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bogdanb 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?
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.