This is sort of a loose reply to your essay. (The things I say about “EA” are just my impressions of the movement as a whole.)
I think that EA has aesthetics, it’s just that the (probably not totally conscious) aesthetic value behind them is “lowkeyness” or “minimalism”. The Forum and logo seems simple and minimalistically warm, classy, and functional to me.
Your mention of Christianity focuses more on medieval-derived / Catholic elements. Those lean more “thick” and “nationalistic”. (“Nationalistic” like “building up a people group that has a deeper emotional identity and shared history”, maybe one which can motivate the strongest interpersonal and communitarian bonds). But there are other versions of Christianity, more modern / Protestant / Puritan / desert. Sometimes people are put off by the poor aesthetics of Protestant Christianity, but at some times and in some contexts, people prefer Protestantism over Catholicism, despite its relative aesthetic poverty. I think one set of things that Puritan (and to an extent Protestant), and desert Christianities have in common is self-discipline, work, and frugality. Self-discipline, work, and frugality seem to be a big part of being an EA, or at least in EA as it has been up to now. So maybe in that sense, EA (consciously or not) has exactly the aesthetic it should have.
I think aesthetic lack helps a movement be less “thick” and “nationalistic” and avoiding politics is an EA goal. (EA might like to affect politics, but avoid political identity at the same time.) If you have a “nice looking flag” you might “kill and die” for it. The more developed your identity, the more you feel like you have to engage in “wars” (at least flame wars) over it. I think EA is conflict-averse and wants to avoid politics (maybe it sometimes wants to change politics but not be politically committed? or change politics in the least “stereotypically political” way possible, least “politicized”?). EA favors normative uncertainty and being agnostic about what the good is. So EAs might not want to have more-developed aesthetics, if those aesthetics come with commitments.
I think the EA movement as it is is doing (more or less) the right thing aesthetically. But, the foundational ideas of EA (the things that change people’s lives so that they are altruistic in orientation and have a sense that there is work for them to do and that they have to do it “effectively”, or maybe that cause them to try to expand their moral circles) are ones that might ought to be exported to other cultures, perhaps to a secular culture that is the “thick” version of EA, or to existing more-”thick” cultures, like the various Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, etc. cultures. A “thick EA” might innovate aesthetically and create a unique (secular, I assume) utopian vision in addition to the numerous other aesthetic/futuristic visions that exist. But “thick EA” would be a different thing than the existing “thin EA”.
This isn’t a very direct response to your questions, but is relevant, and is a case for why there might be a risk of factory farming in the long-term future. (This doesn’t address the scenarios from your second question.) [Edit: it does have an attempt at answering your third question at the end.]
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It may be possible that if plant-based meat substitutes are cheap enough and taste like (smell like, have mouth feel of, etc.) animal-derived meat, then it won’t make economic sense to keep animals for that purpose.
That’s the hopeful take, and I’m guessing maybe a more mainstream take.
If life is always cheaper in the long-run for producing meat substitutes (the best genetic engineering can always produce life that can out-compete the best non-life lab techniques), would it have to be sentient life, or could it be some kind of bacteria or something like that? It doesn’t seem to me that sentience is helpful in making animal protein, and probably just imposes some cost.
(Another hopeful take.)
A less hopeful take: One advantage that life has over non-life, and where sentience might be an advantage, is that it can be let loose in an environment unsupervised and then rounded up for slaughter. So we could imagine “pioneers” on a lifeless planet letting loose some kind of future animal as part of terraforming, then rounding them up and slaughtering them. This is not the same as factory farming, but if the slaughtering process (or rounding-up process) is excessively painful, that is something to be concerned about.
My guess is that one obstacle to humans being kind to animals (or being generous in any other way) has to do with whether they are in “personal survival mode”. Utilitarian altruists might be in a “global survival mode” and care about X-risk. But, when times get hard for people, personally, they tend to become more of “personal survival mode” people. Maybe being a pioneer on a lifeless planet is a hard thing that can go wrong (for the pioneers), and the cultures that are formed by that founding experience will have a hard time being fully generous.
Global survival mode might be compatible with caring about animal welfare. But personal survival mode is probably more effective at solving personal problems than global survival mode (or there is a decent reason to think that it could be), even if global survival mode implies that you should care about your own well-being as part of the whole, because personal survival mode is more desperate and efficient, and so more focused and driven toward the outcome of personal survival. Maybe global survival mode is sufficient for human survival, but it would make sense that personal survival mode could outcompete it and seem attractive when times get hard.
Basically, we can imagine space colonization as a furtherance of our highest levels of civilization, all the colonists selected for their civilized values before being sent out, but maybe each colony would be somewhat fragile and isolated, and could restart at, or devolve to, a lower level of civilization, bringing back to life in it whatever less-civilized values we feel we have grown past. Maybe from that, factory farming could re-emerge.
If we can’t break the speed of light, it seems likely to me that space colonies (at least, if made of humans), will undergo their own cultural evolution and become somewhat estranged from us and each other (because it will be too hard to stay in touch), and that will risk the re-emergence of values we don’t like from human history.
How much of cultural evolution is more or less an automatic response to economic development, and how much is path-dependent? If there is path-dependency, we would want to seed each new space colony with colonists who 1) think globally (or maybe “cosmically” is a better term at this scale), with an expanded moral circle, or more important, a tendency to expand their moral circles; 2) are not intimidated by their own deaths; 3) maybe have other safeguards against personal survival mode; 4) but still are effective enough at surviving. And try to institutionalize those tendencies into an ongoing colonial culture. (So that they can survive, but without going into personal survival mode.) For references for that seeded culture, maybe we would look to past human civilizations which produced people who were more global than they had to be given their economic circumstances, or notably global even in a relatively “disestablished” (chaotic, undeveloped, dysfunctional, insecure) or stressed state or environment.
(That’s a guess at an answer to your third question.)