EA - Governments Might Prefer Bringing Resources Back to the Solar System Rather than Space Settlement in Order to Maintain Control, Given that Governing Interstellar Settlements Looks Almost Impossib

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Governments Might Prefer Bringing Resources Back to the Solar System Rather than Space Settlement in Order to Maintain Control, Given that Governing Interstellar Settlements Looks Almost Impossible, published by Dr. David Mathers on May 29, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Part of my work for Arb Research (/).Epistemic Status: I have no scientific background and wrote this after only a couple of days thought, so it is very possible that there is some argument I am unaware of, but which would be obvious to physicists, why a ‘resource-gathering without settlement’ approach to interstellar exploration is not feasible. However, my Arb colleague Vasco Grilo has aerospace engineering expertise, and says he can’t think of any reason why it wouldn’t be feasible in principle. Still, take all this with a large dose of caution.Some futurists have considered it likely that, at least absent existential catastrophe in the next few centuries, human beings (or our post-human or machine descendants) will eventually attempt to settle our galaxy. After all, there are vastly more resources in the rest of the Milky Way than in the Solar system. So we could support far more lives and create much more of anything else we care about, if we make use of stuff out there in the wider galaxy. And one very obvious way for us to make use of that stuff is for us to send out spaceships to establish settlements which make use of the energy of the stars they arrive at. Those settlements could in turn seed further settlements in an iterative process. (This would likely require “digital people”/#fnref6 given the distances involved in interstellar travel.)However, this is not the only way in which we could try to make use of resources outside the solar system. Another way to do so would be to try and gather resources and bring them back to the Solar system without establishing any permanent settlements of either humans or AIs outside the Solar system itself. I think that a government on Earth (or elsewhere in the solar system) might actually prefer gathering resources in this way to space settlements for the following reason:Impossibility of Interstellar Governance (IIG): Because of the huge distances between stars, it is simply not possible for a government in the Solar system to exercise long-term effective governance over any space colonies further away than (at most) the closest handful of stars.For a powerful, although not completely conclusive, case for this claim see this Medium post:/@KevinKohlerFM/cosmic-anarchy-and-its-consequences-b1a557b1a2e3Given IIG, no government within the Solar system can be the government of a settlement outside it. Therefore, if a government sets up a colony run by agents in another star system, it loses direct control of those resources. Of course, the government can try and exercise more indirect control over what happens by choosing starting colonists with particular values. But it’s unclear the degree of control that will allow for long-term.Meanwhile, a government could try and send a mission to other stars which:A) Is not capable of setting-up a new self-sufficient settlement, or can be trusted not to do so. BUT,B) is capable of setting up physical infrastructure to extract the system’s energy and resources and bringing them back to the Solar system. This way, a government situated in the Solar system could maintain direct control over how resources are used. In contrast if they go the space settlement route, the government cannot directly govern the settlement. So it has to rely on the idea that if values of the initial settlers are correct, then the settlement will use its resources in the way the government desires even whilst operating outside the government’s control.A purely resource-gathering mission without settlement will be particularly att...