Sending a message to the future

Abstract

If we humans manage to kill ourselves, we may not take all life on Earth with us. That leaves hope for another intelligent civilization to arise; if they do, we could potentially help them by leaving carefully chosen messages. The author argues that despite sounding kind of crazy, this could potentially compare favorably to more conventional extinction risk reduction. The author performs a rough calculation and concludes that by spending ~$10M on the proposed program, we can reduce the badness of non-AI extinction events by ~1/300. – AI-generated abstract.