Rob, Luisa, and the 80000 Hours team

It's on YouTube.

It's actually, I think, very well communicated.

He does a great job of summing up this general dynamic.

The way I understood it was, imagine that...

like Earth-originating intelligent life begins settling space, going out into the universe, but there is no coordination between the different groups on how it's going to be split or little coordination between them.

It's still a very competitive situation.

Couldn't they end up basically using up all of the resources trying to get to...

additional resources in space as quickly as possible.

There's basically a race to go as close to the speed of light as you can possibly get in sort of the settlement wave that's moving outwards.

And depending on your values, if you don't mind using up lots of resources in order to go faster, then you have a competitive advantage.

And so these like locusts that basically just are happy to burn up all of the resources available in order to let go as fast as possible to get to the edge of the accessible universe before anyone else, they basically are the most fit

uh settlement wave um that that would be going out and so they would potentially beat everyone else and that is how things would play out now it sounds it sounds nuts because i don't know why you would end up with people with this particular set of values like why would why would locusts as as as he calls them end up being so influential i mean isn't this crazy i don't i don't

Okay.

But like today we end up squandering lots of resources and stuff other than competing over, you know, we don't like spend up 90% of GDP on military equipment in order to fight one another or try to like conquer stuff, I guess.

But you're just saying that's like a weird aberration of the present day.

And like, in fact, people are like groups that just want to expand and gain resources has been like the norm.

Yeah.

We have an old episode about cancer and exactly that phenomenon.

I think it's called Why Cancer is One of the Most Fundamental Forces in the Universe, which I think people should go back and listen to one of our most unappreciated episodes.

So I guess when we're thinking about the far future, I guess one of the