[ExI] Planetary defense

[Anders Sandberg]

Kelly Anderson wrote:
> Some people seem more than willing to spend countless trillions of
> dollars resolving or just mitigating global warming. Compare almost
> any risk to humanity to global warming in terms of a cost risk
> analysis, and you can make a really good case for addressing it (vs.
> global warming). It's a powerful way to make your point, I think.
>   

I doubt it makes my point rhetorically well, remember that most people 
are pretty irrational when it comes to global warming :-)

Actually, I think the key issue is that climate change is a bit like a 
Christmas tree: you can decorate it with whatever ideological, political 
or economical decorations you want. If you want to dress it up in 
socialism, free markets, conservative values or eurobureaucracy, you can 
do it. Compare that to an asteroid defense program. Much fewer 
decorations that fit. You can't really make it "about" social equality 
or your favorite economic tool. This might be good news for the 
feasibility of actually doing something but there are going to be much 
less interest in spending (other peoples) money on it.


> What do the mathematical models you use have to say about
> climate change, and how does the response to that compare to the
> response to asteroid detection and mitigation?
>   
My models have nothing directly to say about climate change, except that 
the statistics of drought disasters *is* worth worrying about - a very 
flat power law with a few very deadly cases. If climate change increases 
the frequency of droughts or equivalent agricultural problems then a lot 
of people will be in trouble. Asteroids actually have a very nice x^-6 
power law - very rare big events. Just going from my data I should 
clearly talk climate change at the conference :-) (actually, the real 
threat in that analysis is wars and democides, so I should be talking 
about how to defang governments sensibly)


This shows an interesting problem we have: NEOs are not the biggest or 
most important threats we need to stop. Yet they are the best managed of 
all of them. We know their physics, it is deterministic, we have a lot 
of data on them, we have some experimental interventions (asteroid and 
comet landings), there is a community working on the problem and there 
is even some public understanding of the issue. Try finding that 
combination for climate change, wars, AGI, bioweapons or nanotech. The 
only thing anywhere close is pandemics.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute 
James Martin 21st Century School 
Philosophy Faculty 
Oxford University