The Ethics of Spreading Life in the Cosmos
centauri-dreams.org
centauri-dreams.org
Conversely, I also think the undertaking broad scale bio-colonization with dumb planetary infection probes is going to be way more expensive and difficult than most people imagine. We would have a better prospect by sending out mycelia with human DNA comehow encoded as passengers on some cosmic equivalent of a taking our retirement funds to Las Vegas.
If any alien probe showed up here, I hope it's also a scouting probe.
https://metallicman.com/surface-tension-by-jamesblish-free-f...
https://metallicman.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/surface-t...
The thing is, this question needs not be answered satisfactorily before a single individual accrues enough means to make it possible.
Apart from non-proliferation "we" seem to be very bad at keeping technology in check.
I have recently been listening to the "We Are Legion (We Are Bob)" sci-fi series. It is about a Von Neumann probe [1] that aids humanity in expanding past Earth. I find a lot of it is thought provoking.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft
So... an expansionist/colonialist agenda for earth-originating life
"oh also hopefully this doesn't lead to conflict"
_I wonder._
Even that analogy understates things because as far as we know, the rest of the known universe is lifeless rock. Personally I'll admit to being a chauvinist who favors life over non-life. If we find native life somewhere else, I'm all for leaving it alone, but until then, bringing life to a lifeless universe seems like possibly the most meaningful thing we can do as a civilization.
I'm all for being cautious if there's something significant out there, but so far we haven't even found anything insignificant.
Assuming the dark forest model is valid, as soon as we prove ourselves capable of expansion, we basically seal our doom. Being on one planet is actually safer in the long run.
A large number of free-floating fusion-powered colonies, gradually expanding through the Oort cloud and then to other star systems, would be quite a bit more difficult to destroy.
Any attacker would also have to consider the possibility of retaliation if they don't get us all. If a civilization detects us from a distance of 100 light years, then their information will already be a century out of date, and by the time they hit us we'll have had two hundred years of technological advancement and further expansion.
Given the time lag, the best time to attack a technological civilization is while it's planet-bound. Given how long we've had radio, there could be a relativistic missile heading our way already.
It doesn't. It assumes that the likelihood of the dark forest killing us increases with the size of the target we present. That likelihood is never zero. It's probably at least 50/50.
>A large number of free-floating fusion-powered colonies, gradually expanding through the Oort cloud and then to other star systems, would be quite a bit more difficult to destroy.
Unless we're assuming some kind of magitech, it would probably take thousands of years or longer to establish more than a few colonies (particularly interstellar colonies) and because there's no stealth in space, it would be obvious to anyone watching. Difficult to destroy is relative to time, resources and effort.
>If a civilization detects us from a distance of 100 light years, then we'll have two hundred years of technological advancement and further expansion by the time they hit us.
I'm assuming any civilization capable of successfully attacking us from that distance is sufficiently advanced that 200 years of relative technological development isn't going to matter. And if it does, why would that stop them? If they've already committed to exterminating any advanced species they detect, the risk of retaliation is implied. It's us or them either way.
If there's "no stealth in space" then a dark forest is impossible anyway. If a dark forest is possible, then it's possible for humans to go dark as well.
Generally, how much stealth is possible depends on how far away the adversary is. Usually people are talking about interplanetary distances when they say that, rather than interstellar.
There is definitely possibility for conflict when we encounter other life, be it inteligent or not. But what is wrong with expanding earth-life to planets devoid of life that we terraform?
See the "Prologue: The Searcher" linked from there to get an idea why :)
… well, that would be a first.
In the history of human migration, there have always been some who have decided to stay behind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_human_migrations#/media/...
The infamous (amongst academic philosophers) book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence [0] by David Benatar, takes the stance that no it is not ethical to bring a human into this world.
Don't we reason about these things exactly to arrive at conclusions that go against our intuitions or feelings? If we decide that the reasoning is flawed merely because we don't like the conclusion, we might as well not reason at all.
If human procreation is immoral simply because it creates suffering for "sentient" beings, then it's this particular line of ethics that needs to go extinct, rather than humanity itself.
"The rules we invented for ourselves say that we shouldn't continue existing" seems like a mindset that natural selection will handle by itself though.
You're not accurately describing the argument the linked article is making, but even so, is the argument you're making that creating suffering for sentient beings is not morally wrong?
>"The rules we invented for ourselves say that we shouldn't continue existing" seems like a mindset that natural selection will handle by itself though.
This is completely orthogonal to whether the argument is correct. Natural selection isn't moral; it just is.
Page quote: "Benatar's antinatalist philosophy: sentient beings are harmed when they are brought into existence, and it is therefore wrong to procreate."
The absolutism and anthropocentrism inherent in that statement renders his whole argument kind of silly. The existence of life itself is inevitably going to cause harm, regardless of how self-aware that particular life form is. It might be smaller degrees of harm, or more indirect, but harm nonetheless.
Sure we should try to minimize the harm we cause others, within reason, on a case-by-case basis, but if your best solution to that is self-imposed specicide, what is the point of ethics?
(Also the comment about natural selection was a half-joke, not a stance on the argument, but your final sentence seems to agree with me anyway.)
1. The absence of good is not bad because nobody is around to lament it
2. The existence of bad is bad
In other words, because it doesn't yet exist, you can't hurt a being by not bringing it into existence. You can't hurt non-existent beings. But you can hurt a being by bringing it into existence because it can and will be harmed once it exists.
The argument is not "simply because it creates suffering for sentient beings."
If you disagree with the argument, you have to explain why it is incorrect. In particular, why is the absence of good bad even if nobody is around to experience that absence? This is difficult to argue, in my opinion, even if I subjectively feel like it has to be wrong.
One argument I can think of is that we want to maximize the average goodness, so we should bring conscious beings into existence if we expect them to experience more good than bad. However, philosophers don't tend to make that argument because the implications are horrific.
Positions that make me feel indignant, or viscerally repulsed, are often ones that I simultaneously don’t like and also have no argument against. (Moral Relativism, for example.)
"The reason why we do not lament our failure to bring somebody into existence is because absent pleasures are not bad."
But we also don't lament bringing somebody into existence; in fact we tend to celebrate it. So we could just as well conclude that absent pleasures really are bad, or turn it around and say that pleasurable existence is good.
I countered with another value judgment: "pleasurable existence is good." This seems trivially true as well but Benatar ignores it. Whether the good of existence outweighs the bad of existence is yet another value judgment, and also depends on particular experience.
In my personal life, I feel that the good far outweighs the bad, and existence is far better than nonexistence. So it doesn't make sense to me to assume that another person who doesn't happen to exist yet won't feel the same way.
They're not ignoring the good, they're arguing that an absence of good is not bad. You seem to be arguing that an absence of good is bad because there is a potential positive experience that could exist if a person came into existence and could experience it.
But their point is that the person who would have that experience does not yet exist and thus is not harmed by not coming into existence and not having that positive experience.
If a conscious person has a bad experience, Benatar considers that Bad in some absolute sense. He thinks it's important that we reduce the number of bad experiences in the world.
Benatar does not consider conscious existence itself to have any particular value. It doesn't matter whether there are more total experiences in the world.
He also doesn't consider good experiences to be Good in any absolute sense, but just privately good to the person experiencing them. So we shouldn't care about increasing the number of good experiences in the world. Given that someone exists, maybe we should help that person have more good experiences, but it's no absolute loss if that person disappears and any good experiences with them.
These are all value judgements: that conscious experience has no intrinsic value, and that we should reduce total bad experiences but not care about total good experiences. The asymmetric treatment of good and bad experiences, and the lack of value attached to existence itself, trivially lead to his odd conclusion. Most people disagree with his conclusion not because they're illogical, but because if they looked closely then they'd disagree with his premises. I would say that conscious existence is intrinsically good, even if it contains some bad experiences. I'd also say that it really is good to have more total good experiences in the world, just as it is bad to have more bad experiences.
As I sit here on the floor in a slightly awkward position, I have a small pain in my hip. Since Benatar doesn't place any value on existence itself, to be consistent he'd have to argue that it'd better for me if a sniper blew up my head, than if I continued to have this little pain in my hip. This is a value judgment with which I disagree.
I also think that conscious existence is intrinsically good, that it is amazing that the universe has found a way to experience itself, and that out of thoughtless rocks, qualia have arisen.
But I don't understand how to argue why this is so. In fact, it appears to make no sense. It seems to me that the only argument one could make that conscious existence is good is that there are conscious people who believe it is good, and without those people, the argument ceases to make sense.
"I'd also say that it really is good to have more total good experiences in the world, just as it is bad to have more bad experiences."
Philosophers do not make this specific argument because if you treat good and bad symmetrically, you can reach conclusions like "slavery is good if it produces more good than bad."
Of course, this is also an outcome-driven decision, where people dismiss an argument because they don't like the logical conclusion, but I think it's fair to say that "good" and "bad" aren't the same thing in opposite directions.
If you can't find a rational argument that conscious experience is good, can you find one that says bad experiences are bad?
If "the only argument one could make that conscious existence is good is that there are conscious people who believe it is good," well doesn't that also apply to bad experiences? The only argument one could make that they're bad is that there are conscious people who believe they are bad. If that's not a sufficient argument, then why bother with reducing bad experiences at all?
And if conscious existence itself doesn't matter then it's hard to see any reason why it should matter what sort of experiences conscious beings have. Whether there are lots of them or few, whether they have good or experiences or bad, none of it matters, any more than it matters what sort of chemical reactions happen as atoms bounce around on lifeless planets.
On the other hand if we decide we should take into account the preferences of conscious beings, then we should consider that they prefer to exist.
Regarding your second argument, you've alluded to an issue already. You say we can't count total good experiences because that leads to bad consequences. But Benetar's premises lead to even worse consequences. So why shouldn't we discount his approach as well?
We should argue on a level playing field. If we use some criteria to reject an argument against Benatar, we shouldn't give Benatar a pass on that same criteria.
I do agree we shouldn't simply count good vs. bad and choose the maximum total good. But that doesn't mean we should discount good experiences entirely. It's still good to have more good experiences in the world, even if we have to be careful about how we apply that principle.
Ultimately, maybe we have to take the most basic things on faith, if we want to avoid utter nihilism. Even math doesn't prove everything; every kind of mathematics starts with a handful of unproven axioms and works out the consequences.
Because that notion is stupid on its face. If there is an ethical code that transcends human existence then nature itself violated that code by letting life evolve into humans. If some jackass wants to claim to know better than the forces of nature well... I'm not sure what else to say about that.
Ethics is practical philosophy, concerned with the good life. It's basic question is "how shall I live?" It is concerned with one's voluntary acts, which presupposes one's existence. It is ridiculous to speak of one's existence as being bad when existence is the basis for the good, or harmful to others when you've already undermined the value of the existence of the individual. The measure of the moral life is rooted in how well voluntary acts accord with human nature. Immorality manifests in the discrepancy between nature and voluntary act. If human beings were cannibals by nature, there would be nothing wrong with cannibalism, for example, because being a cannibal would advance the actualization of a human individual and thus contribute to his good. But we aren't, and because of our social nature, cannibalism is to our own grave detriment in various ways. You cannot make such moral judgements, or make sense of notions like "selfishness", outside the context and parameters of the social nature of human beings. What is good for human beings is determined by our nature. And because of our social nature, it is good that others exist.
Claims like "coming into existence causes harm" would be horrifying if they weren't so fucking stupid. People like that aren't serious thinkers. They're people who need psychiatric help, and maybe should knock off what looks like some kind of weird, life-hating self-pity. Maybe they should read some Nietzsche.
I think you make a small argument against yourself though.
> It's basic question is "how shall I live?" It is concerned with one's voluntary acts
Whether or not to have children is a question of how one should live, and is concerned with one of life's most important voluntary acts.
It seems like you think that existence is good per se because the idea of the good presupposes existence. If I understood that correctly, is that not circular reasoning?
Your last paragraph of ad hominem and no true scottsman attacks against anyone who disagrees with you on the matter was a bit shocking after the coherence of your first. Is this the model of a "serious thinker"? (Although I know Nietzsche did indeed like a good ad hominem!)
I think it's fair to say that David Benatar is a serious person, and a serious thinker. Although perhaps we have different ideas of what that entails.
Just FYI, I'm not an anti-natalist (I hope not with a baby on the way!), I only shared the link because it echoes the Astronomical Suffering idea that the OP article talks about.
Always had been.
You said "perhaps" it doesn't matter. Well, perhaps it does matter. If there is even a small chance it does matter, we might as well act like it matters.
Ah, Pascal's Wager.
There's a small chance that you giving me $100 matters, so surely I'm going to find a check in my mail box next week, right?
...and so on.
The Drake Equation and anthropic reasoning are both frequently discussed in rationist circles.
Please explain the reasoning by which one reaches this conclusion.
~10^25 planets in the Universe.
13 billion out of a googol years elapsed.
And you think our insignificant spec of dust is the first or will be the last on which life evolved?
The elements of life have been found to arise spontaneously, see Bartel and Szostak for example.
However, we don't know if life can arise spontaneously given the right conditions (abiogenesis) or if must it be "seeded" at some level by an existing life form (i.e. deity, asteroid containing bacteria, etc)?
I'm religious, so I'm more in the "seeded" camp than "spontaneous" camp but either way, I strongly believe there is life on other planets in the universe, it's just too bad the universe is so big and light so slow that it's hard to confirm.
Hijacking someone else's comment to ask without judgement or agenda - How, if at all, would it alter your religious beliefs were life/intelligent life to be found on another planet?
One thing that would probably alter my religious beliefs significantly is if abiogenesis or synthetic life were proven possible (i.e. you can clearly show in a lab how to make life arise from non-life, or how to create artificial life). I don't find the current "primordial soup" or other abiogenesis arguments convincing enough to abandon religion, though I do re-visit the wiki every couple years to see what's new on that front.
I don't understand why I don't hear anyone else take this position. To me it's obvious and it's hard to find any other way to reconcile them. (But I'm not religious.)
Well, actually there's two quite different things that could be asserted along that line and it's not clear which you meant: either that evolution is a mechanism by which the hand of God can meddle in random occurrences to pick outcomes, or that it's completely hands-off.
But I would state the second one differently: that the universe was set up to allow evolution and all the other systems of natures to create the world today. Evolution itself is ultimately a consequence of physics and statistics.
I'd expect the same, the problem is just the vast distances involved with space (meaning we are looking into the past) and the enormous quantities planets to check make it difficult to find other life out there
I remind you that I'm not claiming we're first; I'm asking for justification for claims that life exists elsewhere, or is common, or that we're not the first. Myself, I am taking an agnostic position, not committing myself to unjustifiable conclusions.
It sure makes sense to assume we're neither alone nor first, as until we actually prove it either way that's just what the odds are - but I'm tired of people acting like this means we're definitely not the first. If you gave 10,000 people a number between 1 and 10,000 in random order, the probability that any given person got number 1 is 1/10,000, and yet the probability that someone got 1 is 1.
(though there's another problem at play: "first" may not necessarily be a well-defined term at these scales)
I agree with you the odds are strongly in favour of us not being first or unique. I didn’t say we must be first but find it very unlikely given the numbers.
My intuition tells me it's not like that, but it's nothing but intuition.
It's the proportion that matters, not absolute numbers.
The problem with origin of life is we can't do that with the information we have. It's not that the probability is high or low, it's that it's unknown.
"And you think our insignificant spec of dust is the first or will be the last on which life evolved?"
First, when I ask someone to justify their position, I expect a justification, not questions about what I do or do not believe. My beliefs have jack shit to do with any justification for others' statements.
Second, that question slips in the conclusion you're trying to justify, in the word "insignificant". If Earth were the sole lifebearing planet in the universe, it would be extremely significant. By proclaiming by fiat that it's insignificant, you've ruled that out.
I suspect what you did there was assume that IF another world has physical properties like Earth, THEN that world would also produce life as occurred on Earth. But this inference is not valid, because the process could very well have been very nondeterministic, depending on one or more very unlikely steps. There is no reason to conclude if Earth were run through its history all over again that life would again have arisen.
Those numbers mean that even if the odds of life are vanishingly small, there was and will be other life out there. We’re not talking about one world like Earth but likely billions at least. As far as we can tell our star is in no way unique or special, and if those same processes happened say 100000000000000000000000 times elsewhere, it seems very unlikely to me that they wouldn’t produce self-replicating life as well somewhere, sometime.
This is nothing but handwaving. Your argument evaporates when examined closely or critically.
> Those numbers mean that even if the odds of life are vanishingly small, there was and will be other life out there.
Obviously not. If there are N places where life could arise, but the chance that life arises at each is << 1/N, then your conclusion does not obtain. For any N, there is always a sufficiently small chance life would arise that would ruin your conclusion.
You are slipping in an assumption again, that the chance can't be "too small". But we can't rule out that some event in OoL is extremely, astronomically, exponentially unlikely. All known examples of living systems capable of Darwinian evolution have great complexity, and that initial complexity has to have come from somewhere. We can't rule out that at least some of it was just due to some extremely low probability event(s).
Unimaginably large no of plants, odds of life are rare, but life is common because of the no of planets.
Unimaginably large no of planets, odds of life are such that it only emerged once in billions of years over 10^25 planets, so odds of life emerging are something insane like 10^30:1.
Your conclusion that life is probably unique on Earth is possible, but seems highly unlikely, and in the absence of other information, I'm going to assume the most likely outcome, which is that we are not alone, we don't yet know how alone, but the outlier is to say life emerged but once.
Feel free to make whatever assumptions you like, but stating the obvious about assumptions doesn't change my argument at all or invalidate it - obviously you have to make assumptions when information is incomplete. Nobody is saying with certainty there is or is not life (clearly we don't yet know), we're talking about the most likely outcome given what we know.
We have found the building blocks of life on asteroids already, if we do find extra-terrestrial life in our neighbourhood it would mean life is extremely common in the universe due to the no of planets and time, if not, it doesn't mean much, it just means it is not extremely common, the outcome you posit is way on the other extreme of the scale.
https://eos.org/articles/lifes-building-blocks-found-in-benn...
How is this judgment reached? What's the probability distribution assumed for the probability of life arising, and how was that estimated?
This is nothing more than a personal feeling on your part dressed up to try to make it seem to be something that isn't completely subjective.
This whole subject, touching as it does on existential questions, is rife with opportunities for bias, so it's very important to be rigorous and explicit in reasoning, not resort to "feelings", or in arguments that end being exercises in rationalization of those feelings.
What one must do in such a situation is seriously question ones own assertions. "How do I know that this is true?" "What would look different if this weren't true?" So many seem to just voice their intuition and stop thinking.
I want you to imagine an alternative world, let's call it Schmearth. It's inhabited by Schmumans, orbited by the Schmoon. It's in a universe much like ours, but the laws of physics are such that OoL has a very difficult step, so Schmearth is the only life bearing planet in their universe. My question to you: what would be different that they would see that we do not (or vice versa)? If you can't identify such a thing, how do we know we aren't ourselves living on Schmearth?
Even if one agrees that "dozens" is accurate to mean "hundreds of trillions" it still misses the mark for the argument because the odds come from the high number of planets. That is to say, there are very low odds that any individual planet harbors life but ostensibly much greater odds that one planet in a set of planets harbors life. Saying "hundreds of trillions" gets that point across better than "dozens".
https://www.space.com/30172-six-most-earth-like-alien-planet...
https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/W6-Observer-sele...
It seems like a far larger assumption to think Earth is unique in the cosmos, given nature's tendency to repeat itself. There are numerous natural harbors on earth, for example - places where the sea currents and land terrain combine to make a relatively calm environment even during stormy conditions. If we view Earth and the solar system as a natural harbor in space, what basis is there for thinking it can not exist anywhere else? The fact that we're uncertain about exactly how common it is is not a good reason to think the answer is 'not at all'.
We don't know how common OoL is on a planet like Earth. We cannot use the fact it occurred here to conclude it's likely, since if it didn't occur here, we wouldn't be here. Our mere presence to ask the question biases the observation. The less likely it was, the more biased the observation.
Second paragraph: what is this supposed tendency of nature not to repeat itself? The universe is full of objects that are unique arrangements of atoms, not repeated anywhere else. Indeed, all but extremely small objects are very likely to not recur. So this supposed universal property of repetition doesn't appear very universal. Proposing that Origin of Life is in the subset of phenomena that do repeat is just begging the question.
As for "what basis is there for thinking it can not exist anywhere else?", that question is relevant only if I were asking you to believe life is not common, not if I were asking for justification of statements that it is common. The opposite of belief in X is not belief in (not X)!
It also just seems reasonable that, given the size of the universe, the odds of life forming exactly once seems much less likely than the odds of life forming more than once.
"Just seems reasonable" isn't an argument.
I've heard theories about either the presence of Jupiter, or something about the nature of our moon as providing a safe long term environment for life to form on earth, but even that doesn't feel that special, when there are 10^21 stars with planets in the universe.
You should be aware that the logic you are using, vulgar Copernicanism, was used in the 1700s to conclude that the other planets in our solar system must not only have life, but intelligent life!
What your argument ignores is that we don't live on a randomly selected planet in the universe. We necessarily live on a planet that has life. This "observer selection bias" has to be taken into account; the rarer life is, the more biased our local observations will be.