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This is: Space governance is important, tractable and neglected , published by Tobias_Baumann on the Effective Altruism Forum.
Summary
I argue that space governance has been overlooked as a potentially promising cause area for longtermist effective altruists. While many uncertainties remain, there is a reasonably strong case that such work is important, time-sensitive, tractable and neglected, and should therefore be part of the longtermist EA portfolio.
I also suggest criteria for what good space governance should look like, and outline possible directions for further work on the topic.
What is space governance?
It’s plausible that humans, or their successors, will eventually be able to colonise space. There are already various Mars missions, and future technological advances might make large-scale colonisation economically feasible.
Space governance encompasses the laws, rules, norms and institutions that structure interactions in space, as well as mechanisms that are used to establish and enforce those. For the purposes of this post, we’re interested in a subset of space governance that I will call long-term space governance. Long-term space governance refers to the processes of interaction and decision-making among the actors involved in the large-scale settlement of space.
Space colonization is currently not well covered by existing governance mechanisms. The most significant treaty in internal space law is the Outer Space Treaty, signed in 1967, which establishes that space shall be free for exploration and use by all nations, but that no nation may claim sovereignty of outer space or any celestial body.[1]
Subsequent efforts to establish more comprehensive rules, such as the Moon Treaty (which grants jurisdiction over celestial bodies to the international community), have largely failed to achieve widespread assent. Therefore, we currently lack a coherent global framework for space governance. As of now, space is a free-for-all.[2] This is particularly true for challenges that arise in the context of humanity expanding beyond Earth: large-scale settlements in space are currently infeasible, so much of the existing debate centers on more immediate concerns (e.g. related to satellites or exploration of space).
The work I have in mind aims to replace the current state of ambiguity with a coherent framework of (long-term) space governance that ensures good outcomes if and when large-scale space colonisation becomes feasible. In the following, I will argue that such work is important, tractable, and neglected.
Importance
The case for the importance of space governance is straightforward: it directly affects astronomical stakes. On a cosmic scale, Earth is a tiny point in a vast universe containing hundreds of billions of galaxies. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, already contains at least 100 billion planets. So, while space governance is not fundamentally different from existing governance problems, it takes place on a scale never before seen in human history.
Also, the range of possible outcomes is huge. The right space governance regime could enable an outcome that is very good from (almost) every perspective - through positive-sum cooperation and compromise between the relevant actors, combined with the vast amount of resources that an intergalactic civilisation can access. (Cf. Eric Drexler’s Paretotopia.) On the other side of the spectrum, escalating conflicts and warfare on a cosmic level could cause actors to inflict unimaginable horrors on each other, resulting in suffering on an astronomical scale.
That said, one could object that anything we can do now will be overturned in the future, rendering our efforts irrelevant. In particular, one might expect transformative AI to happen relatively soon (which may be the trigger for large-scale space colonisation), and power...
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