Right now, outside of Earth, the universe as we know it is full of vast empty spaces, fiery stars, and lifeless planets. It’s beautiful, but it’s as dead as a rock. I, for one, would not want to be a rock. Being a human is wonderful, but even being a monkey or a dog or a bird would be better than being a rock. There is more happiness and pleasure (and whatever else makes life worth living) in a single bird than there is in the whole known universe outside of Earth. That would no longer be the case if humanity colonizes outer space.

Unified tyranny would be difficult to maintain across the vast distances of outer space.

To get a sense of the possibilities, consider a Dyson swarm, which is a series of structures that a civilization could place around a star to collect its radiation. If humanity builds a Dyson swarm around the sun, we could get a billion times more energy than from Earth. That alone would enable a huge improvement, but then note that the Milky Way has a few 100B stars. A network of Dyson swarms could power a massive galactic civilization that utterly dwarfs anything we can achieve on Earth. However much good we may be able to do by making the world a better place is utterly dwarfed by making the universe a better place.

and a counterpoint

These facts make it look hopeless for a governing system to effectively coordinate law enforcement activities, judicial decisions, and so on, across cosmic distances. The universe is simply too big for a government to establish law and order in a top-down fashion.

But there is another strategy for achieving peace: Future civilizations could use a policy of deterrence to prevent other civilizations from launching first strikes.

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