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This is: All Possible Views About Humanity's Future Are Wild, published by HoldenKarnofsky on the LessWrong.
This is the first post in the Most Important Century sequence. For more info and a roadmap for the series, see the sequence introduction.
Audio also available by searching Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts, etc. for "Cold Takes Audio"
Summary
In a series of posts starting with this one, I'm going to argue that the 21st century could see our civilization develop technologies allowing rapid expansion throughout our currently-empty galaxy. And thus, that this century could determine the entire future of the galaxy for tens of billions of years, or more.
This view seems "wild": we should be doing a double take at any view that we live in such a special time. I illustrate this with a timeline of the galaxy. (On a personal level, this "wildness" is probably the single biggest reason I was skeptical for many years of the arguments presented in this series. Such claims about the significance of the times we live in seem "wild" enough to be suspicious.)
But I don't think it's really possible to hold a non-"wild" view on this topic. I discuss alternatives to my view: a "conservative" view that thinks the technologies I'm describing are possible, but will take much longer than I think, and a "skeptical" view that thinks galaxy-scale expansion will never happen. Each of these views seems "wild" in its own way.
Ultimately, as hinted at by the Fermi paradox, it seems that our species is simply in a wild situation.
Before I continue, I should say that I don't think humanity (or some digital descendant of humanity) expanding throughout the galaxy would necessarily be a good thing - especially if this prevents other life forms from ever emerging. I think it's quite hard to have a confident view on whether this would be good or bad. I'd like to keep the focus on the idea that our situation is "wild." I am not advocating excitement or glee at the prospect of expanding throughout the galaxy. I am advocating seriousness about the enormous potential stakes.
My view
This is the first in a series of pieces about the hypothesis that we live in the most important century for humanity.
In this series, I'm going to argue that there's a good chance of a productivity explosion by 2100, which could quickly lead to what one might call a "technologically mature"1 civilization. That would mean that:
We'd be able to start sending spacecraft throughout the galaxy and beyond.
These spacecraft could mine materials, build robots and computers, and construct very robust, long-lasting settlements on other planets, harnessing solar power from stars and supporting huge numbers of people (and/or our "digital descendants").
See Eternity in Six Hours for a fascinating and short, though technical, discussion of what this might require.
I'll also argue in a future piece that there is a chance of "value lock-in" here: whoever is running the process of space expansion might be able to determine what sorts of people are in charge of the settlements and what sorts of societal values they have, in a way that is stable for many billions of years.2
If that ends up happening, you might think of the story of our galaxy3 like this. I've marked major milestones along the way from "no life" to "intelligent life that builds its own computers and travels through space."
Thanks to Ludwig Schubert for the visualization. Many dates are highly approximate and/or judgment-prone and/or just pulled from Wikipedia (sources here), but plausible changes wouldn't change the big picture. The ~1.4 billion years to complete space expansion is based on the distance to the outer edge of the Milky Way, divided by the speed of a fast existing human-made spaceship (details in spreadsheet just linked); IMO this is likely to be a massive overestimat...
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