The thing with that definition is that it's object-based rather than region-based. It wouldn't include objects that had reached escape velocity because they are technically not orbiting the Sun. Objects passing through the Solar System, like Oumuamua, aren't orbiting the Sun. Also, any interstellar spacecraft stop being covered by intrasolar governance possibly as soon as they are launched by a railgun. 

The edge of the Sun's gravitational reach, where the galaxy's tidal pull is dominated by the Sun's gravity, makes it region-based rather than object-based. 

Soft lock-out does fail to reach the threshold of actually locking out access to space, and does just make it more difficult, and I do say as much in the text. I also agree that grabbing terrestrial property instead of orbits would give a much bigger economic advantage. 
 

Also think you're underestimating costs, both because those Golden Dome estimates are massive underestimates and because as @Arepo says it's really less a point estimate to build a system with a particular capacity, and more an arms race dynamic to see who has the most capacity.

Yeah, so the cost rises primarily with the number of rockets the adversary can launch simultaneously (the salvo depth), where each extra salvo requires a whole other layer of interceptors to stop any rockets getting through. I picked 8-12 as a plausible coincident salvo based on how close China's launch pads are, and therefore how many rockets China could conceivably launch at once without building more launch pads. I also gave the costs for 1 and 50 coindicent salvos, at $32-55B and $0.9-1.6T. I got Claude to make a graph showing the annual cost to maintain lock-out (replacing the interceptors) based on how many rockets an adversary can launch at once (salvo depth):

The band crosses 30% of current US military spending to maintain lock-out if the salvo depth they have to combat is roughly 45–80 rockets at once (that's within an 8–10 minute window within an area of ~500 km (about the area of Texas)). If China could achieve that, then the US would probably have to be getting some massive gains from locking out access to outer space (e.g. because of an industrial explosion), or they would have had to have to switch to other cheaper methods to lock out access to outer space (e.g. directed energy weapons). 

Thanks. I think your points about models, tools, and cost framings are on point. The hard lock-out costing started out as a BOTEC, but as new dynamics kept being added at some point it crossed a threshold where it was no longer a BOTEC! And then sunk cost fallacy and all. I'll try out the models/tools you suggest.

I think it's worth fleshing out the arms race dynamic in more detail (and most of the numbers are in there already to do that). I think a big question with the lock-out story is how long one could sustain lock-out at a loss for it to then pay for itself (i.e. when does "loss leading" pay off?). I think I framed "outgrowing the world" based on a space industrial explosion as the threshold, but it could be much sooner, e.g. developing directed energy weapons that can destroy adversary space assets at a much lower cost than interceptors (plausible near-term tech), building a mass driver on the Moon with an extremely high fire rate, or even just grabbing enough metal from near-Earth asteroids and placing them in Earth orbit to use as weapons against space or ground targets. 

On your specific points:

This sounds like it wouldn't end up being much of a factor - 1200 tonnes of water ice split 3 ways sounds like virtually nothing.

I agree. There is little economic value in claiming the best sites on the Moon, and I doubt there is very much strategic value either in claiming the best spots (vs just being there first). Almost all the soft lock-out premium comes from grabbing the sun-synchronous orbits for data centres (even then, the possible DSA comes from hard lock-out).

"An actor takes permanent control of the whole future specifically by expanding to space"
I'm not sure this would necessarily be permanent, at least in the sense that it might splinter into factions, or at least lose a sense of original national identity over time (though it would prob still have a strong counterfactual effect on future values)

Sure, I guess nothing is really permanent. I think there is a possible argument for their control being extremely long lasting, e.g. through some of the mechanisms Will describes in Persistent Path Dependence (like AGI-based institutions). But yeah I have no expectation that the USA will control the universe in the Iron Star Era. 

Is there anything preventing non-American companies, from just putting their data centres into the same orbit?

I think this is essentially a game of chicken with assets worth millions of dollars. It's possible that other countries could put their assets in the same orbits against the allocations of the ITU, but it would be a bit like driving into oncoming traffic to try and change which side of the road everyone should drive on. It's definitely possible SpaceX could chicken out though. They did previously move Starlink satellites into lower orbits to be further away from Chinese satellites. 

Thanks! I look forward to reading about the space governance module :)

I expect we'll be targeting and collaborating with space law and policy people on a lot of the research,^[1] as well as talking to decision-makers in space companies, governments, and space-related NGOs. This means it would be better to have a separate research stream because:

• Our audience will be new to AI but familiar with space (which is the opposite for Forethought), so the research outputs have to explain different concepts.
• The assumptions that the space policy community have are different to Forethought's audience (e.g. we would have to do more work to justify why we care about future people in space and why we think AI is super important). We'd need to argue different points.
• We would want to build our own reputation and relationships with other space governance organisations, space companies, and governments. We may also start a fellowship program.
• We will want more freedom over our strategic direction as we engage more with the space domain on ideas related to transformative AI and the long-term future. 

I think we'd also like to collaborate with AI governance orgs where it makes sense (e.g. on AI governance related to orbital data centres), and we'd still be talking to AI people (the biggest space company is also an AI company). Acting as a bridge from the AI community to the space community could be great (it's not clear to me that Forethought could or should be that).

I'd personally like to continue collaborating with Forethought on topics where there's overlap, and I don't think the founding of this org affects Forethought's overall strategic direction.^[2] They're supporting us in building capacity in a community that they otherwise wouldn't be able to reach easily.

1. ^{^}

   We would publish things that would not be of great interest to Forethought's typical audience, which I think is mostly EAs and people involved in frontier AI, e.g.

   • Forecasting of the impacts of advanced AI on space activities.
   • Policy proposals to be implemented by the space governance community.
   • Reflections on current events in the space community.
2. ^{^}

   We've recently come to the end of a 6-month research sprint organised by Forethought that was focused on space governance. So I expect them to do less space governance research as the org spins out. 

Chase Hamilton and I are spinning a longtermist space governance organization out of Forethought, and we're looking for people to join us.

We'll be doing field-building to influence and mature the existing field of space policy to more effectively address longtermist issues, and technical and policy research on orbital data centres, military activity beyond Earth orbit, AI integration of space surveillance data, and other work at the intersection of transformative AI, the industrial explosion, extreme power concentration, viatopia, and the long-term future. Happy to share internal docs on this stuff, please DM me. 

If you might be a good fit to help set up an org, want to do research on space governance, or just have strong opinions we should hear, we'd love to chat: [book a meeting with us here]. Or feel free to email me at [email protected] with any questions or introductions.

I think that challenges from misrepresentation and lying might be understated - the truthfulness of the AIs is a structural issue for adopting AI delegates in the early stages. 

There's a potential asymmetry where adopting the defense-favoured coordination tech might actually disadvantage you. With AI delegates, they would presumably be verifiable and would be programmed to tell the truth and keep to deals, but humans could still lie (even if they do so by changing their mind after the interaction with the AI delegate). So if one person adopts the AI delegate and another doesn't, then the human can overexaggerate their preferences, withhold information, and even defect on the deal (without blatantly lying), but a verifiable AI delegate presumably wouldn't be able to do that? So, humans without AI delegates might be advantaged. 

Also, I don't think that many humans do seek a fair deal - they seek a deal that benefits themself more than the other person. I think this, and the issue with AI delegates being truthful, either leads to a slow adoption of AI delegates, or maybe motivations to manipulate the AI delegates to act in deceptively or manipulatively.

The equilibriums are like: 
1. Everyone adopts AI delegates 
2. No-one adopts AI delegates 
3. AI delegates become corrupted to act in ways that might not be defined as defense-favoured 

I don't know how society gets through the transitionary period where AI delegates start getting adopted.

So helpful and clear! 

Well put. I like to think of the digital world and outer space as the big multipliers of what's possible for the extent of sentient experience. Having control over what can scale in these two worlds seems essential to achieving the best futures and avoiding the worst. 

Thanks Tom, yeah the threat model for stage two is quite similar to your post, where I'm expecting one actor to potentially outgrow the rest of the world by grabbing space resources. However, I do think there might be dynamics in space that feed into a first mover advantage, like Fin's recent post about shutting off space access to other actors, or some way to get to resources first and defend them (not sure about this yet), or just initiating an industrial explosion in space before anyone else (which maybe pays off in the long-term because Earth eventually reaches a limit or slows down in growth compared to Dyson swarm construction). 

As for the threat model of stage 1, I don't have strong opinions on whether a decisive strategic advantage on Earth is more likely to be achieved with superexponential growth or conflict, though your post is very compelling in favour of the former.

My current guess is that there are so many orders of magnitude for growth on Earth that super-exp growth would lead to a decisive strategic advantage without even going to space. If that's right (which it might not be), then it's unclear that stage two adds that much. 

I'm thinking about this sort of thing at the moment in terms of ~what percentage of worlds a decisive strategic advantage is achieved on Earth vs in space, which informs how important space governance work is. I find the 3 stages of competition model to be useful to figure that out. It's not clear to me that Earth obviously dominates and I am open to stage 2 actually not mattering very much, but I want to map out strategies here. 

I do already think that stage 3 doesn't matter very much, but I include it as a stage because I may be in a minority view in believing this, e.g. Will and Fin imply that races to other star systems are important in "Preparing for an Intelligence Explosion", which I think is an opinion based on works by Anders Sandberg and Toby Ord.