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?

Good point, and this appears to be a general issue with human space settlement.

Suppose that the technology to do it cost-effectively arrives before AI e.g. cheap spaceflight arrives this century, and AI doesn't. Then even if an unfriendly AI shows up centuries later, it can catch-up with and overwhelm the human settlements, no matter how far from Earth they've reached. (The AI can survive higher accelerations, reach higher speeds, reproduce more quickly before launching new settlement missions etc.)

Worse, increasing the number of human settlements most likely increases the chance that someone, somewhere builds an unfriendly AI. So, somewhat surprisingly, space settlement could increase existential risk rather than reduce it.

Worse, increasing the number of human settlements most likely increases the chance that someone, somewhere builds an unfriendly AI.

I don't see this logic. The chance of AI being made is based on how many people are working on it, not how many locations there are where people can work on AI.

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Musk, Mars and x-risk

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Musk, Mars and x-risk

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