Space Colonization? Or End to Moloch?

"Moloch" is how competitive actors throw away delicate, nice things in themselves or their surroundings to help them compete. "Delicate, nice" may include things like human flourishing or even existence. Consciousness may or may not survive Moloch. With Moloch, there is a race to the bottom, which must be raced, because of the incentives to win or not be destroyed.

But what if it were possible to get rid of race dynamics? What if all actors were basically in harmony? Then, perhaps, Moloch could be stopped or reversed.

It sounds far-fetched, but I think it might be possible to bring all actors on Earth into harmony, well enough to stop Moloch. And, if we have faster-than-light travel and communication, it may be possible to spread that harmony through space and maintain it over time. But if we don't have faster-than-light travel and communication, distant planets can come to distrust us, and their cultures can diverge from ours. This, and the possibility of it, known to us and them, could bring back the race dynamic, and could prevent us from ending Moloch. They can try to invade us, and so we have to improve our defenses or offensive capabilities, and the same is true for them.

This is a brief thought and may not hold up, but if it does, then it means that we have a choice: space colonization with faster-than-light travel and communication (FTL) and end Moloch, stay on Earth only and end Moloch, or space colonization without FTL and keep Moloch alive.

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One exception is if we know that we have sent a ship to colonize a planet that is moving too fast away from us for them to be able to send a ship back. But we have to make sure that the ship we send really will go that far and won't go to a nearer planet.

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How fast would Molochian dynamics work when the two competitors are, let's say, 50,000 years away from each other? (So far away it would take 50,000 years for a ship to make it from one planet to another.) As a human, I could easily just irrationally not worry about threats so slow-moving, spatially and temporally distant, and not part of my daily life (of post-scarcity flourishing, perhaps). By not seeing the threat, I wouldn't feed it by responding to it and giving the other side something to fear and respond to. But maybe AI would be rational enough to really see the possibility of being invaded and feel compelled to direct our resource utilization toward maximizing defense, or toward pre-emptive offensive capability. This military orientation could consume all of Earth's efforts and resources. If the AI were rulers of us, or influential in our governments, they might push us toward a Moloch we were not really capable of ourselves.