Julian Bradshaw's Shortform

Still-possible good future: there's a fast takeoff to ASI in one lab, contemporary alignment techniques somehow work, that ASI prevents any later unaligned AI from ruining world, ASI provides life and a path for continued growth to humanity (and to shrimp, if you're an EA).

Copium perhaps, and certainly less likely in our race-to-AGI world, but possible. This is something like the “original”, naive plan for AI pre-rationalism, but it might be worth remembering as a possibility?

Re: biosignatures detected on K2-18b, there's been a couple popular takes saying this solves the Fermi Paradox: K2-18b is so big (8.6x Earth mass) that you can't get to orbit, and maybe most life-bearing planets are like that.

This is wrong on several bases:

1. You can still get to orbit there, it's just much harder (only 1.3g b/c of larger radius!) (https://x.com/CheerupR/status/1913991596753797383)
2. It's much easier for us to detect large planets than small ones (https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/alien-worlds/ways-to-find-a-planet), but we expect small ones to be common too (once detected you can then do atmospheric spectroscopy via JWST to find biosignatures)
3. Assuming K2-18b does have life actually makes the Fermi paradox worse, because it strongly implies single-celled life is common in the galaxy, removing a potential Great Filter