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> A good example they might support would be spending more money on space tech and less on food for Africa. Resources aren't limitless, and some aren't renewabl

by lahvak 4y ago

> A good example they might support would be spending more money on space tech and less on food for Africa. Resources aren't limitless, and some aren't renewable at all, so we have to use those wisely to position our heirs such that they could take the next step. 1. I am not sure whether I can get behind the idea of "long term species survival" if that means that those who survive will be absolutely awful creatures. 2. What makes you think that prioritizing space travel over feeding hungry people will not lead to some sort of societal upheaval that will destroy life on the planet just weeks before the ships take of?

MichaelZuo 4y ago
To be fair to the longtermists, any non-zero chance of survival beyond Earth is vastly preferable to zero. Especially since we know there exist scenarios, that will occur eventually, that would guarantee an end to human civilization limited to a single planet, such as comet impacts, gamma ray bursts, etc.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Nearest M class planet is how many lifetimes away? How many earths worth of resources must be consumed just to safely transport bacteria there?
- KingMob 4y ago
  To be fair to the rest of us, this has to be balanced against any detrimental effect longtermist plans would have on long-term survival on Earth. A .002% chance of making it to the stars probably isn't worth a 4% lower chance of keeping Earth habitable.
bm3719 4y ago
Since they have formulae to quantize this, they would probably weigh the marginal utility of, say, a billion less hungry people now against a -1% chance reduction of annihilation of the human race, and say the latter is a clear winner. Maybe you can count a cultural shift as just another parameter. They seem to weigh survivability super high, above anything else even. The argument there is likely that nothing matters if we aren't alive to ask these questions. I doubt they're considering "societal upheaval" as a species threat, but if it got bad enough to be on their radar, perhaps they would support (normally unpalatable) solutions to that too. It's all about us reweighting our parameters such that our heuristic functions evaluate towards branches that ensure long-term species survival, and the argument that we're doing the opposite of that now in many areas due to short-term, emotional reasoning. Caveat: Not a longtermist here, just projecting based on what I've read of them so far.

by lahvak 4y ago

MichaelZuo 4y ago

To be fair to the longtermists, any non-zero chance of survival beyond Earth is vastly preferable to zero. Especially since we know there exist scenarios, that will occur eventually, that would guarantee an end to human civilization limited to a single planet, such as comet impacts, gamma ray bursts, etc.

paulryanrogers 4y ago
Nearest M class planet is how many lifetimes away? How many earths worth of resources must be consumed just to safely transport bacteria there?
KingMob 4y ago
To be fair to the rest of us, this has to be balanced against any detrimental effect longtermist plans would have on long-term survival on Earth. A .002% chance of making it to the stars probably isn't worth a 4% lower chance of keeping Earth habitable.

bm3719 4y ago

Since they have formulae to quantize this, they would probably weigh the marginal utility of, say, a billion less hungry people now against a -1% chance reduction of annihilation of the human race, and say the latter is a clear winner. Maybe you can count a cultural shift as just another parameter. They seem to weigh survivability super high, above anything else even. The argument there is likely that nothing matters if we aren't alive to ask these questions. I doubt they're considering "societal upheaval" as a species threat, but if it got bad enough to be on their radar, perhaps they would support (normally unpalatable) solutions to that too. It's all about us reweighting our parameters such that our heuristic functions evaluate towards branches that ensure long-term species survival, and the argument that we're doing the opposite of that now in many areas due to short-term, emotional reasoning. Caveat: Not a longtermist here, just projecting based on what I've read of them so far.