Thread by @jmkorhonen

Re #longtermism: I had an epiphany in 2002. Given that everything we do will eventually crumble into dust, the only really meaningful thing to do would be to do what we can to ensure that life and beings capable of transmitting a culture survive for as long as possible. 1/

All that striving for wealth, power, and social status are going to be meaningless within years of your death if not much earlier. After a century, very few people will even be remembered at all. After millennia, still less. And these are very short timespans. 2/

Especially if you use your limited time to maximize your personal gain, inevitably causing problems for someone else, what's the point of living at all? At best, if you succeed (a big if), some very temporary feeling of you being important? 3/

But if you can use your position to advance the survival of life and humanity, then you could say your life had meaning.

For years, my plan was to become rich and powerful for this specific reason. If I had the chance, I'd probably done the same things Elon Musk is doing. 4/

In particular, I too was enamored by the idea of helping space travel in order to create a backup of civilization. So I totally get the point of SpaceX. I'd done the same thing if I had been in a position to do so.

But my thinking has evolved from what it was when I was 21. 5/

There are many reasons and many lessons that refined my views. The most important single one of them is this: despite advances in space travel, we are going to be living in a finite space, and I don't see how we are going to survive unless we learn to share that equitably. 6/

A civilization that has the power to even contemplate living in space has learned to use forces that it MUST learn to control. I'm not talking only about the obvious ones like weapons of mass destruction, I'm talking about our power to effortlessly alter the environment. 7/

Such powers will inevitably cause too much damage to any life support system in any finite environment.

The greater the powers we wield, the greater the downside if something doesn't go as planned.

AND there is the risk that the powers are used directly against others. 8/

These mechanisms feed each other. Environmental degradation increases the incentives to take greater risks and use force against others, which increases the probability and severity of environmental degradation.

What we need are limits. 9/

But how can we set such limits to the exploitation of others (meaning human and non-human life), and to the use of powerful technologies to gain some advantage in the competition for more resources and more status? 10/

I see only two possible solutions.

One of them is by force: a powerful actor dictates the limits and enforces them.

This is the (eco-)fascist solution.

Very probably, it won't ever work.

Merely the jockeying to become this actor would probably wreck our world. 11/

Even assuming that most people just acquiesce (they won't), there would always be those who would want to be this supreme power, and they would always have an incentive to compete and take risks.

This competition would almost inevitably escalate into conflict. 12/

If this was the only solution, I would say: "enjoy life, we're doomed, likely within this century, and there's nothing we can do." Even if an eco-fascist dictatorship of the enlightened were possible, it would be brittle and fail.

Fortunately, it isn't the only solution. 13/

We actually have good historical evidence and theoretical grounds to say that we have a robust solution to this problem. It's not a guarantee, but it could work.

This solution is the democratic, egalitarian division of power. 14/

Only when we ensure that 1. no one individual or small group can wield dangerous powers without sufficient oversight, and 2. everyone has enough so that even losers in the societal competition are comfortable, can we hope to set safe limits and respect them. 15/

This should be obvious to anyone contemplating space colonies, for instance (and it's a bit weird that it isn't).

If your life support system is very limited, will you just allow anyone to hog most of it? Even if it means that some crew members die?

Obviously not. 16/

What you do is this: you divide the goods the life support system provides equitably. Everyone has a fair and safe minimum provisioning level, and as long as the system's overall capacity is limited, this means that no one can just appropriate more and more. 17/

And in any finite space, the overall maximum capacity is always going to be limited. The only question is when the limits are reached. (This paper calculates that at current expansion rates, the Solar System will be exhausted within centuries.) 18/ sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

So no matter how rapidly we establish an outpost of human culture outside Earth (and we are still at the very early stages), WE WILL EVENTUALLY HAVE TO LEARN TO LIVE WITHIN SAFE LIMITS.

Why not start this learning now, when we have a very fine spaceship under our feet? 19/

Even if a small subset of humanity eventually moves permanently from Earth, we who remain will still have to solve the same problem: how to set safe limits to our powers, and how to respect them.

We just cannot escape this problem through technology, markets, or anything. 20/

In fact, I believe the most probable solution to the Fermi Paradox is that those civilizations that learn to exploit powers necessary for interstellar travel either learn to live within the limits of their life support systems, or destroy themselves. 21/

And if you learn to live within limits, why would you have to expand relentlessly, or strip-mine entire star systems for resources? There probably are others out there, but they are content to walk lightly and not leave a trace. Sustainable civilizations don't leave traces! 22/

(BTW, this also means that the archeological record is probably skewed: we see fallen civilizations because we see their monuments, but we don't see sustainable communities because they left few permanent traces aside from their memories and culture.) 23/

So, in nutshell: I still believe that helping life and culture survive are Very Important Things, some of the most meaningful ones we can do in our short life.

And one of the best strategies to ensure survival is to promote equitable sharing so that we can set limits. 24/24