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?

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).

It feels like privileging a hypothesis. Why should be an uFAI which ignores space travel more likely than an uFAI which ignores people dressed in green?

(The modus tollens here is that nobody would propose dressing in green as a way to reduce existential risk. And it is much cheaper than space travel.)

5Luke_A_Somers14y

somewhat = epsilon