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80,000 Hours interviewed someone about this: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/zach-weinersmith-space-settlement/
Curated and popular this week
This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what’s most impactful for us to work on and focus hard. That’s great! But there are various actions that are ‘non-delegatable’ - the extent to which an individual can do the action is limited (like voting, going to a protest, making hard money contributions to particular campaigns). It might be useful if we were all more in the habit of doing variou...
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
Recent opportunities to take action
As for existential risk from AI takeover, I don't think having a self-sustaining civilization on Mars would help much.
If an AI has completed takeover on earth and killed all humans on earth, taking over Mars too does not sound that hard, especially since the human civilization is likely quite fragile. (There might be some edge cases, where you solve the AI control problem well enough to guarantee that all advanced AIs leave Mars alone, but not well enough for AI to leave Australia alone, but I think scenarios like these are extremely unlikely).
For other existential risks, it might be in principle useful, but practically very difficult. Building a self-sustaining city on Mars will take a lot of time and resources. On the scale of centuries, it seems like a viable option though.