[HN Gopher] The Ethics of Spreading Life in the Cosmos
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The Ethics of Spreading Life in the Cosmos
Author : JPLeRouzic
Score : 35 points
Date : 2025-03-25 18:21 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.centauri-dreams.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.centauri-dreams.org)
| ycombinete wrote:
| The same questions posed by "astronomical suffering" in this
| essay are posed of terrestrial suffering in the debates around
| anti-natalism.
|
| The infamous (amongst academic philosophers) book _Better Never
| to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence_ [0] by David
| Benatar, takes the stance that no it is not ethical to bring a
| human into this world.
|
| [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Never_to_Have_Been]
| jack_h wrote:
| I feel like if our ethics tells us procreation is unethical we
| may want to re-evaluate the foundations of ethics.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| Why?
|
| Don't we reason about these things exactly to arrive at
| conclusions that go against our intuitions or feelings? If we
| decide that the reasoning is flawed merely because we don't
| like the conclusion, we might as well not reason at all.
| ycombinete wrote:
| Agreed. Bertrand Russel wrote of the Sophist Georgias, _"We
| do not know what his arguments were, but I can well imagine
| that they had a logical force which compelled his opponents
| to take refuge in edification."_
|
| Positions that make me feel indignant, or viscerally
| repulsed, are often ones that I simultaneously don't like
| and also have no argument against. (Moral Relativism, for
| example.)
| setsewerd wrote:
| We reason these things not simply to contradict our
| feelings (though that is often a side effect), but to draw
| conclusions of how best to improve society and our species
| as a whole.
|
| If human procreation is immoral simply because it creates
| suffering for "sentient" beings, then it's this particular
| line of ethics that needs to go extinct, rather than
| humanity itself.
|
| "The rules we invented for ourselves say that we shouldn't
| continue existing" seems like a mindset that natural
| selection will handle by itself though.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| _> If human procreation is immoral simply because it
| creates suffering for "sentient" beings, then it's this
| particular line of ethics that needs to go extinct_
|
| You're not accurately describing the argument the linked
| article is making, but even so, is the argument you're
| making that creating suffering for sentient beings is not
| morally wrong?
|
| _> "The rules we invented for ourselves say that we
| shouldn't continue existing" seems like a mindset that
| natural selection will handle by itself though._
|
| This is completely orthogonal to whether the argument is
| correct. Natural selection isn't moral; it just is.
| setsewerd wrote:
| > You're not accurately describing the argument the
| linked article is making
|
| Page quote: "Benatar's antinatalist philosophy: sentient
| beings are harmed when they are brought into existence,
| and it is therefore wrong to procreate."
|
| The absolutism and anthropocentrism inherent in that
| statement renders his whole argument kind of silly. The
| existence of life itself is inevitably going to cause
| harm, regardless of how self-aware that particular life
| form is. It might be smaller degrees of harm, or more
| indirect, but harm nonetheless.
|
| Sure we should try to minimize the harm we cause others,
| within reason, on a case-by-case basis, but if your best
| solution to that is self-imposed specicide, what is the
| point of ethics?
|
| (Also the comment about natural selection was a half-
| joke, not a stance on the argument, but your final
| sentence seems to agree with me anyway.)
| DennisP wrote:
| If reasoning is based on verifiable facts and logic, sure.
| But in this case, the starting point for his reasoning
| appears to be our own intuitions and feelings:
|
| "The reason why we do not lament our failure to bring
| somebody into existence is because absent pleasures are not
| bad."
|
| But we also don't lament bringing somebody into existence;
| in fact we tend to celebrate it. So we could just as well
| conclude that absent pleasures really are bad, or turn it
| around and say that pleasurable existence is good.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Why
|
| Because that notion is stupid on its face. If there is an
| ethical code that transcends human existence then nature
| itself violated that code by letting life evolve into
| humans. If some jackass wants to claim to know better than
| the forces of nature well... I'm not sure what else to say
| about that.
| golemotron wrote:
| Nothing to worry about. Anti-Natalism is self-extinguishing.
| bhouston wrote:
| > Anti-Natalism is self-extinguishing.
|
| Always had been.
| sunrunner wrote:
| And, by definition, Natalism is self-propagating. Is the
| implication here that the ideas that propagate and persist
| are inherently better?
| tticvs wrote:
| That is quite literally the meaning of life, so yes.
| esafak wrote:
| No, because ideas can be spread and enforced. People who
| believe in marrying minors don't outbreed those who don't.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| It fundamentally misunderstands the good and what ethics is
| about.
|
| Ethics is practical philosophy, concerned with the good life.
| It's basic question is "how shall I live?" It is concerned
| with one's voluntary acts, which presupposes one's existence.
| It is ridiculous to speak of one's _existence_ as being bad
| when existence is the basis for the good, or harmful to
| others when you 've already undermined the value of the
| existence of the individual. The measure of the moral life is
| rooted in how well voluntary acts accord with human nature.
| Immorality manifests in the discrepancy between nature and
| voluntary act. If human beings were cannibals by nature,
| there would be nothing wrong with cannibalism, for example,
| because being a cannibal would advance the actualization of a
| human individual and thus contribute to his good. But we
| aren't, and because of our social nature, cannibalism is to
| our own grave detriment in various ways. You cannot make such
| moral judgements, or make sense of notions like
| "selfishness", outside the context and parameters of the
| social nature of human beings. What is good for human beings
| is determined by our nature. And because of our social
| nature, it is good that others exist.
|
| Claims like "coming into existence causes harm" would be
| horrifying if they weren't so fucking stupid. People like
| that aren't serious thinkers. They're people who need
| psychiatric help, and maybe should knock off what looks like
| some kind of weird, life-hating self-pity. Maybe they should
| read some Nietzsche.
| izzydata wrote:
| Assuming suffering is bad suggests there is some cosmic
| morality that the universe is judging us by. Perhaps spreading
| suffering across the universe actually doesn't matter at all.
| rytill wrote:
| There are many effective ways to argue against what you're
| saying, but I'll choose the easiest.
|
| You said "perhaps" it doesn't matter. Well, perhaps it does
| matter. If there is even a small chance it does matter, we
| might as well act like it matters.
| izzydata wrote:
| I'm not actually advocating for or against anything. I'm
| mostly suggesting there are some assumptions being made and
| that some concepts need to be better defined so it can be
| better understood what kind of framework we are thinking
| in. I think it matters when talking about things at the
| scale of the universe.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| The problem with philosophical abstractions is that you can
| conceive of just about any _possibility_. As a crude
| example, just about any baby you see _might_ grow into a
| future dictator worse than Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot
| combined. Is it really ethical to do anything without first
| of all screening all children under 3 to ascertain the
| probability that one of them will wipe out all life on
| earth by age 40? Shouldn 't this be the top priority of our
| species?
|
| ...and so on.
| chowells wrote:
| [flagged]
| pfdietz wrote:
| > statistically there is other life in the universe
|
| Please explain the reasoning by which one reaches this
| conclusion.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Out of the dozens of planets in the universe, Earth is not
| likely to be so unique that it is the only place where life
| has arisen.
| pfdietz wrote:
| This statement doesn't seem to follow from anything. Why is
| Earth "not likely to be so unique"?
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Your comment is not worth replying to.
|
| https://www.space.com/30172-six-most-earth-like-alien-
| planet...
| rytill wrote:
| Dozens? Don't you mean, probably hundreds of trillions in
| the observable universe? Not that the number of planets
| really implies anything when we don't know the probability
| of life arising on one of them.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| No. I meant dozens. Hundreds of trillions is dozens
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| I don't doubt that you intended this meaning but doesn't
| that seem unnecessarily ambiguous to you? Usually when
| people say "dozens" they mean some small handful of
| dozens with an absolute number probably smaller than 200
| (otherwise most would say "hundreds"). Few people are
| going to think "hundreds of trillions" when someone says
| "dozens". If one is expected to think "hundreds of
| trillions" in this case, it seems they should be equally
| expected to think "hundreds of quadrillions" which would
| be incorrect here.
|
| Even if one agrees that "dozens" is accurate to mean
| "hundreds of trillions" it still misses the mark for the
| argument because the odds come from the high number of
| planets. That is to say, there are very low odds that any
| individual planet harbors life but ostensibly much
| greater odds that one planet in a set of planets harbors
| life. Saying "hundreds of trillions" gets that point
| across better than "dozens".
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| I had no idea if the number of planets was estimated to
| be in billions or trillions and I wasn't going to look it
| up. So I went with dozens.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Universe really big, earth not so so so special
| pfdietz wrote:
| Assuming the conclusion like that is not a valid argument.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| You're mistaken. Life thrives in a huge variety of
| environments and survives in many more, and we have
| evidence of similar suns and the existence of planets in
| habitable zones. We can observe varieties of axial tilt
| and configurations of moons in our own solar system. We
| can form (bad) estimates of probability for earth-like
| cosmic conditions, and they're good enough that we've
| found some planets where we expect they might be.
|
| It seems like a far larger assumption to think Earth is
| unique in the cosmos, given nature's tendency to repeat
| itself. There are numerous natural harbors on earth, for
| example - places where the sea currents and land terrain
| combine to make a relatively calm environment even during
| stormy conditions. If we view Earth and the solar system
| as a natural harbor in space, what basis is there for
| thinking it can not exist anywhere else? The fact that
| we're uncertain about exactly how common it is is not a
| good reason to think the answer is 'not at all'.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Fallacious. Size does not determine significance.
| grey-area wrote:
| 10^24 stars in the Universe.
|
| ~10^25 planets in the Universe.
|
| 13 billion out of a googol years elapsed.
|
| And you think our insignificant spec of dust is the first or
| will be the last on which life evolved?
| bokan wrote:
| But the probability of life arising is an unknown.
| Intuitively I too feel it probably isn't that small, but it
| wouldn't be the first time intuition about the universe is
| wrong. How do you _know_ the odds of life arising aren't
| 1/10^30?
| grey-area wrote:
| We don't know, but we can guess that it is lower than
| that, and have no reason to think it is that rare.
|
| The elements of life have been found to arise
| spontaneously, see Bartel and Szostak for example.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The elements of life (by this I presume you mean various
| small biomolecules like amino acids) arising easily
| doesn't imply life arises easily.
| umvi wrote:
| We know the probability of life arising in the universe
| is >0 because we exist.
|
| However, we don't know if life can arise spontaneously
| given the right conditions (abiogenesis) or if must it be
| "seeded" at some level by an existing life form (i.e.
| deity, asteroid containing bacteria, etc)?
|
| I'm religious, so I'm more in the "seeded" camp than
| "spontaneous" camp but either way, I strongly believe
| there is life on other planets in the universe, it's just
| too bad the universe is so big and light so slow that
| it's hard to confirm.
| jnsie wrote:
| > I'm religious, so I'm more in the "seeded" camp than
| "spontaneous" camp but either way, I strongly believe
| there is life on other planets in the universe, it's just
| too bad the universe is so big and light so slow that
| it's hard to confirm.
|
| Hijacking someone else's comment to ask without judgement
| or agenda - How, if at all, would it alter your religious
| beliefs were life/intelligent life to be found on another
| planet?
| umvi wrote:
| I keep my religious beliefs and scientific beliefs mostly
| segregated, so they don't affect each other too strongly
| for the most part. The reason for this is that those 2
| things are reinforced by different sources. My religious
| beliefs are reinforced by spiritual experiences (such as
| repeatedly being stumped by [challenging life/work
| problem], praying for help, and then getting distinct
| thoughts or impressions that miraculously unblock me...
| or sometimes I'm miraculously unblocked through the
| actions other people), my scientific beliefs are formed
| and are refined by reading scientific literature +
| critical thinking. If the 2 are in conflict (which is
| pretty rare), it's usually my religious beliefs that
| adapt to new scientific understanding. For example, if
| evolution seems to be in conflict with intelligent
| design, I reconcile by concluding evolution itself may
| have been the thing that was intelligently designed (i.e.
| "this computer program can't have been intelligently
| designed, we've proven it was created by an LLM" --> "ok,
| then the LLM was intelligently designed").
|
| One thing that would probably alter my religious beliefs
| significantly is if abiogenesis or synthetic life were
| proven possible (i.e. you can clearly show in a lab how
| to make life arise from non-life, or how to create
| artificial life). I don't find the current "primordial
| soup" or other abiogenesis arguments convincing enough to
| abandon religion, though I do re-visit the wiki every
| couple years to see what's new on that front.
| pfdietz wrote:
| You didn't actually give an argument. Blustery personal
| attack is not an argument; indeed, it's a sign you realize
| you don't have an argument.
| grey-area wrote:
| The no of stars in the universe is a personal attack? Or
| are you upset I consider Earth insignificant?
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Well, however improbable it is to be the first, someone
| always has to be.
| grey-area wrote:
| We have no evidence we're the first. Given the distances
| involved it is unlikely we'll find other life, unless it
| is very common.
| pfdietz wrote:
| We have no evidence we're not the first.
|
| I remind you that I'm not claiming we're first; I'm
| asking for justification for claims that life exists
| elsewhere, or is common, or that we're not the first.
| Myself, I am taking an agnostic position, not committing
| myself to unjustifiable conclusions.
| concordDance wrote:
| I can't tell if you're serious, but in case you are:
|
| The Drake Equation and anthropic reasoning are both frequently
| discussed in rationist circles.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Ah, utilitarianism. Perpetually deranged, perpetually evil.
| dang wrote:
| Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? We're
| trying for _curious_ conversation here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| flenserboy wrote:
| life expands to fit the space it's given. pretty much every
| habitable niche on Earth has something living there, extending
| even well down into the planet. we probably should be helping
| things along by sending craft filled with various single-celled
| organisms (& some tardigrades for good measure) to places where
| life isn't found (do the research first; no need to overwrite
| what could already be there) but might be able to get a toehold.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| See Surface Tension by James Blish.
|
| https://metallicman.com/surface-tension-by-jamesblish-free-f...
|
| https://metallicman.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/surface-t...
| bhouston wrote:
| I think we should definitely expand life into the cosmos.
| Eventually we will likely find other life and hopefully it
| doesn't lead to conflict.
|
| I have recently been listening to the "We Are Legion (We Are
| Bob)" sci-fi series. It is about a Von Neumann probe [1] that
| aids humanity in expanding past Earth. I find a lot of it is
| thought provoking.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft
| noizejoy wrote:
| > ... find other life and hopefully it doesn't lead to
| conflict.
|
| ... well, that would be a first.
| bhouston wrote:
| Nothing worth doing is easy.
| rurp wrote:
| This isn't like trying to start a new workout routine where
| the worst case scenario is some mild discomfort. The
| downside of contact with aliens is the obliteration of
| unique life forms and/or humanity.
| sockaddr wrote:
| The bobiverse is such a great series
| rurp wrote:
| How could it not lead to conflict? As far as we have seen,
| different groups always come into conflict. Humans have already
| driven thousands of species to extinction and show no signs of
| that ever changing. Maybe an advanced civilization has found a
| way to reliably enforce peaceful conflict resolution on diverse
| groups, but it's vastly more likely that an advanced
| civilization would treat us the same way we treat less powerful
| groups.
| bhouston wrote:
| Even the same group as it gets bigger split into factions
| which fight against themselves. I think this is the nature of
| trying to have shared control of large groups - consensus
| just becomes hard and a lot of work. You either get factious
| fighting or a lack of freedom to have your own opinions. The
| middle ground where you agree to disagree but still
| compromise is hard.
| rf15 wrote:
| "we should definitely expand life into the cosmos."
|
| So... an expansionist/colonialist agenda for earth-originating
| life
|
| "oh also hopefully this doesn't lead to conflict"
|
| _I wonder._
| greiskul wrote:
| Expand life into cosmos doesn't imply expanding earth-
| originating life to countries that already have life.
|
| There is definitely possibility for conflict when we
| encounter other life, be it inteligent or not. But what is
| wrong with expanding earth-life to planets devoid of life
| that we terraform?
| DennisP wrote:
| Do you think fish should not have expanded to dry land?
|
| Even that analogy understates things because as far as we
| know, the rest of the known universe is lifeless rock.
| Personally I'll admit to being a chauvinist who favors life
| over non-life. If we find native life somewhere else, I'm all
| for leaving it alone, but until then, bringing life to a
| lifeless universe seems like possibly the most meaningful
| thing we can do as a civilization.
| phkahler wrote:
| Some people really hate humanity. They'd rather see the
| universe stay full of lifeless rocks than have people touch
| it.
|
| I'm all for being cautious if there's something significant
| out there, but so far we haven't even found anything
| insignificant.
| parasti wrote:
| Almost every place on Earth is populated by humans via
| "expansionism".
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| I prefer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_the_Lifemaker
|
| See the "Prologue: The Searcher" linked from there to get an
| idea why :)
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| Simple ethical filter - were you or any of your descendants ever
| a full time resident of Jersey City. If yes, then please don't
| step onto the spaceship.
| smokel wrote:
| _> So should we attempt such a thing, and if so, what would be
| our motivation?_
|
| The thing is, this question needs not be answered satisfactorily
| before a single individual accrues enough means to make it
| possible.
|
| Apart from non-proliferation "we" seem to be very bad at keeping
| technology in check.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I can't help thinking the paper referred to is basically an
| effort to create a sinecure for philosophy professors. Would we
| be cautious if some random but obviously artificial space probe
| appeared? Of course. It's reasonable to expect the same of any
| other space-capable civilization.
|
| Conversely, I also think the undertaking broad scale bio-
| colonization with dumb planetary infection probes is going to be
| way more expensive and difficult than most people imagine. We
| would have a better prospect by sending out mycelia with human
| DNA comehow encoded as passengers on some cosmic equivalent of a
| taking our retirement funds to Las Vegas.
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