The Long Way Back to Ourselves

9.6

The Multiplanetary Thesis

This episode takes seriously Elon Musk's thesis that a Mars colony is insurance against human extinction and tests it with a computational objection: even the most devastated Earth imaginable stays more hospitable than Mars, whose gravity is less than forty percent of Earth's. Toby Ord's framework of existential risk estimates that risks people produce themselves are more likely than natural ones, which weakens the insurance idea, since the same civilization would export its dangers. The critics Chris Impey and Daniel Deudney object, with Deudney warning that an isolated colony could produce an authoritarian form of government. A comparison with the Polynesian settlement of the Pacific shows why the two undertakings differ fundamentally.