where I think such a decision would be acceptable are things like
The âpersonâ weâre trying to save is actually a single astronomically vast hivemind/âAI/âetc that runs on a star-sized computer and is worth that many resources.
Our moral views at the time dictate that preventing one death now is at least fifteen orders of magnitude worse than extending another beingâs life by a billion years.
The action is symbolic, like how in The Martian billions of dollars were spent to save Mark Watney, rather than driven by cause prioritization.
Otherwise, we are always in triage and always will be, and while prices may fluctuate, we will never be rich enough to get everything we want.
This post is important and I agree with almost everything it says, but I do want to nitpick one crucial sentence:
I think it is unlikely that we should ever pay the price of a thousand suns to prevent one death, because tradeoffs will always exist. The same resources used to prevent that death could support trillions upon trillions of sentient beings at utopic living standards for billions of years, either biologically or in simulation. The only circumstances where I think such a decision would be acceptable are things like
The âpersonâ weâre trying to save is actually a single astronomically vast hivemind/âAI/âetc that runs on a star-sized computer and is worth that many resources.
Our moral views at the time dictate that preventing one death now is at least fifteen orders of magnitude worse than extending another beingâs life by a billion years.
The action is symbolic, like how in The Martian billions of dollars were spent to save Mark Watney, rather than driven by cause prioritization.
Otherwise, we are always in triage and always will be, and while prices may fluctuate, we will never be rich enough to get everything we want.