This article provides a personal perspective on the importance of human civilization expanding into outer space and relates that to the more urgent need to address global catastrophic risk.
The article begins as follows:
Ten years ago, I dropped out of my graduate program in electrical engineering. I was in computational electromagnetics, modeling how radio waves propagate through the ground. I liked it, but I didn’t love it. I was living a double life. By day, I was an engineer; by night, I was a do-gooder and community volunteer, helping the homeless support themselves by writing for a street magazine that they would sell. I couldn’t reconcile my passion for making the world a better place with my engineering work, so I quit.
The heart of the matter for me was that engineering is all about solving problems. I got caught up on which problems we should be solving, and these “should” questions can’t be answered with engineering. Society needs some other way of figuring out what problems engineers should work on, and for that matter what everyone should do with their lives. For me, it’s the idea of making the world a better place.
But why just the world? Humanity is already exploring outer space; give us a few billion more years of technological progress and we can probably colonize much of the universe. That would let us outlive our planet and accomplish much, much more. So, it is small-time to make just the world a better place. The real opportunity lies in making the universe a better place.
The remainder of the article is available in Nautilus.
Image credit: NASA
This blog post was published on 23 December 2016 as part of a website overhaul and backdated to reflect the time of the publication of the work referenced here.
