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?

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.)

Preliminary note: While my assertion concerning uFAI x-risk reduction is certainly fair game for debate, it is ancillary to my main interest in this topic, which is overall x-risk reduction from all sources. That being said, I do think that the uFAI specific x-risk reduction is non-negligible, though I do agree it may well be minor.

Why should be an uFAI which ignores space travel more likely than an uFAI which ignores people dressed in green?

Two broad categories of explaining such a difference:

The advent of uFAI may lead to a series of events (e.g. nuc... (read more)

1Armok_GoB14y

The set of UFAI that threaten people dressed in green is strictly smaller than the set of all UFAI as well, technically. However, for all practical purposes the sets can be treated as just identical.