Risks of space colonization

Abstract

Space colonization is humankind’s best bet for long-term survival. This makes the expected moral value of space colonization immense. However, colonizing space also creates risks — risks whose potential harm could easily overshadow all the benefits of humankind’s long-term future. In this article, I present a preliminary overview of some major risks of space colonization: Prioritization risks, aberration risks, and conflict risks. Each of these risk types contains risks that can create enormous disvalue; in some cases orders of magnitude more disvalue than all the potential positive value humankind could have. From a (weakly) negative, suffering-focused utilitarian view, we therefore have the obligation to mitigate space colonization-related risks and make space colonization as safe as possible. In order to do so, we need to start working on real-world space colonization governance. Given the near total lack of progress in the domain of space governance in recent decades, however, it is uncertain whether meaningful space colonization governance can be established in the near future, and before it is too late.