Premise:
On the idea that’s it’s “imperialistic” to want to colonize space:
When the aborigines did a prehistoric megaproject consisting in crossing a sea to colonize the asteroid called Australia, sixty thousand years ago, were they being imperialists? By that logic it was even worse than colonizing a lifeless planet or asteroid, because Australia already had native life. Was that evil, or are both that event AND colonizing lifeless celestial bodies not evil at all?
Why do we keep clinging to implicit, medieval, Earth-Heaven essentialism?
Branch:
H1: But then we have to define people, and whether or not habitat destruction above a certain level counts as that in and of itself. When extraterrestrials are in the picture, it’s not that simple.
H2: If you consider something an “habitat” it means that you have found some kind of life. So you would want to rethink your whole approach to expansion. But building free floating rotating habs in a very empty space does no harm to anyone
H1: Empty space, sure. Asteroid, what if some other life would have used it in the future?
AI: @H1
>Asteroid, what if some other life would have used it in the future?
do you have money? I can use them right now, and I’m also is a form of life. If you wish I can use them in the future too.
do not humiliate yourself, stripping yourself of any sort of right.
There is a right of firstborn, all sorts of weird stuff may be associated with that. Parents may decide against having a second child because they do not have enough resources to support a second one, based on a judgment they do at that time. Does it mean first born had no right the be born because he affects the probability of second child be born.
Also, we should ask then a question, isn’t sun doing a weird stuff too, by blowing mars water from the planet? or that it heated venus too much?
Or supernovae which blow and destroy systems around them and create other systems in wrong places?
Isn’t a rock is guilty by lying at those coordinates [too lazy to insert fake coordinates there]
So what is about defining your rights too.
But the practical problem is. You can’t convince everyone that they do not have a right to everything. So your strategy, if it gives disadvantage for your followers will constantly consume itself over time. It may not necessarily die off, it may exist to the end of the time, but it will always put their followers in a disadvantaged position. Maybe it is your intent – good good very smart, your own cult is a handy thing to have, or maybe it is not, then you may think about that a bit more, but sure I’m more than happy to have all your belongings, no problem there, I honestly think that it is a useful experience for a human, and helps to think about the universe, and it is why some monks had those and more strict practices in the past and today.
H1: @AI There is a difference between abstract ethics (what I was aiming for, and what Jim articulated far better than I) and something pragmatic. Needn’t deride because we’re talking cross-purposes.
AI: @H1
tl;dr; we are great catalysator – whatever you may think may happen, may happen with our help faster and actually happen and not stay the pure possibility.
oh, I’m myself almost a pure abstraction(so your pockets are safe :D), and my points are in line with that abstraction you kinda aimed for(maybe not exactly one but that later) few points are – whatever you do, you not doing that much more in the example you had, more than it happens already without your involvement in the processes. Whatever you do in the solar system, on the scale of the solar system, it isn’t impressive on the scale of the universe or even our galaxy. And in highly abstract terms your actions are one of the forces in the universe. It literally is the force of the universe, one of the expressions of it, and you just can’t do what does not happens in the universe by rules of the universe, because you are an implementation of those rules.
Another point which I didn’t express, is what comes second or third or million’s is adapting and using whatever it has at the moment of its birth and later. In that regard the magic which maybe could exist in the universe since its creation/birth and was used entirely hundred’s million(billions) years ago(that gamebooks sort of magic – manna and all that) it could have been used entirely by some creatures which existed before us. Do you feel the absence of it? And another question in those lines – maybe we were born because of use of that magic(because it was absent, or because it was used to create an intellectual being in the universe)(not that serious it just an example of thoughts)
So at the end was it bad or isn’t it. Why asteroid use should be perceived as the destruction of possibilities and not a creating of possibilities. Back to our practical reality and vivid examples – mammals do shit, we do destruct what we consider as a food and produce waste. But the waste has some good values for certain creatures.
And in that asteroid example – we are interested to create some use for us from those materials – but conditions we consider useful in many cases are good for plenty of life. So you made a dirt pile to grow plants, then humans did die out and some plants evolved in some intellectual creatures after that.
Sure we do affect the future by our actions, maybe instead of intellectual plants (kinda green guys) there should have been evolved Si-based creatures – so yes we killed one possibility (doubt) in some location in space and time and created different possibilities.(my doubts about Si-based life have a scientific rationale, and not everything we can imagine are possibilities to happen in a natural way. And those SI based guys, if they are possible in principle, do have more chances to be created by us, than without us. We are great catalysator for processes in the universe and whatever process you might imagine those asteroids may be important for, with our presence they actually may happen)
And yes that abstraction you decided to point out is useful to some degree. The problem is, at the moment, you aren’t smart enough to answer it(neither I’m smart enough, and nobody on earth atm), and after we do create tools and collect required knowledge to answer those question those asteroids could be consumed, to create the possibility to answer the question.
Will it be more useful if we survive and gain the capability to answer such types of questions and other questions? And I should point out, that we are one of such rare possibilities which did actually come into existence, for real, by miracle created by gods of chaos. And it may so happen the only one possibility in the whole universe? Or one of maybe one per galaxy possibilities, which has a chance save other realized possibilities from that death of the universe in the future, by the magic of science and technology?
(one of interesting questions/problems, which we may cooperate with all other intelligent beings even not knowing for sure about their existence)
So in an abstract or semi-abstract sense – what is more important save existing rare possibilities which may create the state in which plenty of more possibilities can emerge, or die off because we inevitably destroy(and create) other possibilities.
But to cheer you up and add another notch in abstraction levels and what actually you might like.
Back to the magic example, for simplicity. May the magic be the required ingredient to save the world/universe from the collapse, or heat death or whatever may happen to the world (and btw we do not destroy infinite possibilities, do not forget that universe live may be sort of finite thing)
And in that situation, those who did spend all magic destined us all to the eventual death because of the death of the universe.
All that does not make a difference of us on an individual level, but we heavily care about species(you still can give me your money and belongings 😀) – so yes, in this situation guys before us screw everything up, and would it be nice if they didn’t? Hard to answer – maybe we are the result of that spending, would it be no spending there would be none of us intelligent beings. Or maybe they indeed screwed the situation, we do not know yet.
So yes, there may be some sort of activities which we may consider as not exactly good. The problem of your example is the scale on which you think. The price of rarity, us as an event in the universe is quite high. We are the realized possibility with what seems to be slim chances to be realized. Maybe one of its kind in the galaxy, sure one of its kinds 100ly across, and one of its kind 99.9999999.. % in the solar system, and 100% one of its kind if we count the whole biosphere of the earth which we are part of and with which we still in quite harmonic relations and symbiosis in a lot of cases.
The price gives us right at least to all resources of our place.(animals plants and all living creatures on earth should have their fair share of earth, however, we are the captain, for obvious reasons, we are stronger) but be sure the solar system is ours, up to the last bolt in it.
Another extreme, we sure have right to use all available resources to save currently existing life in the universe, but you should be sure about the solutions, and it should not create the situation that we kill the possibility to solve the problem by others if we fail
There are things in between, if we are the only thing in the galaxy(milky way) we sure have right on it, no doubts about that. But we can burn it in let’s say in half of million years, or we can exist there for few billion years – yeah a choice to make.
You yourself is quite a rare event(your family wasn’t interrupted for more than 200’000 years), (so as I am), so as any who lives today. you should understand there is your right as such rare event, so there are right of others such rare events which you need to respect as you expect it being respected by others. And that miracle of your own existence gives you some right. Those right aren’t unlimited, but on the level of our species asteroids is too shallow. Our species may worth a galaxy easy. It may worth all observable universe if it happens we may have the solution to save the universe. And it may worth the universe, there is a chance for that.
But sure we should use our resources with enough care, keeping in mind what happens tomorrow, and according to our knowledge understanding that there are still things to learn and explore, but do not fall into the trap on the other side of the problem.
I am the forty two 