Very interesting, thanks a lot !

Do you have any data on pigs or cows ? I know they represent a smaller number of animals, and there is less data from the welfare footprint project, but I'd be curious to know your opinion.

The calculations would also be complicated by the necessary inclusion of veal for cows, and gestation crates for pigs, since these are a necessary part of current systems and certainly bad most of the time.

But since grass-fed cows are likely to be better treated than other animals, it would be good to know if their lives are positive and can maybe provide a template for other forms of animal agriculture (although economic incentives don't push in this direction).

Hi ! In the end I didn't read about transactional analysis.

But I did try to 'give permission' to some people who were thinking of launching a project.

Not much to add, this is inspiring !

This is an interesting question, and I'd really like to know the answer.

From what I got, chicken have a lot of trouble making hiérarchies when there are a lot of them (e.g. thousands) and it's something important for them so this might be a negative element. But frankly not sure.

Yes, but transport on Earth is mostly cheap, which cancels out a lot of the natural inequalities in geography. Meanwhile, transport to Mars would be super costly.

I think a significant difference with current countries is that having an additional person on Mars would be incredibly expensive compared to living on Earth - in terms of rocket, fuel, shipping stuff from Earth, getting additional supplies, getting super high-tech materials and minerals for maintenance... 

I tried to acquire superwhisper - but it's only available on mac and iphone, so in the end I couldn't use it (I'll look into other speech to text translators)

Interesting. It feel like this still requires a lot of effort to make it usable in the context of alternative proteins (plus marketing, developing incentives, fighting the opposition, etc.), but if it works, that could indeed be a good news. 

When I talked about the economic incentive, I was mostly asking about what is the economic incentive long-term? What can be done in space cheaper than on Earth ?

Mining seems much more complicated than on Earth, due to lack of water, and the fact that minerals are not being very concentrated, which makes it much more expensive to extract than on Earth. 

Interplanetary presence might be more plausible if there's another space race.

Thanks for taking the time to expose your view clearly here, and explaining why you do not spend a lot of time on the topic (which I respect).

If I understand correctly, the difference in consideration you make between humans and animals seems to boil down to "I can talk to humans, and they can tell me that they have an inner experience, while animals cannot (same for small children)". 

While nobody disputes that, I find it weird that your conclusion is not "I'm very uncertain about other systems", but "other systems that cannot tell me directly about their inner experience (very small children, animals) probably don't have any relevant inner experience". I'm not sure how you got to that conclusion. At the very least, this would justify extreme uncertainty.

Personally, I think that the fact that animals display a lot of behaviour similar to humans in similar situations should be a significant update toward thinking they have some kind of experience. For instance, a pig is screaming and trying to escape when it is castrated, just as humans would do (we have to observe behaviours). 

We can probably build robots that can do the same thing, but that just means we're good at mimicking other life forms (for instance, we can also build LLMs which tell us they are conscious, and we don't use that to think humans are not sentient).  

Regarding arguments against A City to Mars, I found the link you gave under titotal's post pretty interesting. It indeed lowers my credence in this book. Thanks for the link.

However, despite reading the post, I still fail to understand the economics of going to space long term -beyond what SpaceX is ready to fund- since everything would be so expensive, with no significant added value compared to what we can do on Earth. But maybe I missed something here as well.