I broadly agree with the arguments here. I also think space settlement has a robustness to its security that no other defence against GCRs does—it’s trivially harder to kill all of more people spread more widely than it is to kill of a handful on a single planet. Compare this to technologies designed to regulate a single atmosphere to protect against biorisk, AI safety mechanisms that operate on AGIs whose ultimate nature we still know very little of, global political institutions that could be subverted or overthrown, bunkers on a single planet, etc, all of which seem much less stable over more than a century or so.
It might be that AGI/vacuum decay/some other mechanism will always be lurking out there will the potential of destroying all life, and if so nothing will protect us—but if we’re expected value maximisers (which seems to me a more reasonable strategy than any alternative), we should be fairly optimistic about scenarios where it’s at least possible that we can stabilise civilisation.
If you haven’t seen it, you should check out Christopher Lankhof’s Security Among the Stars, which goes in depth on the case for space settlement.
You might also want to check out my recent project that lets you model the level of security afforded by becoming multiplanetary explicitly.
I broadly agree with the arguments here. I also think space settlement has a robustness to its security that no other defence against GCRs does—it’s trivially harder to kill all of more people spread more widely than it is to kill of a handful on a single planet. Compare this to technologies designed to regulate a single atmosphere to protect against biorisk, AI safety mechanisms that operate on AGIs whose ultimate nature we still know very little of, global political institutions that could be subverted or overthrown, bunkers on a single planet, etc, all of which seem much less stable over more than a century or so.
It might be that AGI/vacuum decay/some other mechanism will always be lurking out there will the potential of destroying all life, and if so nothing will protect us—but if we’re expected value maximisers (which seems to me a more reasonable strategy than any alternative), we should be fairly optimistic about scenarios where it’s at least possible that we can stabilise civilisation.
If you haven’t seen it, you should check out Christopher Lankhof’s Security Among the Stars, which goes in depth on the case for space settlement.
You might also want to check out my recent project that lets you model the level of security afforded by becoming multiplanetary explicitly.