Can a preference against arbitrariness ever be stable? Non-arbitrariness seems like a pretty arbitrary thing to care about.

I would greatly prefer that there be Babyeaters, or even to be a Babyeater myself, than the black hole scenario, or a paperclipper scenario.

Seems to me it depends on the parameter values.

For what it's worth, I've always enjoyed stories where people don't get hurt more than stories where people do get hurt. I don't find previously imagined utopias that horrifying either.

I agree with Johnicholas. People should do this over IRC and call it "bloggingheadlessnesses".

In view of the Dunbar thing I wonder what people here see as a eudaimonically optimal population density. 6 billion people on Mars, if you allow for like 2/3 oceans and wilderness, means a population density of 100 per square kilometer, which sounds really really high for a cookie-gatherer civilization. It means if you live in groups of 100 you can just about see the neighbors in all directions.

"boreana"

This means "half Bolivian half Korean" according to urbandictionary. I bet I'm missing something.

Perhaps we should have a word ("mehtopia"?) for any future that's much better than our world but much worse than could be. I don't think the world in this story qualifies for that; I hate to be negative guy all the time but if you keep human nature the same and "set guards in the air that prohibit lethal violence, and any damage less than lethal, your body shall repair", they still may abuse one another a lot physically and emotionally. Also I'm not keen on having to do a space race against a whole planet full of regenerating vampires.

The fact that this future takes no meaningful steps toward solving suffering strikes me as a far more important Utopia fail than the gender separation thing.

Or "what if you wake up in Dystopia?" and tossed out the window.

What is the counterargument to this? Maybe something like "waking up in Eutopia is as good as waking up in Dystopia is bad, and more probable"; but both of those statements would have to be substantiated.

So could it be said that whenever Eliezer says "video game" he really means "RPG", as opposed to strategy games which have different principles of fun?

Probably the space you could visit at light speed in a given subjective time would be unreasonably large, depending on speedup and miniaturization.