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whpearson comments on All hail the Lisbon Treaty! Or is that "hate"? Or just "huh"? - Less Wrong
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If you think the science will allow the human race to fend off extinction for longer than if we had stayed at the pre-industrial level it might be justified. It is not a pleasent justification to make.
The idea of science fending off extinction requires some serious justification. At pre-industrial technology levels, none of today's biggest extinction threats would exist (high-tech war, singularity-class technology, climate change, etc.)
Think longer term things such as near super novas, large meteors etc. I rate meteors as a bigger extinction threat than climate change. Even with runaway climate change it still is unlikely to make us extinct .
Think of science as a gamble that can pay off big, if we manage to get off this rock, but might just backfire.
All of this implies you assign significant utility to the indefinite survival of humanity regardless of your personal survival, the survival of any particular persons you know, or your personal legacy and influence on that future.
I assign little utility to this. For instance I'd choose a 50% chance of extinction of humanity, with guaranteed survival of myself and friends in the event humanity survives; over a 20% chance of extinction, with another 50% chance of my death even if humanity survives (which sums to a total 60% chance of my death).
Do you have different preferences here and does that relate to our differences on the war question?
I assign a higher value to the survival of humanity than to my own personal survival/survival of my legacy. So yes we have a value disconnect.
If you value personal survival you should also value science fairly highly, as the longevity research program is a product of that as well, not to mention the basic useful health care.
Anyway we are getting fairly far off-topic. If you want to follow this further we should probably go to the open thread.
Continued here.
Note that we've never needed high tech to extinguish other species.
There are species we probably wouldn't have been able to make extinct without high tech. But we've almost never needed to deliberately make another species extinct at all, so we weren't trying all that hard.
We did do a pretty thorough job on the smallpox virus...
Yes, that's one of the very few exceptions.