Colonizing the galaxy would be good

http://nautil.us/blog/why-colonizing-the-galaxy-is-the-highest-good

by dnetesn • 9 years ago

63 37 9 years ago

nautil.us

AlphaWeaver• 9 years ago

I wonder how ethical it may be to try and force humanity's idea of happiness in the universe...

coldtea• 9 years ago

Assuming there's a single humanity's idea of happiness in the first place.

Idontagree• 9 years ago

Can you elaborate? What is humanity's idea of happiness, and who/what are we potentially enforcing it on?

db48x• 9 years ago

The author makes the (perfectly plausible) assumption that there's no other life out there. Imposing our "idea of happiness" (or whatever other measure you want to use) on the lifeless universe would certainly not be unethical.

DesiLurker• 9 years ago

well when we find an alternative viewpoint then we can have an honest debate about it but until then whats the point in waiting.

I mean if you just look at all the energy sun is 'wasting' at every moment throughout its 5B yr lifespan wouldnt that be better utilized by creating more life and more branches for evolution? if thats true for one star then imagine what can be achieved throughout the galaxy!

politician2• 9 years ago

Please go on and elaborate on that point, would you? The folks at home fret about recycling while the Sun is busy wasting 99% of the energy we might ever be able to use.

Surely, the star at the center of our solar system is the biggest polluter. Can you argue otherwise?

joshgel• 9 years ago

"There is more happiness and pleasure (and whatever else makes life worth living) in a single bird than there is in the whole known universe outside of Earth."

That's a really beautiful sentiment. Lifelessness doesn't have happiness!

markbnj2• 9 years ago

Beautiful? I came here to react to it with awe at the sheer chutzpah it took to make that statement. So the author has determined that the universe is lifeless, and has nowhere in it other than Earth a single spark of consciousness that might experience a pleasant emotion? This is pretty significant news.

Banthum2• 9 years ago

The author is reasoning along the premise that the universe is lifeless; he didn't declare it with absolute certainty (and in fact he specifically addressed the possibility of aliens and how they'd interact with his point).

Frankly I'm glad someone is publishing thoughts on bigger topics... we could use more of this and less myoptic focus on the latest my-tribe-other-tribe cultural dominance outrage circus.

throwaway911114• 9 years ago

There is 0 evidence of life outside earth.

There is also Drake's equation.... your opinion on that is probably already formed, so why discuss it?

blurbleblurble3• 9 years ago

It really frazzles me to see the the same presumptuous seeds that fruited in multiple genocides getting "happily" sprouted once more on such a potentially endless scale...

kirse• 9 years ago

A sentiment written about many thousands of years ago by Solomon...

"For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion." (Ecclesiastes 9:4)

anigbrowl3• 9 years ago

Lifelessness doesn't care. This is an extrapolation from his earlier assertion that 'I, for one, would not want to be a rock,' a statement that seems no more meaningful than 'I would not like to be the transcendental number pi.'

This writer seems not to have explored very much philosophy, and without wanting to damp his imagination or enthusiasm I have to say that the idea of making the universe resemble our domestic environment as much as possible strikes me as a bit...trite. I don't find it so hard to conceive of planetary or cosmic-scale dynamic systems that might be locally hostile to life but of staggering natural beauty. One might argue that skilled mathematicians enjoy private vistas whose extent is only limited by their cognitive capability, or conversely that the most elaborate and variegated manifestations of life are merely an expansion in conventional space of some higher-dimensional universal function.

Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad story collection considers the ends of endeavor from several perspectives, including that of a society that has reached the Highest Possible Level of Development which naturally proves to be a severe disappointment to its less-developed discoverers. Those engineers troubled by ethical or philosophical uncertainties would do well to read it (followed by everything else he's written, though not necessarily at the same time).

rdiddly• 9 years ago

If you agree that "things untouched by man" are "bad" and "things remade in the image and whim of man" are "good," then yeah, absolutely! If we can just keep a galactic perspective and get past these few little global catastrophes that afflict precisely all the planets inhabited by homo sapiens (I'm sure it's just a coincidence...) then we could build a real cool civilization you guys c'mon!

Banthum2• 9 years ago

Catastrophes are only catastrophes when they happen to conscious beings.

Every days, stars explode and planets are torn to pieces. None of it matters because there's nobody for it to matter to.

Moreover, any catastrophe on the table that humans can forseeably produce is nothing compared to nature. Pop off every nuke we've got in coral reefs, burn every forest into CO2 and dump all our toxic water in pristine rivers - the total effect will be nothing next to a decent-sized supervolcano eruption or asteroid strike. And that's not even getting into stellar events.

imsofuture• 9 years ago

It will still cement our position as catastrophically prolific assholes though...

daxfohl• 9 years ago

The ending of Space Balls seems particularly apt here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kD516OENN7s

basicplus2• 9 years ago

Looking at the arseholes who run the world I would not wish them upon the rest of the universe.

This article is nonsense, a rock is a rock and is in perfect balance with the rest if the universe within its space time, and needs no interference by egotistical selfish humans

GCA10• 9 years ago

"I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place." -- Winston Churchill 1937

It's an argument that's been around a long time. It's a recipe for remorse.

shouldbworking• 9 years ago

Wow. I like your take on this. Reminds me that the regular populace is still in support of fascist ideas as long as the notion isn't obvious on the surface.

HONEST_ANNIE• 9 years ago

People like having a purpose and being part of something greater than themselves. What could be greater than the entire universe?

There is also the possibility of complete existential freedom. Freedom to choose meaning can be very frightening. Humanity is still driven by the meaning and purpose programmed by evolution and slightly modulated by cultural evolution. When technology advances, it will become possible to modify personal or collective meaning at will or fulfill evolutionary desires more directly.

Creat Filter Hypothesis:

The reason why it's difficult to meet technically advanced aliens in the galaxy is because technology enables direct ways to get meaning and satisfaction that far surpasses anything the real world can offer. Each civilization develops to the point where they can produce technology that short circuits the evolutionary drive and replace it with something better (It can be 'Enlightement', 'Soma', 'immersive neural lace games and soap opera', or 'permanent intellectual, physical and existential orgasm by brain fungus') or alternatively they start to modify their core utility function that gives them meaning and purpose.

Intelligent agent can't derive meaning from rationality or intelligence using deduction. Self preservation is not more logical than being happy, it's provided by evolution. Those who explore universe have not fallen into this filter or have not opted to remove this desire.

Civilizations that pass this Great Filter are puritans

jwilliams2• 9 years ago

Seems more likely to me that the AI and machines we build will colonize space. In that lens the fate of humanity is less critical.

throwaway911114• 9 years ago

What does motivation look like in AI? Why would AI care about anything? What does an AI caring even mean?

AI is just a bundle of humanity's fears/hopes about being replaced. Silly humans! There is nothing more human than a human.

jwilliams2• 9 years ago

Well that's a different set of questions - but the will to survive seems like it'll be a necessary factor.

My comment was more a practical one - in the cosmic sense, a machine is going to get there earlier and go farther.

ajmurmann• 9 years ago

What does meat caring even mean? Why should near care?

anigbrowl3• 9 years ago

This doesn't sound like something you've thought about in great depth.

ridgeguy• 9 years ago

I found this a shallow, escapist read.

From the article: "So, it is small-time to make just the world a better place."

It's not "small-time". It's essential. Until we learn how to do this, scaling humanity to a galactic extent will only scale our unresolved existential challenges.

When we have our current home running so that current and future people can live up to their potential, I'll feel more confident about our chances in spreading out into a larger neighborhood.

Edit for word choice.

Rhapso• 9 years ago

I think you are wrong. The reality is that It is an order of magnitude more efficient and safe to take the shotgun approach. We can stay here and try and push the half-life of our civilization out with ever decreasing returns or we can send out a _lot_ of bad attempts to colonize asteroids, moons, and planets and see much stronger gains to our species' half-live via redundancy.

A decent metaphor is that trying to make 1 system more reliable quickly becomes less cost effective than making a network that increases reliability via redundancy. While we have all of our life on one planet all our failures are essentially total. Have life on many planets limits the impact of catastrophic failures/random accidents.

politician2• 9 years ago

Suppose your entire civilization was running in a single Docker container. Being a SPOF, that's not ideal. Now, consider scaling out horizontally by running on a cluster of a dozen planets. That provides a bit more breathing room for your devops team.

The website highscalability.com is a good resource on this topic of fault tolerance and availability. It turns out that a lot of what applies to keeping services like Google running applies to the entirety of the human race.

anigbrowl3• 9 years ago

Species != civilization. TO treat humanity as a monoculture is to skate over some rather yawning chasms of philosophical disagreement between different groups of people and to assume they've been resolved in your favor.

dbaupp• 9 years ago

This is a very similar sentiment to Octavia E Butler's Earthseed (from her series of the same name), a fictional religion where one of its central tenets is "The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars".

standup75• 9 years ago

A night of December 2013, I was walking towards the waterfront from our apartment on S1th and Berry in Brooklyn.I saw the spectacle of this ultra lit cityscape. What we're capable of doing with nature was somehow telling me that we have to do it. At the time it was a simple intuition. Now I can better piece things together, as if the cause of this intuition unwinds in front of me, with a fake air of truth. And I thought about the big things that mankind achieved. I thought going in space was one of them. But why? It's just what our species do. Space is just the new unknown territory. The trees grew higher to reach more sun and survive. We conquered all territories of this planet, that's how we survived. Also, we never had to look at leaving the place clean behind us, this has never been a survival instinct. But now, that we just settled, we grow out of place/resource, we start messing things up dangerously here. There is no telling how this will end, but now more than ever, we know that things must change. The way of caring about Nature that this situation requires is something we never experienced. One of the problems is that there is no direct payback for good behavior. Now that we're outside of the food chain in our leaky man-made biosphere we call cities, we are too far from the consequences of our actions on nature. Really this sucks. There is no turning back. The march of the civilization on our landscapes is devastating. Recycling plastic bags is not gonna cut it. We're just too many, each of us taking too much space, and growing. We need to be better at knowing nature as much as we need to have an escape. Let me insist on "as much as", otherwise this would just be another escapist rational and doesn't have anything to do with the highest good. So how could colonizing the galaxy be the highest good? Well, the highest good is not an expression I'm personally very fond of. This suggests the universality of virtues, which I am still struggling with. But let's assume that the highest good is to follow what we're programmed for, what we're good at, what we can call, inspired by Arthur Schopenhauer, our will as a species. Searching to understand nature and exploring new territories is a game we like to play. The excitement of discovery is so deeply ingrained in our species. This really is our life instinct. Whereas keeping things static, finding comfort in not questioning or enforcing our representations of the world is our death instinct.

Colonizing the galaxy would be good

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