Nautilus

Why Colonizing the Galaxy Is the Highest Good

When we work to reduce the risk of global catastrophe, we are doing good at a literally astronomic scale.Illustration by CSA Images / Printstock Collection

Ten years ago, I dropped out of my graduate program in electrical engineering. I was in computational electromagnetics, modeling how radio waves propagate through the ground. I liked it, but I didn’t love it. I was living a double life. By day, I was an engineer; by night, I was a do-gooder and community volunteer, helping the homeless support themselves by writing for a street magazine that they would sell. I couldn’t reconcile my passion for making the world a better place with my engineering work, so I quit.

The heart of the matter for me was that engineering is all about solving problems. I got caught up on which problems we should be solving, and these “should” questions can’t be answered with engineering. Society needs some other way of figuring out what problems

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