"Why would it be an argument either way?"

"For: for science. Against: because doing science on people is often questionably ethical."

"Well, we can just wait to meet alien species and not bring any twelve-year-olds to Jupiter."

"But what if Eclipsing in space does something really cool that we're missing out on?"

"Well, what are the ethical problems with bringing twelve-year-olds to Jupiter?"

"How do we know that an eclipse on Jupiter would work by the same rules as an eclipse on Earth? I'm less concerned about 'bring twelve-year-olds into space, they become a psion or mage' than 'bring adults into space, woops, Jupiter's age is twenty-five and it eclipses you as some third thing that resists lockdown somehow.'"

"Well, the range of possibilities is literally infinite, there, and with a single data point we can only start with that as a baseline."

"Well, but that's what I mean by not being sure if it's a good idea or not, if it works basically the same way then whatever interesting differences there might be won't be too dangerous, but we have no idea whether it's likely to do that or not."

"No, what I mean is that we should probably a priori assume that it will in fact be similar, even if with very high uncertainty."

"Except that it's not, like 'would you like this free value with which to space,' going into space has opportunity costs, and I think that the relative value of space compared to, like, curing malaria, is lowered by our complete lack of data on how space will effect eclipses."

"Yeah, that's also part of what I mean, we don't have a priori any evidence that it's particularly good or useful, and the risk that it's not is fairly high given our knowledge."

"Well, we're going to have to do it eventually, once we scale de-aging overpopulation's going to become a much more pressing issue."

"True, but by then we'll have gotten to all the other lower-hanging fruit in terms of expected returns."

"Maybe."

"You don't expect so?"

"There are a lot of problems we could have solved already, but haven't."

"I guess, but we're on our way to, and most low-hanging fruit nowadays is about equally low-hanging, I don't think there's anything obviously correct and easy to do compared to everything else."

"Right, but I'm saying that solving problems isn't as simple as finding a technical solution, scientists have clean energy ready to roll out whenever and we don't have clean energy because oil lobbyists."

"Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that the problem is strictly technical, when I want to see how high the fruit is hanging I include every necessary step to get it, not just 'is it technically feasible.' Same for space exploration, I don't think at this point the challenge is very technical anymore."

"Well, exploration no, colonization yes."

"Hmmm, yeah, fair enough."

"She does that."

"Does what?"

"Being right."

"Very good habit, that."