Searching for life on Mars @ Imperial College London
Lead of the Space Generation Advisory Council, Cosmic Futures project.
Interested in: Space Governance, Great Power Conflict, Existential Risk, Cosmic threats, Academia, International policy
Chilling the f*** out is the path to utopia
Hello! I’m just here to introduce myself as I think I’m a bit of an unusual effective altruist. I am an astrobiologist and my research focuses on the search for life on Mars. Before discovering effective altruism I was always very interested in the long term future of life in the context of looming existential risks. I thought the best thing to do was to send life to other planets so that it would survive in a worst case scenario. But a masters degree later, I got into effective altruism and decided that this cause was a 10⁄10 on importance, 10⁄10 on neglectedness, and 1⁄10 on tractability.
So my focus has changed more recently as I progress through my PhD. I’m interested in the moral implications of astrobiology as it plays a really important role at the core of longtermism. There are a few moral implications that depend on astrobiology research:
Research conclusion: The universe and our Solar System are full of habitable celestial bodies. Moral implication: The number of potential future humans is huge in the long term future, so we ought to protect these people through research into existential risks.
Research conclusion: The universe seems to be empty of life. Moral Implication: Life on Earth is extremely valuable, so ensuring its survival should be the highest moral priority.
Research conclusion: Planets like Earth are extremely rare and far away. Moral implication: “there is no planet B”—we ought to protect our Earth for the next ~1000 years as there is no backup plan
I plan to investigate these ideas further and see where they lead me. I think that as I progress in my career, I can equip philosophy and outreach to help people understand the long term perspective and inspire action towards tackling existential risks. Great to meet you all!
This book is desperately needed. The scale and neglect of animal welfare put this cause area right up there for me.
I will be attending the talk in London! (and bringing along as many people as I can)
Very interesting post, I haven’t thought about animal welfare in Africa before. I guess the first thing I (and most others) think of when I imagine philanthropy in Africa is human poverty and disease. With this perspective in mind, I wonder how this impacts funding sources from the western world… Getting money out of the “animal welfare budget” for this will probably work! But getting money out of the “philanthropy in Africa” budget I imagine will be very challenging.