Bill Gates vs. Our Intergalactic Descendants
Hardly anyone in human history has ever been so wrong as Bill Gates by attacking space colonization
“I don’t know — I’ve become obsessed with things like Malaria and HIV and getting rid of those diseases, and I probably bore people at cocktail parties talking about diseases. Space? We have a lot to do here on Earth.”
— Bill Gates on 'The Late Late Show' (Source)
From the perspective of our intergalactic descendants, problems like malaria and HIV in Africa are completely and utterly irrelevant.
To realize this, you need to understand the sheer enormity of space, so here is something to make it more intuitive: if space travel was instantaneous and you visited each star in the Andromeda galaxy for only 1 second, it would still take you ~31,000 years to do so.
All these stars are resources that can be used to simulate utopian living conditions for trillions upon trillions of beings for trillions of years, and to create god-like Matrioshka brains capable of experiencing unimaginable happiness and joy.
It seems terrible to ignore the plight of millions of people in Africa. But they are no more than a few organic compounds in the primordial soup that is Earth, while the colonization of space is the abiogenesis process itself.
Any action that doesn't directly contribute to lighting the spark of virtually all life in the universe will be as irrelevant to our descendants as small disturbances in the primordial soup are to us.
This is not to say, of course, that we cannot do both: improve the lives of people living today and accelerate the colonization of space. But you shouldn't act morally superior while attacking people who are doing far more important work than you.
Subscribe to Axis of Ordinary
Links and stuff