You might be in an overripe civilization when you hear people saying things like, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result,” and stop hearing anyone mention the straw that broke the camel’s back. Just keep doing the things you’ve been doing, and everything will be fine if it started that way. This is what the hapless owner of the dead camel was thinking as they added pieces of straw over and over. Not everyone is willing to think anything different until they absolutely must.
One of the willing is Elon Musk, who recently said that he was building spacecraft so that “the light of consciousness” wouldn’t die. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-billionaire-tax-mars-2021-10 Presumably he wasn’t thinking that the only consciousness on Earth resided in humans.
On the principle that eggs are safer in more than one basket, it is true that once humans are established sustainably off this planet, the risk of our extinction diminishes, barring a complication described below. The question is whether that is a good thing.
I recently finished my physics doctorate, a couple of decades late. I wanted to do physics to worship God through gaining greater love for the world around me and the universe of which it is a part. What I mean by God probably differs from what you do, but this is true of any two randomly chosen people as well.
In addition, I’ve been deeply worried about nuclear annihilation since I was a kid and catastrophic climate change since no later than my late twenties. I remember pondering in the second half of the Nineties whether the methane clathrates would thaw.
The 1997 movie Titanic includes a simple though memorable example of a cascading failure. The point is clearly made that one can be past the point of no return https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SP7BWb1ndpA for some time before this fact is universally acknowledged. You probably remember scenes from the movie from which it can be inferred that consensus on this point was eventually achieved. When I was a kid, I always heard it said that there was insufficient lifeboat seating because the designers thought that the ship couldn’t sink, but this would have been reason to have no lifeboats at all. Does the reader remember the other principle the James Cameron movie suggests might have been in the minds of the designers? https://youtu.be/w8s-W6OhRao?t=26 Could that principle be at work today in the minds of rich people in heavily armed nations that are acting so exquisitely slowly in response to the climate and ecological crises?
Thus, as my advisor and I talked about the possibility that our work could be applied to improving on rockets as a means of leaving Earth, I thought that I might be doing good for others. Think of what Jessica Chastain’s character in Interstellar was after. Incidentally, it helps to understand the ending of that movie if you know that time and one of the directions in space switch roles inside a black hole.
The problem I have with my work is that it risks making me serve evil. Consider a person working in the sixteenth century to improve navigation. Would we want that person to extrapolate from the behavior of Columbus https://www.nytimes.com/1990/08/14/opinion/don-t-celebrate-1492-mourn-it.html to the genocide of the Americans at the hands of the Europeans? Would we want them to toss it in and do something less harmful, which would leave them a vast array of career options? Maybe we would want them to continue their work in hopes that it was meretricious and would lead others away from fruitful lines of inquiry.
We are in fact behaving like the good Christians whose deliberate acts and mere presence as disease vectors killed a large fraction of the poor heathen they were civilizing in the Americas. We are allowing our numbers and wealth to grow to an extent that crowds out many other living beings on the planet https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-race-just-001-of-all-life-but-has-destroyed-over-80-of-wild-mammals-study, godless as we presume them to be. The Keanu Reeves version of The Day the Earth Stood Still conveys some of it and illustrates one of the problems of thinking in English, namely that possessive pronouns encode both the concept of ownership and that of association, so that the two markedly, perilously different ideas shade into one another in the minds of some of the, perhaps not merely coincidentally, richest and most powerful humans. https://youtu.be/mnsWobu7tjM?t=50 If you think it silly to talk seriously about pop culture, you have been partially insulated from the kind of change of heart brought about by some of the truly clever people, like Norman Lear and Douglas Adams .
We possess the awesome power of organisms to reproduce. Once established off Earth, we would actually be unconstrained, as we pretend ourselves to be currently. We would have the potential to be the worst of invasive species.
Opinions vary on the harm done by our current civilization. The most terrifying thing of all is that many people of good will, great capabilities, and high achievement, among them dear friends of mine, can look at the world and not see the need to rein in our greed for possessions and the illusion of security they offer or the drumbeat in our culture that deprecates the childfree life and the generosity by which it leaves more of what our planet offers to the offspring of other living things, including fellow humans.
Of course, my advisor, whose opinion on these matters I don’t know, argued that there was intervening agency. Others would decide how my work was used. I emphasize that it’s unlikely that I’ll come up with something that could do very much evil through helping humanity, but I can’t rely on other agents to shoulder my moral burden when the other agents are human.
The other problem with establishing humanity off the planet is that doing so would instantly make the humans on Earth less valuable in the eyes of the kind of people who start wars. Would the people who first achieved a permanent escape from Earth seize an illusory chance to win history for their way of life by exterminating all the Earthbound humans? We live currently only by the grace of mutually assured destruction. I like my fellow humans, both individually and on the whole, too much to contribute to that outcome. Besides, do it too quickly, and you could inadvertently cause human extinction, not that the sort of person who would do it at all would necessarily be deterred by that consideration.
If you doubt there’s anyone that evil, you may be right. Nevertheless, consider that in a complex system, behavior in which the whole acts as if controlled by a single will can emerge from the independent functioning of the components, as when a swarming flock of birds swoops or wheels almost as one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4f1NM_a6VU Frankly, my understanding of God, as well as the Adversary, is exemplified by this.
My advisor and I started to differ strongly, and I’ll admit, painfully, on the physics. Separate from that and for his own reasons, he began investigating UFOs. https://theconversation.com/are-we-alone-the-question-is-worthy-of-serious-scientific-study-98843 I wasn’t interested, but I expect that intelligent, humane, if you’ll pardon the language, beings would monitor Earth very closely at this juncture of its history, were they aware of what was going on. Would you not take precautions to keep a sample of smallpox sealed in its container or remove all the zebra mussels before you left port? Remember our capacity to reproduce.
Two things seem certain to this underachiever: First, a society that treats with injustice any living things, whether its members or not, delays its own progress by making unclear the morality of contributing to that progress.
Second, doing the same thing over and over can lead to catastrophe, because circumstances change. In the case of our planet, growth in human population and average consumption https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/04/05/the-world-economy-is-a-pyramid-scheme-steven-chu-says/?sh=3f887fcb4f17, among other things, have occurred. Whether or not you expect catastrophe, you probably would agree that re-evaluating one’s behavior in light of changing circumstances is a good idea.
By the way, in case anyone is worried that a middle-aged, newly minted physics PhD is saying that Einstein was wrong by picking apart the idea behind a quotation sometimes attributed to that person, I’ll take my chances with the lawyers for the estate https://youtu.be/y31D8vnEyp4?t=186 of Yogi Berra by telling you that Einstein really didn’t say everything that Einstein said https://www.businessinsider.com/misattributed-quotes-2013-10.