Nick Bostrom: Astronomical Waste

Stumbled across this speculative, I assume slightly tongue-in-cheek, paper from Nick Bostrom, published back in 2003, where he calculates the “opportunity cost of delayed colonisation of the local supercluster”. He calculates that for every second that we postpone being in control of the huge stellar energy sources of our host cluster, then $10^{14}$ potential human lives are lost. And this is the conservative estimate - other research suggests the cost is as high as $10^{29}$ human lives per second!

A Utilitarian, who abides the imperative “Maximize expected aggregate utility!”, should therefore focus all their efforts advancing technological development so that we can colonise the supercluster as soon as possible. Not so fast, argues Bostrom; existential risk should be the real focus of the utilitarian’s attentions. If the human race ends up being wiped out, either naturally or by our own hand, the opportunity cost would be essentially infinite.

But there are different types of Utilitarian. A Utilitarian who is primarily concerned with those people currently alive over those forecast to exist, what Bostrom calls a ‘person-affecting’ Utilitarian, could ignore the existential risk as it would have a relatively smaller cost on current generations. It’s not a clear division: the ‘person-affecting’ utilitarian would still wish to avoid the death of the current population as this would have an opportuntiy cost proportional to their remaining lifespans. However, the potential for life extending or value enhancing technologies in the short term may present a tempting priority.

I picked up on the following statement, “Any civilization advanced enough to colonize the local supercluster would likely also have the ability to establish at least the minimally favorable conditions required for future lives to be worth living.” By minimally favourable conditions, Bostrom is talking about the conditions for which living a human life is worthwhile, or ‘a life worth living’. It made me consider at what stage of ‘colonisation’ would we expect to have achieved this for the entire human population? I don’t think that anyone would argue that we are currently close, given the high proportion of those currently living in poverty, and yet we have been firing a selected few in to space for decades. Should we not be able to establish ‘minimally favourable conditions’ for the entire human population, given that we can support human life in Earth orbit for long durations? And if not, at what stage of colonisation would we expect to achieve this goal? When we settle on the Moon? Mars? Colonise the solar system? A rhetorical question worth consideration.




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