P.P.S. Thinking about the last point. I can actually think of one reason why digital beings might raise some animals. If bringing about animals somehow is the best way to extract resources from some planets (like, eat and then decompose stuff), they digital people might still do it.
This seems pretty unlikely, as animals would presumably be useful thanks to some biological process, but planet/asteroid mining is a mechanical process.
The answers to this post are also relevant to the inputs of your analysis. Carl Shulman says (I am not quoting the full answer):
Wikipedia has a fine page on orders of magnitude for power. Solar energy received by Earth from the Sun is 1.740*10^17 W, vs 3.846*10^26W for total solar energy output, a difference of 2 billion times. Mars is further from the Sun and smaller, so receives almost another order of magnitude less solar flux.
Surfaces of planets are a miniscule portion of the habitable universe, whatever lives there won’t meaningfully directly affect aggregate population or welfare statistics of an established space civilization. The frame of the question is quantitatively much more extreme than treating the state of affairs in the tiny principality of Liechtenstein as of comparable importance to the state of affairs for the rest of the Earth.
Thomas Kwa says:
1. Assuming space colonization and terraforming get here before AI or other transformative technologies like whole brain emulation, it seems very unlikely that the terraformed planet will be “unmanaged wilderness”. First, the Earth is already over 35% of the land area of the inner planets, so it’s not like there will be a large amount of free space. Second, without the benefit of natural water and nutrient sources, not to mention hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to reach a stable equilibrium, wilderness will be necessarily managed to maintain ecosystem balances.
2. In the long run, planets are extremely inefficient as space colonies. It takes just a few years to disassemble Mercury into solar panels and habitats, creating thousands of times as much economic value as anything that could exist on the planet. Asteroids don’t even need to be lifted out of a gravity well to be turned into habitats. So economic incentives will be strongly against planets, making the question moot. (Unless we turn them into planet-sized computers or something, which would again be out of scope of this question.)
Hi Fai,
This seems pretty unlikely, as animals would presumably be useful thanks to some biological process, but planet/asteroid mining is a mechanical process.
The answers to this post are also relevant to the inputs of your analysis. Carl Shulman says (I am not quoting the full answer):
Thomas Kwa says: