Help us make civilizational refuges happen

There are a number of overlapping reasons for why we might want really good refuges: 

1. Countermeasures refuges: In a global catastrophic biological event, we ought to have a secure facility where scientific personnel can develop medical countermeasures in a position of relative safety.
2. Foundation-style refuges: In the case of an extreme global catastrophe, a civilizational refuge can protect a nucleus of people, information, and materials to increase the probability of rebuilding and recovery after civilization collapse.
3. Values refuges: We would have a means to safeguard important cosmopolitan values and empirical or conceptual worldviews^[1] to survive and flourish after a civilizational collapse, assuming it is good to do so.

Currently, we think all three reasons are plausible, which a focus on #1 and #3. In particular, we believe that building refuges can be an unusually effective broad-spectrum intervention for reducing existential risk from a wide range of non-agentic sources.

We (a working group composed of Linch, Ajay, and a third, anonymous, collaborator) have worked part-time to deliver a temporary plan for refuges. We’ve made considerable progress, but we will greatly benefit from having a technically competent volunteer or short-term contractor help us refine our plans and make them much more detailed/precise/concrete. If you are interested, please message us or chat with us at EA Global London!

Funders are potentially interested, assuming a good initial team and operational plan. 

Our two biggest bottlenecks: 

1. We have not yet identified great candidates for a sufficiently competent (interim) CEO who is both capable and willing to take ownership of the refuge project.
2. Our technical requirements write-up is not yet detailed enough to a) attract top non-EA talent or b) discuss a feasibility study with an architecture firm in sufficient depth to be useful. This would require expanding out technical requirements from a ~10-pager to a ~40-pager in the next 4-6 weeks.

Here are ways you can advance the refuge project:

1. Reach out to us, either here or at EAGlobal if you’re interested in volunteering to help us build better plans or talent scout for a CEO to champion this.
   1. If you think you might make for a good CEO, definitely talk to us.
2. Apply to Rethink Priority’s new temporary roles in General Longtermism or Special Projects, to potentially work full-time on this under Linch’s guidance.
   1. Note that the jobs won’t start until June/July, and we’d ideally want to make progress faster. Also it is not guaranteed that RP would work on this.
3. Independently come up with your own plans/schema^[2] for civilizational refuges, and pitch it to funders. More competition in the EA ecosystem can be very valuable!

1. ^{^}

    E.g., impartial concern, the importance of existential risk reduction

2. ^{^}

    We can potentially help with funding small-scale experiments and preliminary research.