Latest / Art of the Question / The Ethics of Seeding the Universe - Dr. Asher Soryl - #68

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The Ethics of Seeding the Universe - Dr. Asher Soryl - #68 · Art of the Question

• Julius Moorman: Thank you so much for coming on the show. Today we're going to be discussing your paper, which is the ethics of directed panspermia, which is essentially purposefully seeding the universe. You wrote a very interesting paper together with Anders Sandberg, who's been on the show as well. It was one of my favorite episodes I've I've done so far. He's great. But the paper you guys both wro wrote together is extremely interesting and it's a topic I wanted to cover for a long time. So I'm really grateful that we get to meet and that we get to discuss all the interesting ethics of it all because it is yeah it sounds there there are good arguments to be made for it and and there's also some good arguments to be made against it. so before we we get into the paper and discuss the the definition first, what directed panspermia actually is, I was curious to understand what inspired you to write this paper and why you got interested in this topic in the first place. Yeah. yeah, thanks for for having me on here. Happy to be here. so I I suppose my background is in you know, kind of well being or the study of of well being in analytic philosophy and also in suffering reduction. So in the paper as we'll get into, we talk about two positions being biocentrism and and welfareism. as a philosopher, I land in in the second category. I'm I'm a you proud welfareist and I I think well being is the closest approximation to intrinsic value that we have for guiding ethical decision making. so yeah, basically during my master's degree and my PhD, I studied wild animal welfare as a topic that I felt had been understudied and and seemed to be of great importance and had considered the possibility of directed panspermia as an implication of some of the the arguments that I was writing about. and then it was I think three or four years ago now in Oxford, I was doing a visitation at the Uhara Center for Practical Ethics. as a part of my PhD. And Anders and I happened to be giving presentations one after the other at the Natural History Museum for an animal ethics seminar series. and so, yeah, being a big fan of his work, I sent him an email and and said, if he has time, I'd love to to chat with him. and we ended up talking for I think almost three hours about all sorts of different topics. but then yeah, discussing wide animal welfare and directed panspermia. he has the intuition that it would be a good thing. he's he's very optimistic and very promoting promoting life in the universe. and so we found a disagreement. but then we actually found that when we're working through our reasons and then trying to take a an agnostic position on on what intrinsically matters, we found that we actually ended up agreeing on on a proposed moratorium subject to future research and thought actually We should write a paper together in order to articulate that. So that's the backstory of the paper. Awesome. And well, this is the the culmination of it all. it's a great paper. What I really enjoyed about it is a lot of scientific papers are sometimes quite difficult to read. this one reads like a breeze. It it was very easy to understand, even though, of course, it is still a scientific paper, and and it's hard to avoid all complexity, but I thought it was really well done and yeah, it was a it was a pleasure to read. So for the people who haven't read the paper, what is directed panspermia? And perhaps we should start with what panspermia is in the first place. Yeah. So the the term panspermia coined by a Greek philosopher, Anexagoras, means Essentially like life coming from the cosmos falling to the earth as as seeds. And it's it was originally proposed as a a hypothesis to explain the origin of life on Earth. directed panspermia kind of flips that and says, you know, or it it could be an explanation for life on Earth, but typically it's discussed as something that humans could do. it's the deliberate spread of life by intelligent actors. and so we focus in the paper on yeah, whether or not humans could or should attempt this. but panspermia has been a subject of like scientific and philosoph philosophical discussion for hundreds, yeah, even thousands of years, depending on yeah, how how how you look at it. Yeah. And if we look at it from a practical perspective, this would involve sending small probes containing bacteria or or microbial life And send it to other planets, to exoplanets, to in an attempt to hopefully seed those planets with those microbes, bacteria, or or whatever you're using as this life source to then, just like happened on Earth, preserve life. Because if we just send out enough of these probes to different exoplanets, the chance that one of these batches would involve into intelligent life and therefore preserve life in the universe, preserve consciousness in the universe, as Elon Musk, for example, calls it, would be enhanced and that can either be good or bad. we'll get into the ethics of it. But that's basically what it would look like in practice, correct? Yes. Yeah. one of the the core reasons why I think this is so important to look at now is that the you know the individual payloads would be very small and microorganisms are are very easy to provide, you know, protected conditions or to you know to to build a protected shield around so that they can survive the background radiation of the universe and and it would be very cheap as well to to send out multiple payloads, especially if you scale up you know, whatever production system to to send them out. So yeah, we can get into to more detail about that if you'd like. But it's it looks a lot more imminent than other kind of more sci-fi, you know, conventionally science fiction related possibilities for humans affecting outer space, such as sending humans or or other large animals who have much more complex requirements. Yeah, and I think it would make sense to go a little deeper on the feasibility of it, because to many people it might might sound like some distanced science fiction idea, but I think the technical feasibility of directed panspermia is actually much closer than many people may realize. I mean, we've just last week or this week even, I I'm not entirely sure, but seen the the new starship. a launch from from Elon Musk, which deployed a huge payload of Starlink satellites. I believe if they ramp it up, they didn't even stuff the ship to its maximal capacity, but I think if if he will, and and he probably will within some of the next flights, that would be the equivalent of like twenty previous flights with just the one starship. So we are by using reusable rockets, the cost of going and and getting payload into space has gone down significantly. You can literally go onto the SpaceX website right now, like you would some use some kind of postal service and calculate how expensive how expensive it is to send your package into space. And you can literally just do it. I mean, it's still pretty expensive for regular people, but if you are a company with a decent amount of money or just a wealthy individual for that matter, everyone can s can send stuff into space right now. so we are much closer. Like I think if we would want to, we we could already send out tiny packages into space. Of course we w space is is vast and the distances are still pretty huge. But as you say in the paper, these microbes, given the right circumstances, they can survive for for very, very long periods of time, millions of years, perhaps even h hundreds of millions of years. So correct me if I'm wrong, but we are closer than than many people may realize. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean I think the t the technology's already there for transmitting microorganisms within our solar system. and that could be achieved using, you know, the current SpaceX technology. But the fact that the costs have been decreasing by like literally orders of magnitude just in the last 10 years. and you know this technology is now proven. and right now, you know, SpaceX is the primary like you know non-governmental actor that's acting in space. but I expect in the future, as with most other industries, other companies will probably rise up and start, you know, there'll be more competition to bring prices down. for enacting directed panspermia out of the solar system, I think you would need additional technologies in order to you know, send them at the at the right velocity, you know, so that you're not waiting potentially like hundreds of millions of years. and and you also want to be able to do it on a shorter timeframe so that you can correctly predict the trajectories of whatever exoplanet that we're that that one would target in this hypothetical scenario. But as discussed in the paper, there there have been methods proposed for this. I think the use of solar sales is at least like 30 years ago was proposed. And and as I said before, because the the individual pansperms, the the units containing the the UV protected pellets, which each contain like, you know, billions or trillions of microorganisms. because they're so small, it's so much easier than sending even like satellites as SpaceX is doing currently. It would actually be possible in principle to engineer, you know, your own propulsion mechanism just from planet Earth without even using rockets to to get them outside of of Earth's orbit. and then once you have that kind of system in place, then as I said, it's scalable. you know, it might cost a lot to to build the capacity to send them into outer space to begin with, if you have a mechanism where it begins on Earth. But once it's built, you can just do it ad infinitum and the cost becomes exceedingly small, whereas the the probability of success per payload sent out into space remains the same, which is why we think we should consider it as a as a potentially near-term probability, even though it's still difficult to, you know, estimate the likelihood of this happening because we can't actually test this empirically, or at least if we did, then we would have Actually done Pan Spermia, and so it's too late. Yeah, and what what I find really interesting about this idea in general is that many people and it makes sense, but we are often talking about building a base on the moon, and we're talking about sending people to Mars eventually and and perhaps turning humanity into a multiplanetary species and and by either Building, going underground on Mars, or or some other structures that prevent re radiation poisoning or developing cancers or anything. We are actively working on technologies that could potentially one day solve these issues. And but we are still talking about relatively short time frames, right? I mean Elon Musk really wants to do this before the end of his life, which I make sense. If you dedicate your life towards something, you wanna see the end result. but with directed panspermia, this won't be the case. Even though the packages will be small and therefore we could reach higher speeds to reach these other planets. there is still no way and and then let's let's assume we could drop today. Today. there there's there's packages deployed on on all these. It takes billions of years to to evolve into potentially intelligent life. So it's something that we would never, the people building it would never see the fruits of their labor, if you will, which is something that right now might seem weird to us because most of our lives and economy is focused on direct benefits and and benefits to which we or perhaps our children, but not many generations in the future, would see the outcome of. However, this wasn't always the case. And I like to use the Sagrada Familia, the the the building in in Barcelona as an example. That only got finished very recently, but they started building that thing hundreds of years ago. And The people who laid those first bricks, they knew that they weren't going to see the end of it. And that was just part of the gig. And and we as I mean, to be fair, those people building the Sagrada Familia hundreds of years ago probably didn't have much choice and and the their circumstances weren't exactly ideal. I don't know whether that was forced perhaps to, but just in general, we we as humanity tend to Prefer projects that we can actually see finished within our lifetimes. And this wouldn't be one of them. Why do you think that we started? Yeah, I mean, I know it makes sense that we that that our focus has shifted because of the economy and money. And I I understand it, but this would be a very different beast. Are there actually parties con considering this? and and that would be unique in the sense that yeah, given everything I just said, basically. Yeah. I think the the example of the Sagrada Familia is is actually like surprisingly quite apt. I lived in Barcelona two years ago and visited three times in the six months that I was there. and it's It is my favorite building. And so, you know, I kind of I totally have a sense of of what you're talking about. but I think it's it's it's appropriate because there's I think a lot more in common with people who hold you know axiomatic kind of ethical or or you know positions on on what matters intrinsically in the universe. and I think the the people, you know, or or the players who you know, began the process of building the Socorata Familiar. they wanted to build it as you know, in in the case of many other churches, but I think especially in this case is a is a monument to God based on their own conception of purpose and what matters. And it doesn't matter to them if they're not around to see the final product because what matters is, you know, they're they're motivated by belief in something greater than themselves. and in the case of directed panspermia, in the last fifty years at least, the the people who have been arguing for it and actually taking actions to try and prove that it's possible and and strategize you know how how to actually implement it are also people who believe in a sense of purpose outside of themselves. and so in the paper we talk specifically about Michael Mortoner, who has a a view of panbiotic ethics where he he believes that the life tends in a in a direction towards replication and and is like an ongoing, you know, evolving process and and he sees the purpose of life, which includes you know, himself and all of humanity in any instance of life is to continue expanding and replicating and engaging in these like basic biological mechanisms or evolve mechanisms. So for him it's also, you know, and I think he actually We're we're actually from the the same city in New Zealand, which is v very interesting. I've never met him. I think Anders has met him before. But yeah, he I think he's near the end of his life or he might have recently passed. I'm not exactly sure. But he he certainly his arguments in favour of directed panspermia yeah, don't don't depend at all on him being around to to to see it and and in fact given the interstellar different d distances involved, it's unlikely that unless we solve like longevity and become posthuman and you know whatever happens, it's unlikely that we would ever see the the product. as for individual actors working toward this right now, I am aware of a few people. I don't know how many how po how much resources they have, but a few people are working on this like ser seemingly quite seriously to attempt it. And then I'm aware although I don't know their identity. I'm aware of one person with like considerable resources who's also working toward this, which was one of the reasons that I actually wanted to publish the paper in a lot of these circles concerning, you know, like long term risks of astronomical scale. There's often a concern about like info hazards, what are called. so by talking about something you could increase the likelihood that it happens, you know, and if it's bad with consequences on an astronomical scale, then maybe we shouldn't talk about it. but in this case I thought, well, not talking about it is actually just, you know, kind of delaying or or not not delaying, it's it's just giving more time until somebody potentially attempts it. And and because we don't know the likelihood of any given attempt succeeding, I thought it's important to actually try and open this discussion and develop some sort of multilateral, you know, kind of agreement. a around like the development of these technologies and and where they should be used. So that that was yeah one of the reasons I wanted to write the paper. Yeah, no I I I completely agree. And one of the things you you do me we'll we'll get into the ethics right after this, but one of the things you also mentioned, which I wanna highlight in this section of the conversation, is that you mentioned rightfully so I believe that people could do this secretively. That I mean You don't really like back in the day you'd need your own rocket and you'll need your own clearance. But now you can just I mean, obviously they are similar to our our luggage on the airport. Your your luggage is scanned, so to say, and you have to be really clear about your your goals and what you're actually bringing into space. But we're talking about small probes and there are already examples of people who without any permission sends stuff into space. And given how small these packages could potentially be, people may do this without discussing it with the international bodies that govern space, if you could even call it governance, because that's a discussion for for a different episode, but space law is kind of messy too. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. there has been some renewed effort in the last few years. to try and you know increase coordination toward you know acting in outer space. And there's an organization called the Cosmic Footprint Society that's attempting to, you know, get more coordination on these exact sorts of activities, which I I s I support and I think I'm I'm a member of. but yeah, it's it's also, you know, in in recent in recent years, there's also been a a sort of deterioration of these kinds of international coordination mechanisms that we have you know, much of which in response to like the COVID pandemic and the fa and in some cases the failure of these organizations to act in in the interests of of everyone or or be transparent. And so it's it's a difficult time to kind of be be pushing for this. But I think you know, like in other cases where you know a single action and it we we talk about the unilateralists' curse at the end of the paper. where where a single action could determine the likelihood of an event occurring that has cosmic consequences. It's it's so important that, you know, we we do have this kind of dialogue, I think. and and yeah, the develop the continued development of of more efficient and and more like stealth you know technologies to interfere or or act in out of space, makes this actually more pressing as well. because as I said before, I think this is actually analogous in some ways to the development of AI and and biorisk, where previously, you know, if you wanted to commit some a terrorist action, you know, on on a kind of national or international scale, you had to be a government and you had to d you know, have a wet lab and you had to employ scientists who you know, all of these steps were were very restrictive and prohibitive for most countries. and then the risk of developing you know, highly advanced artificial intelligence is that you can actually just automate this. And now it's it could be trivial for anybody with access to to r you know enough resources to to act on what this this system is is telling to to be able to pose this kind of threat to to the international community. And I think the same is true for for Panspermia. Now it's it's not so much a matter of like, do you have, you know, some of the world's top you know kind of physicists and engineers working on your team. it could actually just be as simple as having, you know, sufficient resources And then just like maybe even an AI system that's working with you to yeah to develop the technology to attempt it. So yeah. We we have dem democratized directed Panspermia. Exactly. Yeah. No, so I think we've established why it's so relevant to talk about this, right? I mean the technical feasibility is there, the will is there within some people. So this isn't some science fiction story that we are talking about, even though it could make for a very cool science fiction book or a movie. this isn't as unrealistic as many people may think, which would be a good time to try and and figure out should we want this? in the paper there are arguments for directed penspermia, and there's arguments against it. And based on those arguments you you come to a conclusion, which we'll obviously discuss. I wanna start like you also do in the paper with the arguments for directed penaspermia, which are the the main ones are well I wrote it down as life maxing, but it's actually life maximizing, if you the more scientific appropriate term. and life conserving. So can we get into yeah, those arguments? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, so the the maximizing view, that's you know definitely the I think the strongest argument for directed panspermia is just simply that life has intrinsic value and that this value you know scales in proportion to how much life exists and and we should create as much life as possible because it's the only intrinsic value. And so you know, naturally actions which you know, promote the abundance of of of life or biomass or whatever unit an a person decides tracks this thing that they're they're trying to promote. they're going to, you know, follow whatever strategies promote that. And it just you know, it it's a fact of physical systems that there is a finite amount of energy, you know, on on different planets and on on Earth, even though, you know, like evolved life has d become like very advanced and sophisticated and found like very you know unique ways of extracting energy from from the environment in ways that like certainly like a billion years ago yeah there was a lot less life because life was a lot more simple. there is like still an upper limit just because there is a limit on the the physical resources and energy that can be exploited to you know enable replication and that's the cycle. So yeah, naturally people who want to maximize the abundance of life are going to want to attempt this. there's also, I think, a strong argument for people who care about conserving life in the universe. this is a bit different because it depends on how common or or ubiquitous life is in the universe. And, you know, because we only have our data point and and the search for extraterrestrial life has so far come up short. it might be prudent to assume that we're the only ones or that it's very uncommon that that life evolves. And there's actually a lot of very interesting research looking at different, you know, filters at different stages in the e in the evolution or the proto evolution of life. and, you know, to to the extent of our current models, it looks like a lot of these stages were very unlikely and there was no direct you know, kind of selection gradient. So it was just a matter of like, you know, improbable, you know, co occurring physical events that resulted in in the the fundamentals of life and then and then we have evolutionary processes and then we have we have us eventually. and so if if life is uncommon, which, you know, the evidence is consistent with, then the risk of life extinction or, you know permanent eradication on Earth, which is ultimately inevitable because the sun is going to become a red dwarf and there are other extinction threats as evidenced by the history of of life's near extinction on our planet already and and just knowing that like the universe is like you know quite unstable and and extinction level events can occur randomly without warning. so people who want to conserve the existence of life would want to spread it because Right now we have all of our eggs in one basket on Earth and they'd be concerned that if something happens here, then that could, you know, snub out this this process that has that has this intrinsic value. Yeah. And I think the first argument is very simple to understand, right? I mean it's life is good, so we should want more of it. I mean that's that's basically the the gist of it, if you break it down completely. kind of it it is a very simplistic approach, but that's basically what it boils down to. the conservation argument is very similar to what we hear people like Elon Musk say, for example, when they're talking about their missions to Mars, like, hey, we have all our eggs in in one basket, like you say, and that it is inevitable that one day something catastrophic will happen to Earth. I mean w The Earth has experienced many mass extinction events in the past. We know this based on the the the the the soil and and and the and the archaeologists and and there's there's a a lot of evidence. I mean space is a hostile place, right? shit happens n not just once, but it is inevitable that we will get asteroid strikes and Like you also point out in the paper, NASA is working actively on technology together with ESA to divert potentially dangerous asteroids, which they successfully did. More not a dangerous one, but just a general asteroid. They they managed to change the trajectory of an asteroid with their Dart mission, I believe. I believe that there's still some more research coming out of that in the in the future. But that is something we're working on. of course there's the danger of pandemics, there's the danger of nuclear war. There there is a variety of things that can go bad. And there then there's the inevitable one, which is the sun. So when the sun is gone, that that means it's it's probably an end game for us, at least for for life as we as we know it. so that seems reasonable. I mean, conserving a life. it's different than than just straight up s seeding life. It's more of a last resort, right? So is like, hey, we kind of know that we are going to go extinct. Therefore, this is more like more like a panic button. Like okay, in case something yeah. It's it's also interesting because I guess the scale of directed panspermia that these arguments point toward is different for these two positions because the life maximizing view simply wants, you know, like a it's like a linear increase for every additional planet teaming with biomass, that's like a a doubling or a tripling or or however much of the total value. Whereas for life conserving views, actually if you you know, if you succe succeed on say five or ten panspermia missions, then actually the there's the a marginal value to continuing it beyond that. So something else that actually I I don't think we mentioned in the paper that but I think is relevant to consider is that there's also uncertainty around whether or not intelligent life will evolve just from you know a planet with life. and it seems like you know our current estimates of of looking at different evolutionary strategies where you know different amounts of energy are invested into into offspring survival and development, animals like humans that can build technology and and live for long enough and and can coordinate with a shared language. This seems like a very unusual strategy and it might be like very unstable on an evolutionary time scale. And so the risk isn't only the extinction of life on Earth. It could actually also be the extinction of intelligent life, namely humans. That could be functionally equivalent to the extinction of life because without intelligent life, unless natural panspermia happens for for reasons that are still like very uncertain and we don't have strong reasons to believe are likely to occur, then that would also prevent you know, life from being spread to these other planets. So and and you know, risk to to humanity seems a lot more pressing or salient. It's actually very difficult to completely eradicate life, you know, have a complete extinction event. And in the paper we talk about, the closest we came to was the Permatriassic, which I think was seventy percent of land species and ninety percent of marine species from memory. So yeah. Yeah, no, that that is that is true. Yeah. I I I believe what is often talked about, at least in the s sphere of of getting to Mars is preserving consciousness in the universe. Which is something you do touch on in the paper, not not mentioning consciousness, but sentience. And that there's a distinction between sentient beings, w we are sentient beings, dogs, cats, other animals are sentient beings. Generally we do not consider microbial life to be sentient beings, but more so beings that just work on autopilot, if you will, and just react to their surroundings, but not necessarily experience the world like mammals or or other creatures would. I this is this is also, you know, subject to debate. And I d I'd I'd looked at this or or investigated it quite extensively in my PhD. And I have the intuition that sentience, which I define as their being a unified field of experience and essentially there being like hard boundaries between different experiences. So like my consciousness or my experience is modeling my environment and myself. And I think this has an adaptive role and probably evolved during the Cambrian because of pathological complexity and and degrees of freedom and and predator prey co evolution and a bunch of factors that made adaptive behaviour or you know like selected for, I think you know, bound consciousness like this plays a special role in way that ways that non-conscious processing doesn't allow. But this assumes that to be able to create a bound experience like like I believe sentient beings have, this assumes that this has a metabolic cost and and that it requires, you know, like an advanced, you know, kind of evolved adaptation, and that it's not just something that basic microorganisms possess. And so it could be that maybe consciousness is very cheap and maybe all manner of biological you know entities have you know their own small experiences. it's very unclear like what their their well being would be like in that case because it's it's so distant from the constraints under which you know kind of sentient animals evolved that modulate how we feel in in response to different circumstances. But but it could be that, you know, microorganisms are sentient And maybe that would change the arguments implications. Yeah, I agree. And this is a topic that is endlessly fascinating to me. I I read a lot about consciousness. I recently finished Being You from Anil Saf on this topic, which is a great book. I started listening to a podcast from Alex O'Connor yesterday. I believe it's latest episode. He has an episode I forgot the the guest's name but it's the episode the discussion is around whether plants are or or could be a conscious or or sentient. I I'm only ten minutes in, but it was already very interesting. But yeah, I I I tend to agree that it is unlikely that microbial life is sentient the way that we are or that a cat or a dog would be I would find that hard to believe, but who knows, right? And then we can can get into the difficulty of of even measuring that. but that's that's an a discussion for for for another another day. regarding the yeah life conserving thing yeah we we do only have the single data point request regarding life which is Earth. I mean, that's the only planet that we definitely definitively know of. the only planet that has life. I am very curious about the the Mars sample with the leopard spots that they found that's just such an agonizing idea to me that there's just this sample sitting on the surface of Mars ready to be picked up that could open this whole discussion about preservation because they're very careful because they've made some mistakes in the past and and they were too too quick to to to jump the gun and and declaring that they had in found in fact found life on a different planet. but there there do seem to be s several like strong leads even within our solar system that like we haven't ruled out the the possibility of of microbial life existing on different celestial bodies just within our solar system. And then you can get into the discussions of panspermia, right? Was it actually did life just arise the once and and did it somehow spread throughout the solar system by asteroid impacts, for example? Or did it arise on its own on on several different occasions if we do indeed come to the conclusion that for example that sample that was taken on Mars does contain proof of microbial life. Have you been following that story at all? Yeah, I not the specific story, but I am aware of you know, one of the primary hypotheses for life on Earth is actually that maybe it c it could be an offshoot of potential life on Mars because we know that in the past you know it did it used to have I think an atmosphere and and liquid water, which was the result of geological activity creating a a a magnetic shield and protecting it from background radiation. And so you know Earth and and Mars are often considered to be you know, sister planets, they had similar conditions, but for for Mars, I think the the l the the the core cooled down and then it lost its, you know, protective shield. and so it could be that maybe there was like proto life on on Mars and then it just never got the chance to evolve where, you know, Earth it seems actually extraordinarily unusual on a cosmic scale. All of the you know the Goldilocks conditions that that we had in order to you know be protected from the harshness of space and and have time to be able to develop complex life. something you know we we also look at in the paper is we try and estimate the number of potentially habitable planets within our galaxy and and in other galaxies. And it's actually surprisingly, even though it's very improbable, there's just there's so many, you know, exoplanets out there that It is s you know, so th th this seemingly I think we come to the estimate of like three hundred million potentially habitable planets per galaxy on average, which is enormous if you think about it. And and also if you think about I think while we were writing the paper, the James Webb telescope was you know being constructed and now operational and and we're, you know, continually developing more advanced capacities to be able to detect conditions on exoplanets. so not only like theoretically, you know, like given its position in relation to whatever stars and and and its solar system, not only just making an inference there, but actually saying, you know, this is the the chemical composition of this planet and being able to predict with a much higher degree of confidence what kinds of microorganisms would thrive, given that, you know, even even in a on another planet with with liquid water and and and similar conditions to Earth, it might still have like a very different chemical composition and most microorganisms might not survive or or you know be able to take root in the way that ecosystems you know eventually emerge from. So yeah. Yeah. And I think if we just recap the arguments for direct dependspermia, there's just the the one that we discuss live maximizing Just life is good, so we should have more of it. Pretty, pretty straightforward. life con conservation, all right. life is fickle. it doesn't seem to be very abundant in the universe based on our current data. might change in the future, but based on what we currently know for sure, life seems to be pretty rare. We also know that catastrophic events happen all the time. Space is a hostile environment, so we know that we are doomed basically given a long enough timescale. Therefore it seems like a good idea to engage in directed panspermia. Now that sounds very logical, but there are also arguments against directed panspermia. part of which is or most of it is is your territory, as you pointed out, welfareism. Can you maybe explain what welfareism is and how it would oppose directed panspermia? Yeah. so welfareism is just essentially the view that the closest approximation for intrinsic value that should guide ethical decision making is the promotion of well-being, which You know, there are many different theories of well-being in philosophy, but broadly, you know, I I I take the view, and I think most philosophers take the view that suffering or at least unnecessary suffering is you know, kind of is is a bad thing, and flourishing or or feeling feeling good, you know, motivated, purposeful, whatever kind of emotional concepts we might attach to these these states of consciousness that that feel intrinsically attractive as opposed to aversive. th th these are good and and worth promoting. So so my view is that essentially well being is yeah, rather than the promotion of of life per se, well being is is a a better conception of of what matters and and how we should act to to promote what what matters. as for directed panspermia, it's like quite a you know a more complex argument or chain of reasoning in order to arrive at the position that welfareism seemingly opposes attempting directed panspermia. But earlier I was talking about how, you know, no matter what, just just because of physics, physical systems or, you know, exoplanets contain a finite number of resources and that sets a natural limit on the abundance of life that can, you know, kind of grow within those conditions. And of course you have you know, the the evolution of more sophisticated biological patterns where they become more and more optimized at extracting energy from their environment, you know, kind of in in unique ways. But fundamentally there's still like, you know, Earth has a finite you know, space and and finite energy. And there are some physical constraints that actually you can't overcome, even if you can become a lot more efficient to work around. And so the concern is that in environments with scarce resources, evolved patterns, which we'll call life, have to compete with one another to, you know, extract energy from from the environment. and competition is in fact like one of the primary driving forces behind evolution and natural selection because you know, there's because there's just finite energy and you can't, you know, grow ad infinitum. And so If you have a population of organisms that that is sentient, it's actually looking at the evolved life issue strategies of animals on on our planet, it's a lot more adaptive across a much wider variety of environments to simply have many offspring, you know, either in one bout or over the course of one's life. so in other words, to reproduce in significant excess to the carrying capacity of your environment because the risks are so great because of competition and because of unforeseen events that could you know kill any individual offspring, most animals reproduce in significant excess to the the you know what the environment can support. And then statistically for a stable population, one of them will survive into adulthood and reproduce themselves. and so the problem, you know, of Potentially natural suffering emerges when, yeah, you have ecosystems containing sentient beings, each of which ha has evolved this strategy. And maybe there there's a trade-off between how many offspring you produce and how much energy you invest in each individual offspring. So you know, this could be intrinsically like humans, you know, have a combination of like you know, typically only one child is born per event of reproduction, but then we also have this very long child rearing process and a lot of energy is invested, you know, as the child is developing so that we have, you know, a complex model of of of how to navigate all of the challenges in the world. But most animals come into existence and it's essentially a lottery whether or not they are going to be like eaten alive or starved to death, or maybe just stumble across, you know, a little bit of energy that they can consume and and grow and then develop and and repeat this process over and over again. And and the key thing to consider is that natural selection doesn't optimize for well-being intrinsically. I think that well-being is instrumental to the aims of natural selection, but specifically for for sentient beings. and as I said, not all, you know, life-containing populations might be sentient, but I think at least in in the case of of animals on earth, I think sentience evolved and and has this function, like pain, for example, one of the most conserved you know, I think states of well being has a function which is avoidance learning. It's it's not only withdrawing from harmful stimuli, but it's actually teaching an organism in response to novel stimuli when they encounter when they encounter harm or, you know, or noxious stimuli to to avoid that in the future because it's an adaptive model. because yeah, like environments contain constantly changing conditions and and you need a model that can change in response to these changing conditions. So it is yeah, a bit you know, as I said, a bit more complex chain of reasoning to to arrive at this conclusion. But like myself and other philosophers have argued in the past that because of of you know natural selection and because of like empirically looking at the life history strategies that most animals have evolved, that it could be the case that suffering predominates positive well-being states in nature. And so then if we spread life to other planets, then there's the risk that if sentience evolves, which seemingly it did on planet Earth, then we're actually just gonna be multiplying the amount of disvalue in the universe without, you know, s improving well being at at that scale. So that's that's roughly the concern of that. No, I I understand it. I have a few questions about it to to to kind of dig deeper on this to see if I understand it correctly. So let's take Earth, for example. And let's take humans out of the equation. So let's imagine Earth before we existed. There was natural selection going on. Some of the species and and animals within a species, they thrive. Like you say, some animals give on purpose, give birth to too much offspring, knowing that. Some of them will won't make it, but the ones that do will be the strongest ones and and they will be the best chance to keep the the species alive. Now there are prey in in nature. I I recently went to South Africa, I did a bunch of safaris d there. I didn't see any hunting going on, but I did see a lot of predators in their natural environments. And in order for them to thrive Some other animal must be killed. It's it's the natural food chain, if you will. If we're just strictly speaking about this earth before we arrived, what would that be from a welfare perspective? Because some animals thrive, some are hunted, some won't survive. is that a good thing according to to to the welfare? Is is that acceptable or is just life in general not a good thing because it always involves suffering for some parties? Yeah. So I I think there's kind of an interesting dynamic where, you know, as humans and as mammals, when we think about life in nature, like in the example you gave in in Africa on a safari, we tend to think about other mammals, like, you know, large you know, organisms that we can kind of empathize with and and they're very visible to us and we can kind of relate to them because we are actually evolutionarily very proximate. I think that, you know, f for mammals, whether or not suffering predominates positive welfare states, this is actually a a lot less clear because mammals are like among the most adapted toward investing lots of energy into their offspring. And and so even if you have like a I don't know, a gazelle or an antelope or or whatever that succumbs to predation at some point in their development, it's it it has been argued that, you know, it's it's very unclear whether or not this this one event at the end of its life makes, you know, this this entire you know, kind of system of selection and you know a a bad thing on net or or how to trade off the the positive and negative welfare. The concern that I and others have is that I I suppose we're quite biased when we think of of mammals because actually mammals represent like such a small fraction of the the total number of of potentially sentient beings on the planet at any given point. And because yeah, we have evolved like, you know, almost universally along along this axis of prioritizing offspring survival. But if you look at Like I think fish one of the the best examples, but also amphibians and reptiles and then invertebrates if you're willing to grant them sentience. yeah, fish I think number in the range of ten to the power of fifteen or more, in terms of the total number of of organisms that are alive at any given point. Mammals, it's only ten to the power of eleven to twelve. So that's already like three or four orders of magnitude separating them, which yeah, if if you're familiar with the how how you know exponential these numbers grow. It's bad. It's extraordinary. And then you look at the the evolved strategies of fish and actually many of them per event of reproduction have millions of offspring. so you you know, you might stand if you're born a a a fish, you might stand a a one in a million chance of surviving into adulthood and reproducing yourself. and it's essentially nonlinear the distribution of fecundity across different animal species. So, you know, even like a one in a thousand seems like extraordinarily low, but like, you know, some some fish have you know tens of millions of offspring per reproducing event. So it's not only this. And then I think also even if predation wasn't a factor, because again, predation's also something that's very intuitive and very easy to imagine there being a trade-off between the utility of one animal and the loss of another. I think most of the suffering in nature doesn't come from predation. I th if I had to to guess, and there's very little, you know, data on this, I w I would guess that most of it comes from resource s scarcity and essentially like hunger or thirst or malnutrition. So not being able to just get very basic energy in order to to grow and develop. just because as I said before, there's this finer energy and there's a lot of competition for it. but I also think that the evolution of parasitism is often like understated relative to its importance. So some estimates place out of all animal species that exist, between forty and sixty percent can be classified as parasites. And again, this is like very you know, uncommon or unintuitive because humans, even though we we ourselves have parasites in our ancestral environment because we've developed technology and and coordinated ourselves, we no longer have to deal with you know worms burrowing into our flesh and laying their eggs there or you know other animal species that you know in order to survive have to you know kind of leech off the the energy of of another and I think by like most reasonable estimates, you know, not all parasites because they vary in terms of how much suffering they can cause, but like many parasites certainly look you know, to to to cause a lot more suffering than the potential positive value that's created by by their existence if you assume the welfareist position. So it's more kind of like you know, non-mammals and also like non-predation, the kinds of things that are very unintuitive, but actually empirically represent the the vast majority of potential suffering for for sentient beings in nature. That's the that's the concern, more or less. Yeah. And assuming we Are not a product of directed panspermia ourselves, assuming we just arrived here naturally or or spontaneously, if you will. From this point of view, you could say, like, hey, we we know that this happens on earth. We are not going to eradicate life because there is suffering, because that would be even more unethical. But life, if you look at all creatures could potentially have more suffering than thriving. that it exists is one thing, but to actively try to copy this onto different planets, that would be unethical. Is is that correct? Yeah, but but it's important to note also, and this is something we we mentioned, I think, in a footnote of the paper, is is that this is a contingent you know, in other words, it's not a necessary outcome of just these natural processes which optimize for replication or the transmission of genetic information or whatever the unit of selection is that's resulted in in these these evolved strategies. and so it is actually possible in principle that you could have a natural environment that intrinsically selects for high levels of well being or at least like well being alongside fitness, which is defined as survival and reproductive success. and if you had a an environment that, you know, this I don't think this would happen naturally, because there's no, you know, kind of an intrinsic benefit for survival and and reproduction that comes from being happy. but if you could engineer a natural environment such that this was, you know, a one pressure among other pr other pressures, then you could actually avoid this outcome. And and this could be a way to reconcile both, you know, biocentrism and welfareism. because welfareism, as I said, it's it's not a necessary outcome that suffering predominates positive welfare states. It's it's just a result of these kinds of unguided, you know, evolutionary processes, and in natural environments. And and that could change with with oversight or with with engineering of of these selection pressures. Yeah, and wha what I was curious about, you you do mention it in the paper, I believe, but I wanna want to get a clearer picture is are suffering and thriving, as I call it, weighted equally? So for example, is five entities suffering suffering and five entities thriving, is that just it needs a tiebreaker or is it like, hey, thriving is more important than the few suffer suffering. How is this weighted and and and where do you draw the line? How do you how would you calculate something? Yeah, that that's a a great question. it honestly really depends. there there are different theories of how we should, you know, kind of order different states of well being in relation to each other. I tend to hold the view that it's basically symmetrical in either direction, but th there are many that argue that suffering is just intrinsically much worse than positive welfare states. I think that because again of these evolutionary circumstances, I think that nature has programmed us such that states of extreme suffering, which, you know, again important to note because of the human bias, where most humans are very unfamiliar with extreme suffering because we have hospitals and we have thermo-regulated environments and and all of these other conditions. But like, you know, i it's it's possible at least to experience extreme suffering, and that's because the organ of of pain is our entire body. You know, like our skin is lined with nosaceptors that send, you know, kind of information to, you know, parts of our brain and whatever's responsible for modulating these these parameters of of conscious experience to create an excruciating state. But but pleasure on the other hand, we're actually There's no there's a there's a sort of natural asymmetry because when we haven't evolved to feel, you know, maximally good. We've only evolved to feel just as good as is sufficient to motivate us toward ends correlated with with reproduction. So like the classic example is sex. You know, we we want, you know, or we're motivated by w wanting to to have sex to because that's correlated with reproduction. and like, you know, hopefully this isn't too crude, but like, you know, or orgasm is you know, a very pleasant state, but it's you know, if if you actually look at the theoretical maximum and you can actually by looking at phenomenology re reports of people who have, you know, kind of experienced like very ecstatic, high valence states of consciousness, for example, in Buddhist forms of meditation like jhana, it actually turns out that this like this peak evolved state is like less than one percent of the total value that you could otherwise obtain if you kind of you know, engage in other mechanisms to circumvent, you know, how Mother Nature, you know, designed us to feel pleasure. But the opposite isn't true because with with pain, when something's threatening your life, then there's there's no limit to, you know, how much energy our bodies should expend in order to make us feel bad and want to avoid that situation. So I I mean I I think, yeah, theoretically, you know, outside of these evolved mechanisms, I think that it's roughly equal. I think that for animals like humans and you know and other evolved creatures, I think states of extreme suffering are a lot more accessible than states of extreme pleasure. And so again, like contingently, I think we should probably weigh these as as higher than than positive welfare states. But if we could actually if we had a better understanding of of what consciousness is and how valence is encoded in the structure of the experience, then we could change this. And then I think it would be roughly Roughly equal. We'll go back to the conversation in just a second, but first I have an important announcement to make. 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I love it. one thing I was only briefly touched on in the paper, but I do think would also be a counter-argument for many people. And this is perhaps more of a technical counter-argument rather than a purely philosophical one, although I think kind of both. And it's the following We don't know what's out there. So if we send out all these probes, this has to assume that before we let one of these probes land, that we can make some sort of analysis of the entire planet to see whether there is already microbial life on it or or some other form of life. Perhaps even more evolved life. Which, of course, if w especially with the current technology, we may be able to send out probes into the universe, but to equip these probes with the necessary technology to make an entire assessment of an entire planet seems very unlikely and and is something we would probably never do. or are unlikely to do for economical reasons and and the sheer weight and and extra time that would take to to bring such equipment, right? If it's feasible at all. I mean we've been we've been going to Mars with rovers for for many, many years now. And Mars is super close by and even now it's it's taking decades to There there's currently a sample sitting on Mars and and we aren't even able to analyze it properly. So all of this is to say when we would engage in directed transpermia, there is a high chance, I wouldn't say high chance, but there is a chance that we would contaminate other planets and potentially poison or or at least inhibit the further evolution of the microbes or other organisms already there. I mean, you you must have thought about this as well. Well w what is your take on this? Yeah. Yeah, I think this is we didn't go so much into detail about this objection in the paper, primarily for lack of space, but also it's been discussed in a related paper from Oscardi Sivulla. a friend a friend of mine who's a Finnish philosopher and he he also published a paper, I think, a year before ours, looking at from more of an environmentalist ethics perspective on, you know, the potential outcomes of seeding other planets with life. so either, you know, life is actually ubiquitous in ways that we currently are unable to predict because we don't have boots on the ground. You know, we can't go and see whether or not you know, there's even just like very basic, you know, proto life, you know, kind of processes. And and if there are, then y you're right, we would contaminate those those planets. And and if there's another view that we didn't consider that Ascari considers in his paper is if there's a view where biodiversity is intrinsically valuable, then directed panspermia could be bad because yeah, you would be essentially replacing, you know, this entirely different, you know, kind of passion, like organic passion, which has its own value simply because it's different, even if it's functioning in a similar way. Maybe it's, you know, more you know, kind of adapted to specific conditions on those planets, but then, you know, we send a pansperm in and we have this, you know, like very like one size fits all you know, engineered microbe that can just, you know, thrive on any given planet and and then we lose some value there. So that that's definitely a concern if if you're con if you care about biodiversity. another position is that there could just be value even on planets without life. just simply, you know, I can't remember where there's a really good Substack post where this view is articulated, but there could just be val value in their being you know, kind of untarnished by humans or human activities, being able to like both study like geologic landscapes or or conditions or just it simply existing independently of of humans and and the conditions on earth. So yeah, there's there's certainly arguments against it on those bases. We just didn't have the time to go into it as much. yeah, of course. I mean you only have have so much room and I think you you focused on on on the most pressing ones for sure. It's just because that also what I find interesting about that is It would make it at least for those specific planets that already contain the microbial life, which we would then interfere with, it would be pointless. It would actually be more like colonization rather than preserving life because we evolved from such life forms as well. And we would find it I mean, if someone would have messed with with with Earth back in the day, then yeah, we we wouldn't be having this conversation right now probably. So yeah, that's that's also some something I think about. It's interesting the argument you mentioned there, about just whether celestial bodies deserve to be left alone with. I I had a Eric wha what's his name again? I I had an episode Eric Pearson, that's the that's the one. He's a a philosopher that I had on the show to to do an entire episode on on that topic as well whether we should colonize Mars was the example. What we discussed also the possibility of even if it turns out that Mars did not have microbial life, never had an and Well, never will, I won't say, but that's that there is an argument to be made for for celestial bodies to be yeah, left alone with. are are you familiar with those arguments? Because I don't have them yeah, crystal clear right now. Yeah. I I mean I think the the strongest reason that I've I've come across is the argument from instrumental value, which is that as soon as humans interfere with a natural, you know, landscape or, you know, just whatever environmental conditions on an exoplanet, in whatever way, even sending rovers to Mars, you know, simply to to to to look around and take samples, we're actually you know, affecting our future ability to be able to observe, you know, these these environmental conditions in ways that you know, ha haven't been affected already by humans and and it's it's really hard to do things like, for example, to sterilize any technology that we send to Mars or into out of space. It's been there's been quite a few incidents of thinking that we've we've done so and then it turns out that like tardig f frozen tardigrades, for example, are on the moon and are a bit impossible to or or like very very difficult in in our sterilizing t sterilization techniques. failed where we thought that they succeeded. So there are examples like this and and yes, it would affect our ability to be able to like study the history of these planets and actually use this evidence to, you know, feed into broader inferences about the universe and and physics. a as for yeah the the intrinsic value of of these environments being left alone. Yeah. It's s something that some people believe, but I think it's a less common position than say Conventional biocentrism. Yeah. And the the science argument for Mars I can understand because we are actively planning to go there, but on the same time we want to know whether Mars once had life, because that's an extremely important question to to answer and and says would say a lot about our place within the universe. That argument doesn't hold up as strong for very distant planets that would take hundreds of thousands of years to get there, even with the smallest probes that could potentially travel like ten to twenty percent of the speed of light, because simply we we wouldn't be able to do science there, not with current technology and not with physics as we understand it. Yeah, correct. Yeah. I think one yeah the I I'm I'm this is perhaps more into Anders Sandberg's t territory, but one argument and this is the argument that comes up a lot with the the whole should we be able to modify our own bodies, for example, whether it's through medicine. or perhaps genetic modification. it's part of the the entire eugenics discussion. There there's this comes up with now with the advanced IVF technologies that we're developing, where people can kind of cherry pick the the the the cells that they want their offspring to be used or or born with, so to say. I wish it's the plain God argument, right? Should should we interfere with nature at all? I mean we're doing a pretty horrendous job on on planet Earth right now. but yeah, shh sh is isn't is it our role even what gives us the audacity to think that we even have the auth authority to just go out and spoil or see the entire universe with life. Maybe you could argue some might argue that it's our our goal, that's our purpose to to sustain life, but but for other people it might just be the opposite of that and and just stick in your lane, so to say. Stay in your lane. I mean it's it's interesting because actually for many people this would be one of the most compelling reasons to oppose directed panspermia is not to interfere with with mother nature or the way things are. personally I'm actually very sympathetic to Anders' view, which essentially follows from, you know, I I I don't think there is a mother nature or a an entity that, you know, kind of has some sort of grand design, and by interfering with that design we're opposing their will, I think these these views, you know, kind of derive most strongly from you know, religious or theistic kind of beliefs. And And I do think that essentially, you know, as as I said before, I think nature is like approximately telogical in the sense that it's like it's moving in in a in a direction, but it's it's not designed and it's not you know, I think it's not truly tel telelogical, which would imply that it it it actually there's an intention behind that. It's just the the result of the dynamics of the system that this target tends to be optimized for. and sometimes that produces positive outcomes. And sometimes it produces negative outcomes. So yeah. At the same time, I think as a matter of like respecting the limits of our current scientific models, I do tend to, you know, I'm I'm quite cautious about interventions given that we have, you know, we've only existed with our current, you know, with the scientific method and and the technologies that we have for such a small amount of time in the history of you know, life on this planet. And I think that like through these many iterative evolutionary cycles, organisms have, you know, capacities or or are are adapted to deal with conditions in ways that we actually currently fail to model. So I I think that both we should respect just as a matter of like, you know, naturally evolved capacities are actually there's probably a lot more going on beneath the surface than we're modeling currently. so both respecting that, but also like as a matter of like what what really matters fundamentally or or if we actually do have enough knowledge to be able to like tinker with with our biology. I'm I'm all for it. And in fact I think it's necessary in order to have ecosystems where, you know, as I said, well being is being intrinsically selected for, potentially. because yeah, I think that yeah, mot Mother Nature is unfortunately you know, doesn't seem insofar as it cares about replication and transmission of genetic information, it doesn't seem to care about the the well being of of individuals. And that seems you know, at odds with what what I think matters, you know, in in the world and cosmically. Yeah. And it's slow. It's too slow. It's very slow. Yeah. Yeah. No, I I I love that you bring that up because it's so easy to forget what time scales we're we're talking about, right? If we just fifty years ago seems like an eternity ago for for humans, but if you just see what time scales we're working with in the universe, it's nothing. It's not even the the the blink of an eye. It's just it's it's truly nothing. So I think that also brings us to the conclusion of of the paper, because you you weigh the co the pros and you weigh you weigh the cons and then you arrive somewhere. So maybe you could give that conclusion. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we essentially argue that given, you know, kind of uncertainty about mm you know, both like empirically about whether or not we can attempt this and its likelihood of success. You know, we think it's given the uncertainty, we should assume that it's possible and also given uncertainty about what matters, because even though Anders and I have have different views on on what matters in this debate, you know, we we w wrote the paper together, adopting a sort of agnostic view, because we thought that would be, you know, that there's actually more value in doing that rather than just kind of dogmatically assuming that like, I know what, what's right and especially if you want coordination between different actors. and we estimate the expected value. and we have a few technical lines of reasoning in the paper where we try and estimate given the universe's continual expansion, how many, you know, galaxies we're losing per year from our future light cone, and and then, you know, like a few other kind of you know arguments along that line. I d I don't think that matters so much. It was more just a fun theoretical exercise. but but we do ultimately argue that there should be a moratorium on attempting panspermia and for individual actors developing t the technology to be able to to do this. And and obviously we need international governance or at least you know coordination systems in order to enforce enforce you know this kind of agreement that we're not going to attempt it right now. but simultaneously, because of the concern about extinction risk and and the the vanishing of life from the universe, in case, you know, it's it's not common and in case earth something happens on earth and and life goes extinct, then we also argue that like as a result of of this coordination you know, at whatever institutions are responsible for coordinating human activity, we should develop the capacity but in in a manner where it would only be triggered if an extinction or like a catastrophic risk threat was imminently you know kind of I guess like determined to to to be about to occur. So we could so so yeah so having the technology to be able to do it, if it looked like you know life on Earth was w was close to to being threatened, but then not actually attempting it until that moment and then that deals with the concern about you know about extinction. For for life maximizing, it's also on a cosmic time scale, the amount of like counterfactual universes that we're not seeding is is trivial. we estimate like a century of waiting would be on the order of less than a billionth of the total value that that we could otherwise obtain if you care about maximizing the abundance of life. and the benefit to waiting is that we have more time to actually study well being and figure out is there a way that we can have have our cake and eat it too, you know, achieve alignment between these two positions, which aren't actually intrinsically at odds because welfareists I think will agree that if there's a way in which well being can be promoted alongside increasing the abundance of life, then this is actually not only is it admissible, but it's actually a good thing and we should we should want to do this. but we're just at such an early stage in in our our understanding. So yeah, we we prescribe caution in the face of uncertainty. Yeah. That seems like a good a a reasonable reasonable conclusion. this is so incredibly interesting. I I love that you you wrote this paper and and that you wrote it together with with Anders. That's that's awesome. Is there anything else that you're currently working on or related to this or perhaps something on an entirely different topic? Because you do a lot more than talking and and and writing papers about directed panspermia, of course. Yeah. So I I actually I finished my PhD a year and a half ago, I believe, or something around that timeline. I'm currently about to move to California to work at a biotech startup and ac it's funny, our aim is to actually develop better technologies in order to improve well being and reduce suffering without the side effects that like say current you know pain painkillers or or pain relief have. So developing better technologies. We're looking at small molecules, but we're also looking at other other modes of you of of optimizing for for for well being. that would also be like applicable both to humans and and non humans because it seems like one of the primary limiting factors in in at least the existence of suffering at the scale that it exists today, is we actually just don't have a way of directly interfacing with the you know, with an animal's physiology and whatever mechanisms are responsible for them feeling pain or pleasure in response to different stimuli. And so like better better understanding that and being able to modulate that. I think this could potentially feed into you know the development of technologies related to responsible panspermia where you're both promoting well-being and you know safeguarding life. but Anders and I have also talked about doing a follow-up paper because in the process of writing this paper, we had several ideas that we were unable to explore and and it's such an interesting topic and and so important at this time in history. I think something that is very easy to forget, but I'm, you know, constantly reminded of and and kind of use as as a sort of like motivation for continuing to try and think about these these topics is that if our current you know models of physics are correct, we exist at such an early stage in the projected, you know, kind of lifespan of the of the universe. And any action that we make in the present has just a maximally outsized impact on the future light cone. and so like you can imagine like in a hundred million years or a billion years, there could be like a super intelligent civilization that has, you know, all sorts of you know advanced capacities relative to humans now. they're like, you better in any relevant respect that we could identify. but there could be things that we can do because we are at an earlier point. that they can't do or they at least can do less efficiently than us. And so yeah, I I think acting now in the sense of trying to get more clarity and and work toward engineering solutions to these problems, which you know, I think in philosophy, a a lot of the time when there's disagreement, it's it's just assumed that there's an impasse. I think this could be engineered around. And I think most philosophical problems can be engineered around. I think we just at such a you know an early stage and and in in many cases pre theoretical with our understanding of consciousness and sentience and and well being. And so working more to understand this I think will, you know, have massive effects on on the the long term future if we're able to like find ways to actually work with it instead of, you know, kind of just assuming it as like a a base fact of existence, if that makes sense. Thank you so much for coming on the show. This was incredibly interesting and yeah, I would love to to run it back sometime.