Musk, Mars and x-risk

Kawoomba

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX, wants to help establish a Mars colony of up to 80,000 people by ferrying explorers to the Red Planet for perhaps $500,000 a trip.

Relevant Sagan quote:

(...) we've put all our eggs in one basket. If we were on many worlds and were to mess up down here, there's a way for the human species to continue. I don't for a moment propose that the Earth is a disposable planet, and we have to put enormous efforts into making sure we don't muss up down here. But there is a chance.

This should also at least somewhat reduce the x-risk stemming from uFAI (a subset of uFAI's may not concern themselves with space travel), and may significantly reduce the x-risk posed by many other x-risk categories (bioengineered threats, catastrophic climate change, global nuclear catastrophe, grey goo scenarios, etcetera).

For total x-risk reduction, prima facie it's unclear to me how supporting an endeavor such as Musk's stacks up against the SI's effectiveness, measured by total x-risk reduction per donated currency unit.

What's your take?

Article on space.com

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX, wants to help establish a Mars colony of up to 80,000 people by ferrying explorers to the Red Planet for perhaps $500,000 a trip.

Relevant Sagan quote:

(...) we've put all our eggs in one basket. If we were on many worlds and were to mess up down here, there's a way for the human species to continue. I don't for a moment propose that the Earth is a disposable planet, and we have to put enormous efforts into making sure we don't muss up down here. But there is a chance.

What's your take?

This should also at least somewhat reduce the x-risk stemming from uFAI.

I doubt it. If travel to Mars becomes do-able for Musk, it'll be trivial for uFAI, and uFAI wouldn't be stupid enough to let a nearby technological civilization threaten the efficient achievement of its goals, whatever they are.

More extreme environments may force faster technological developments ( eg WW2), also see the excellent "Destination Void" by Frank Herbert, where a colony ship has to develop an AI to survive the journey to the nearest star, with unexpected results!

14Eliezer Yudkowsky13y

Correct. SIs that only terminally care about a single green button on Earth instrumentally care about optimizing the rest of the universe to prevent anything from threatening that button.

2Kawoomba13y

In many cases, spaceflight may not even be necessary, an uFAI that is still in stealth mode could just transmit itself over. However (correct me on the jargon), uFAI mindspace certainly contains uFAI's that - for whatever reason - will not concern themselves with anything other than Earth. For example, a uFAI that uses geometric discounting as part of its utility function (cf. page 6 here) may realize the eventual danger (decades down the line) from a Mars colony, but may invest all its resources to transform Earth into the desired state anyways. Since the number of uFAI concepts that will also threaten Mars is strictly smaller (even if not much so) than the number of uFAI concepts with no constraints on Mars given, I think the statement that the risk would be somewhat smaller is fair to make (conjunction fallacy otherwise).