a) Seems to me like you might need very competent and powerful space governance even in a ‘safe’ defense-dominated universe. You may worry about locusts causing S-risk, eating up value that could have been flourishing people, or just mundane societal collapse of some star system in future which really could be so bad.
b) I think solving good governance (where good here maybe means a long term stable social contract which is very agreeable on diverse sets of values) seems doable. We’re in the tough spot of having seen thousands of years of failed attempts, true, but
1. that’s actually not a long time to try,
2. we were hobbled by low tech and logistics limitations which we can overcome in future
3. we have made progress, and history teaches us about failure modes
In the future, we’ll likely be building vertically into many virtual worlds and the vast majority of beings probably live there and they are smart and long-lived. But they have a shared source of ultimate vulnerability in base reality so it seems like there will be massive pressure to have tight governance ensuring that these are insanely safe.
I definitely have a huge fear/aversion for lock-in and tyranny but I think there are plausible paths to robustly good government (some vague sketch in the comment above) and that you plausibly get bad lock-in/tyranny by default if you don’t do the hard work of building good government (depends on unknown equilibria, ideally revealed by LR but plausibly many unknowns about e.g. great attractors for civilizational equilibria remain). There seems also to be substantial risk from beginning to expand into the stars without knowing the equilibria. In either offense-dominated (OD) or defense-dominated (DD) universes there is something about the probe launch which you may never be able to rollback. i.e. in OD universe it could be existential if spurs of civilizations later come into conflict. While in DD if spurs of civilizations cause S-risk you can’t fight a just war against them and bring an end to the regime.
I had a comment on Jordan Stone’s piece about interstellar travel possibly dooming the longterm future that I think goes here as well, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/x7YXxDAwqAQJckdkr/interstellar-travel-will-probably-doom-the-long-term-future?commentId=pvJpqdswi9mmbtkz8 (its a bit fast and lose, apologies)
Essentially,
a) Seems to me like you might need very competent and powerful space governance even in a ‘safe’ defense-dominated universe. You may worry about locusts causing S-risk, eating up value that could have been flourishing people, or just mundane societal collapse of some star system in future which really could be so bad.
b) I think solving good governance (where good here maybe means a long term stable social contract which is very agreeable on diverse sets of values) seems doable. We’re in the tough spot of having seen thousands of years of failed attempts, true, but
1. that’s actually not a long time to try,
2. we were hobbled by low tech and logistics limitations which we can overcome in future
3. we have made progress, and history teaches us about failure modes
In the future, we’ll likely be building vertically into many virtual worlds and the vast majority of beings probably live there and they are smart and long-lived. But they have a shared source of ultimate vulnerability in base reality so it seems like there will be massive pressure to have tight governance ensuring that these are insanely safe.
I definitely have a huge fear/aversion for lock-in and tyranny but I think there are plausible paths to robustly good government (some vague sketch in the comment above) and that you plausibly get bad lock-in/tyranny by default if you don’t do the hard work of building good government (depends on unknown equilibria, ideally revealed by LR but plausibly many unknowns about e.g. great attractors for civilizational equilibria remain). There seems also to be substantial risk from beginning to expand into the stars without knowing the equilibria. In either offense-dominated (OD) or defense-dominated (DD) universes there is something about the probe launch which you may never be able to rollback. i.e. in OD universe it could be existential if spurs of civilizations later come into conflict. While in DD if spurs of civilizations cause S-risk you can’t fight a just war against them and bring an end to the regime.