I agree. Mods, is there a reason why I can't downvote the community tag on this post?

You make some great points. If you think humanity is so immoral that a lifeless universe is better than one populated by humans, then yes, it would indeed be bad to colonize Mars, from that perspective.

I would be pretty horrified at humans taking fish aquaculture with us to Mars, in a manner as inhumane as current fish farming. However, I opened the Deep Space Food Challenge link, and it's more like what I expected: the winning entries are all plants or cellular manufacturing. (The Impact Canada page you linked to is broken.)

If we don't invent any morally relevant digital beings prior to colonizing space, then I think wild animal suffering is substantially likely to be the crux of whether it is morally good or bad to populate the cosmos.

Interesting argument. However, I don't think this point about poverty is right.

The problem is that [optimistic longtermism is] based on the assumption that life is an inherently good thing, and looking at the state of our world, I don’t think that’s something we can count on. Right now, it’s estimated that nearly a billion people live in extreme poverty, subsisting on less than $2.15 per day.

Poverty is arguably a relic of preindustrial society in a state of nature, and is being eliminated as technological progress raises standards of living. If we were to colonize Mars, it would probably be done by wealthy societies that have large amounts of capital per person. You might argue that conditions are so harsh on Mars that life will be unpleasant even for the wealthy, or that population growth will eventually turn Mars society into a zero-sum Malthusian hellhole, but I don't think those are your claims.

As for animal cruelty, it's pretty straightforward to propose things like a ban on animal cruelty in a Mars charter or constitution. Maybe this is politically difficult and we don't have leverage on the Mars colonist people, but then it would be even harder to ban Mars colonization altogether. Finally, this issue might be moot: it'll be really expensive to take pets and farm animals to Mars. Everyone will probably be eating hydroponic lettuce for the first fifty years anyway, not foie gras.

Shrimpify Mentoring? Shrimping What We Can? Future of Shrimp Institute?

Oh, and we can't forget about 1FTS: One for the Shrimp.

I'm very disappointed that Rethink Priorities has chosen to rebrand as Rethink Shrimp. I really think we should have gone with Reshrimp Priorities. That said, I will accept the outcome, whatever is deemed to be most effective, and in any case redouble my efforts to forecast timelines to the shrimp singularity.

I don't see Shapley values mentioned anywhere in your post. I think you've made a mistake in attributing the values of things multiple people have worked on, and these would help you fix that mistake.

I don't really see anything in the article to support the headline claim, and the anonymous sources don't actually work at NIST, do they?

Rather than farmers investing more profits from growing plants into animal farming, I think the main avenue of harm is that animal feed is an input to meat production, so if the supply of feed increases, production of meat would increase.

Under preference utilitarianism, it doesn't necessarily matter whether AIs are conscious.

I'm guessing preference utilitarians would typically say that only the preferences of conscious entities matter. I doubt any of them would care about satisfying an electron's "preference" to be near protons rather than ionized.

So you think your influence on future voting behavior is more impactful than your effect on the election you vote in?