I think the first dot point deserves fleshing out. I have done a very preliminary analysis of getting prepared with resilient foods for agricultural catastrophes such as nuclear winter, and it appears that this is a very cost-effective way of saving species. This is because if many people were starving, not only would they generally not care about preventing other species from going extinct due to the climate impacts, but they would likely actively eat many species to extinction. It would not take that much more work to turn this into an actual paper, and ALLFED would be happy to do it if someone wanted to fund it specifically (~$20,000). The model also has AGI safety, so we could look at the cost-effectiveness of that work of saving species. Naïvely, one might argue that preventing human extinction from a pandemic would be bad for biodiversity. However, the only hope of biodiversity continuing beyond about a billion years when the earth would naturally get too hot would be humans controlling the climate or relocating species. So overall, I would agree that work on existential risk is likely effectively helping biodiversity in the long term.
I think the first dot point deserves fleshing out. I have done a very preliminary analysis of getting prepared with resilient foods for agricultural catastrophes such as nuclear winter, and it appears that this is a very cost-effective way of saving species. This is because if many people were starving, not only would they generally not care about preventing other species from going extinct due to the climate impacts, but they would likely actively eat many species to extinction. It would not take that much more work to turn this into an actual paper, and ALLFED would be happy to do it if someone wanted to fund it specifically (~$20,000). The model also has AGI safety, so we could look at the cost-effectiveness of that work of saving species. Naïvely, one might argue that preventing human extinction from a pandemic would be bad for biodiversity. However, the only hope of biodiversity continuing beyond about a billion years when the earth would naturally get too hot would be humans controlling the climate or relocating species. So overall, I would agree that work on existential risk is likely effectively helping biodiversity in the long term.