Thanks for writing about this! I tend to believe looking into the longterm impacts of interventions typically classed as neartermist is valuable.
A few thoughts:
If the extinction risk from “natural” pandemics is low, and humanity learns a lot from them, they could decrease the risk from more severe pandemics.
I think more global warming might be good to mitigate the food shocks caused by abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios.
It is quite unclear whether global warming is good/bad for wild animals, whose welfare is likely much larger than that of farmed animal and humans.
Alternative proteins require less resources, so they will push towards decreasing the amount of slack in the agricultural system, and therefore decrease resilience to food shocks. This will arguably increase the risk from extinction due to nuclear war, which can cause severe food shocks via a nuclear winter.
The smaller the population of (farmed) animals, the less animal feed could be directed to humans to mitigate the food shocks caused by the lower temperature, light and humidity during abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios (ASRS), which can be a nuclear winter, volcanic winter, or impact winter[4].
Because producing calories from animals is much less efficient than from plants, decreasing the number of animals results in a smaller area of crops.
So the agricultural system would be less oversized (i.e. it would have a smaller safety margin), and scaling up food production to counter the lower yields during an ASRS would be harder.
To maximise calorie supply, farmed animals should stop being fed and quickly be culled after the onset of an ASRS. This would decrease the starvation of humans and farmed animals, but these would tend to experience more severe pain for a faster slaughtering rate.
As a side note, increasing food waste would also increase resilience against food shocks, as long as it can be promptly cut down. One can even argue humanity should increase (easily reducible) food waste instead of the population of farmed animals. However, I suspect the latter is more tractable.
My current overall take is that I do not know whether more alternative proteins is good/bad from a longtermist perspective. However, I would say it is a relevant topic to think about!
Hi Bruce,
Thanks for writing about this! I tend to believe looking into the longterm impacts of interventions typically classed as neartermist is valuable.
A few thoughts:
If the extinction risk from “natural” pandemics is low, and humanity learns a lot from them, they could decrease the risk from more severe pandemics.
I think more global warming might be good to mitigate the food shocks caused by abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios.
It is quite unclear whether global warming is good/bad for wild animals, whose welfare is likely much larger than that of farmed animal and humans.
Alternative proteins require less resources, so they will push towards decreasing the amount of slack in the agricultural system, and therefore decrease resilience to food shocks. This will arguably increase the risk from extinction due to nuclear war, which can cause severe food shocks via a nuclear winter.
Regarding this last point, I wrote that:
My current overall take is that I do not know whether more alternative proteins is good/bad from a longtermist perspective. However, I would say it is a relevant topic to think about!
I would also say we should beware surprising and suspicious convergence. For example, to cost-effectively decrease the risk of human extinction due to:
Food shocks, one could invest in resilient food solutions. Some of these are alternative proteins, like single-cell protein, but not all of them.
Engineered pandemics, one could invest in far-UVC and PPE.
Thanks so much for your comments, Vasco—I appreciate your engagement, and I find your comments fascinating.
Thanks, Bruce! I appreciate your open-mindedness too.