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DanArmak comments on "Stupid" questions thread - Less Wrong
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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.