“Space colonization and suffering risks: Reassessing the ‘maxipok rule’” is an article published in 2018 by Phil Torres, Director of the Project for Future Human Flourishing.

The article, published two years before Covid19, argues that expanding civilization into space would be the worst dystopian future. This nonsense theory is based on the hypothesis that expansion into space will generate a wide variety of different species, many having their own cultural, political, religious faiths and traditions. According to the author, such a great diversity will not represent a fantastic cultural richness of the space civilization (!). Opposite, it would only result in catastrophic conflicts between different civilizations. Any mitigation strategies, such as a cosmic government (called “Leviathan”) and the implementation of policies of deterrence to prevent conflicts would be problematic, due to the limited speed of space travel and the transfer of information, and the advanced weaponry that future civilizations will almost certainly have at their disposal. The outcome would be a paranoid fear of each civilization to be attacked and destroyed by others. Btw, the author foresees that future civilizations will have advanced weaponry, but not advanced ethics and full inclusive culture, open to different intelligent species, however coming from the same homo sapiens strain.

The first consideration is that the author – as did his referred mentor Daniel Deudney before him — is projecting his claustrophobic terror of the future on the future millennia.
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