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gothgirl420666 comments on "Stupid" questions thread - Less Wrong
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Why is space colonization considered at all desirable?
Earth is currently the only known biosphere. More biospheres means that disasters that muck up one are less likely to muck up everything.
Less seriously, people like things that are cool.
EDIT: Seriously? My most-upvoted comment of all time? Really? This is as good as it gets?
1: It's awesome. It's desirable for the same reason fast cars, fun computer games, giant pyramids, and sex is.
2: It's an insurance policy against things that might wreck the earth but not other planets/solar systems.
3: Insofar as we can imagine there to be other alien races, understanding space colonization is extremely important either for trade or self defense.
4: It's possible different subsets of humanity can never happily coexist, in which case having arbitrarily large amounts of space to live in ensures more peace and stability.
In sci-fi maybe. I doubt people actually living in space (or on un-Earth-like planets) would concur, without some very extensive technological change.
New incompatible sub-subsets will just keep arising in new colonies - as has happened historically.
Eggs, basket, x-risk.
Would you rather have one person living a happy, fulfilled life, or two? Would you rather have seven billion people living with happy, fulfilled lives, or seven billion planets full of people living happy, fulfilled lives?
I am more interested in the variety of those happy, fulfilled lives than the number of them. Mere duplication has no value. The value I attach to any of these scenarios is not a function of just the set of utilities of the individuals living in them. The richer the technology, the more variety is possible. Look at the range of options available to a well-off person today, compared with 100 years ago, or 1000.
Oh, okay. Personally I lean much more towards average utilitarianism as opposed to total, but I haven't really thought through the issue that much. I was unaware that total utilitarianism was popular enough that it alone was sufficient for so many people to endorse space colonization.
But, now that I think about it, even if you wanted to add as many happy people to the universe as possible, couldn't you do it more efficiently with ems?
Even without total utilitarianism, increasing the population may be desirable as long as average quality of life isn't lowered. For instance, increasing the amount of R&D can make progress faster, which can benefit everyone. Of course one can also think of dangers and problems that scale with population size, so it's not a trivial question.
It would be more efficient with ems, but we can’t make ems yet. Technically we could already colonize space; it’s expensive, but still, it’s closer.
Think about why old-world people colonized the Americas (and everything else they could, anyway). The basic cause was space and resources. Of course, with current tech we can extract much more value and support a much larger population in Europe than we could at the time. But even if they anticipated that, it still wouldn’t have made sense to wait.
Either way, more territory means more matter and energy, which means safer and longer lives.
I don't subscribe to either average or total utilitarianism. I'm more of a fan of selfish utilitarianism. It would make me personally feel better about myself were I to move the universe from 1 person living a life worth celebrating to 2 people living such lives, so it's worth doing.
Ems are still limited by the amount of available matter. They may enable you to colonise non-Earthlike planets, but you still need to colonise.
In fact, pretty much everything possible is limited by available energy and matter.
Personally, I too tend toward 'utilitarianism's domain does not include number of people', but I think most people have a preference toward at least minor pop. growth.
Also, many people (including me) are skeptical about ems or emulation in general. Plus, you'd want to colonize universe to build more emulation hardware?
You should check out this post and its related posts. (also here, and here). Which is to say, there is a whole wide world out there of preferences - why should I have one or two small options?
Both/and.
It seems likely that exploiting resources in space will make society richer, benefiting everyone. Perhaps that will require people live in space.
Another reason is that the earth's crust is quite rare in virtually all precious and useful metals (just look at the d-block of the periodic table for examples). Virtually all of them sank to the core during earth's formation, the existing deposits are the result of asteroids striking. So, asteroid mining is worth considering even if you're a pure capitalist working for your own gain.
It is not the space as currently is, to be colonized. It's the radically technologically transformed space we are after!
Then why not be after technological transformation of Earth first, and (much easier) expansion into space afterwards? Is it only the 'eggs in one basket' argument that supports early colonization?
Space colonization is part of the transhumanist package of ideas originating with Nikolai Federov.
no population cap
On a global scale, the demographic transition means most nations don't care about population caps much. On a local scale, individuals won't find it cheaper to raise children in colonies; in fact the cost of life will be much higher than on Earth at first.
Of course if you're a population ethicist, then you want to increase the population and space colonization looks good.
You are taking trends that have lasted a century at most, and extrapolating them thousands of years into the future. As long as the trait "wanting to have many children even while wealthy and educated" is even slightly heritable, not necessarily even genetic, then that trait will spread, leading to a reversal of the demographic "transition".
I agree with your predictions. However, I was talking about why space colonization might be desirable now, rather than why it might become desirable in the future.
If you're an average utilitarian, it's still a good idea if you can make the colonists happier than average. Since it's likely that there is large amounts of wildlife throughout the universe, this shouldn't be that difficult.
???
What's the question?
Earth isn't the only planet with life, is it? If most planets do not evolve sapient life, then the planets will be full of wildlife, which doesn't live very good lives.
That assumes that on most planets life will evolve to have wildlife but not sapient life, as opposed to e.g. only evolving single-celled life. Basically you're assuming that the most likely hard step for intelligence is between "wildlife" and "sapient life" instead of coming earlier, which seems unjustified without supporting evidence, since there are earlier candidates for hard steps that come after life has already began on the world. For example, from Hanson's paper:
It assumes a hard step between wildlife and sapient life, but it makes no assumptions about earlier hard steps.
I suppose it's not likely to be a hard enough step that creating enough life to massively outweigh it is all that hard. Wildlife will only live on the surface of one planet. Sapient life can live on many planets, and can mine them as so to use all the matter.