Why do you think space exploration matters? Self-sustaining space colonization is decades away, and wouldn’t help against UFAI. OTOH, it might help in the case of global war, if there are some colonies that all sides are nice enough not to attack.
I can’t think of any risks that space colonization helps against that deep underground colonies wouldn’t, though space colonization has the huge advantage of being much more popular.
(Also, asteroid mining is a WMD and might increase x-risk for that reason. On the other hand, cheaper more abundant minerals might be geopolitically stabilizing — or destabilizing, for all I know.)
Probably mostly indirectly, as a catalyst for science, engineering, and industry in general, with concomitant beneficial effects on education and living standards, thus potentially allowing more attention and resources to be allocated to x-risk mitigation in the long term.
On the other hand, technological advances bring risks of their own, so it’s not obvious what the net benefit is. My intuition tends to favor advancement, but I’m open to persuasion if there are good (particularly inside-view) arguments against it.
Other existential risks that are impacted by space colonization include asteroids and sudden diseases. One other thing to keep in mind is that if the Great Filter is some specific advanced technology that we haven’t yet constructed, then it is likely that space colonization will allow some avoidance of that. This follows since any such technology will likely not be able to spread much beyond the planet where it occurs (otherwise we would have started to see signs of its spread in the star systems that are the graves of civilizations). Thus for example, the Filter probably is not something like a slow false vacuum collapse made by a specific technology. In that regard, space colonization helps protect against a lot of unknown unknowns.
if there are some colonies that all sides are nice enough not to attack.
The tech level to attack a Mars colony is as high as the tech level to send colonies. And no colony would be a substantial military threat. Deliberately constructing weapons to specifically attack a colony well before hostilities break out seems not just not nice but well beyond sociopathic. The level of outright vindictiveness seems even beyond that of any classical dictator.
Why do you think space exploration matters? Self-sustaining space colonization is decades away, and wouldn’t help against UFAI. OTOH, it might help in the case of global war, if there are some colonies that all sides are nice enough not to attack.
I can’t think of any risks that space colonization helps against that deep underground colonies wouldn’t, though space colonization has the huge advantage of being much more popular.
(Also, asteroid mining is a WMD and might increase x-risk for that reason. On the other hand, cheaper more abundant minerals might be geopolitically stabilizing — or destabilizing, for all I know.)
Probably mostly indirectly, as a catalyst for science, engineering, and industry in general, with concomitant beneficial effects on education and living standards, thus potentially allowing more attention and resources to be allocated to x-risk mitigation in the long term.
On the other hand, technological advances bring risks of their own, so it’s not obvious what the net benefit is. My intuition tends to favor advancement, but I’m open to persuasion if there are good (particularly inside-view) arguments against it.
Other existential risks that are impacted by space colonization include asteroids and sudden diseases. One other thing to keep in mind is that if the Great Filter is some specific advanced technology that we haven’t yet constructed, then it is likely that space colonization will allow some avoidance of that. This follows since any such technology will likely not be able to spread much beyond the planet where it occurs (otherwise we would have started to see signs of its spread in the star systems that are the graves of civilizations). Thus for example, the Filter probably is not something like a slow false vacuum collapse made by a specific technology. In that regard, space colonization helps protect against a lot of unknown unknowns.
The tech level to attack a Mars colony is as high as the tech level to send colonies. And no colony would be a substantial military threat. Deliberately constructing weapons to specifically attack a colony well before hostilities break out seems not just not nice but well beyond sociopathic. The level of outright vindictiveness seems even beyond that of any classical dictator.