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by skybrian 3152 days ago
Yeah, I don't see how you can put a good spin on saying that you don't care if 95% of humanity dies.

Treating people equally means it only solves 5% of the problem. Probably far less than that. It rounds to zero.

2 comments

Yeah, I totally should’ve phrased that bit more carefully

The clearer, fuller argument would would be: if something terrible was to happen to Earth it would be objectively better (though obviously still a tragic and nightmarish event) if we only lost 95% of living humans vs losing 100%.

Also though it might also be worth a teensy bit more risk of near-complete wipeout to gain a backup. (e.g. the risk of migration to Mars causing economic or political issues back here that cause a terrible war or something). It’d be crazy hard to do the maths on that though.

You would also kind of assume though that as long as a tiny percentage lived, they would turn a lot more people than are currently alive over a few 1000s of years? So even if the worst happened the ethics would eventually balance out.

Given the amount of really really bad stuff that could happen to humans on Eart (disease, asteroids, super volcanos, sea level change, nuclear war, etc) having 5% safe somewhere else sounds like a great situation to be in. Doubt we’ll get there though.

To be fair, "5% rounds, rounds to 0" is still strictly more than 0, which was what the other person proposed.