Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Space settlement and the time of perils: a critique of Thorstad, published by Matthew Rendall on April 14, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Given the rate at which existential risks seem to be proliferating, it's hard not to suspect that unless humanity comes up with a real game-changer, in the long run we're stuffed. David Thorstad has recently argued that this poses a major challenge to longtermists who advocate prioritising existential risk. The more likely an x-risk is to destroy us, Thorstad notes, the less likely there is to be a long-term future.
Nor can we solve the problem by mitigating this or that particular x-risk - we would have to reduce all of them. The expected value of addressing x-risks may not be so high after all. There would still be an argument for prioritising them if we are passing through a 'time of perils' after which existential risk will sharply fall. But this is unlikely to be the case.
Thorstad raises a variety of intriguing questions which I plan to tackle in a later post, picking up in part on Owen Cotton-Barratt's insightful comments here. In this post I'll focus on a particular issue - his claim that settling outer space is unlikely to drive the risk of human extinction low enough to rescue the longtermist case. Like other species, ours seems more likely to survive if it is widely distributed.
Some critics, however, argue that space settlements would still be physically vulnerable, and even writers sympathetic to the project maintain they would remain exposed to dangerous information. Certainly many, perhaps most, settlements would remain vulnerable. But would all of them?
First let's consider physical vulnerability. Daniel Deudney and Phil (Émile) Torres have warned of the possibility of interplanetary or even interstellar conflict. But once we or other sentient beings spread to other planets, it would render travel between them time-consuming.
On the one hand, that would seem to preclude any United Federation of Planets to keep the peace, as Torres notes, but it would also make warfare difficult and - very likely - pointless, just as it once was between Europe and the Americas. It's certainly possible, as Thorstad notes, that some existential threat could doom us all before humanity gets to this point, but it doesn't seem like a cert.
Deudney seems to anticipate this objection, and argues that 'the volumes of violence relative to the size of inhabited territories will still produce extreme saturation….[U]ntil velocities catch up with the enlarged distances, solar space will be like the Polynesian diaspora - with hydrogen bombs.' But if islands are far enough apart, the fact that weapons could obliterate them wouldn't matter if there were no way to deliver the weapons.
It would still matter, but less so, if it took a long time to deliver the weapons, allowing the targeted island to prepare. Ditto, it would seem, for planets.
Suppose that's right. We might still not be out of the woods.
Deudney warns that 'giant lasers and energy beams employed as weapons might be able to deliver destructive levels of energy across the distances of the inner solar system in times comparable to ballistic missiles across terrestrial distances.' But he goes on to note that 'the distances in the outer solar system and beyond will ultimately prevent even this form of delivering destructive energy at speeds that would be classified as instantaneous.' That might not matter so much if the destructive
energy reached its target in the end.
Still, I'd be interested whether any EA Forum readers know whether interstellar death rays of this kind are feasible at all.
There's also the question of why war would occur. Liberals maintain that economic interdependence promotes peace, but as critics have long pointed out, it also gives states something to fight abou...

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