I don't believe that this would change the outcome much: It seems hard to argue that preservation of a nonhuman species would be worth more than a million lives (=> negligible) and assuming global loss of all human life is already unreasonably pessimistic in my view-- (e.g. the Chicxulub impactor would not have achieved this).

I also think that fully accounting for multi-generational consequences is murky/questionable and not really something we do even in much more obvious cases: Eligible people deciding against having children are not punished for depriving future society of centuries of expected workyears, and neither are mothers/fathers rewarded for the reverse.

But even if you accounted for losing 3 full generations and some change (for biodiversity loss), that still leaves you in the ~$200M/year range.

Currently we don't have reliable asteroid deflection capability at any price (but it would be technically somewhat in reach), but just imagine a future NASA budget discussion that goes "we're gonna have to mothball our asteroid deflector 3000 because it eats 5% of yearly NASA budget and thats just not worth it"-- that could be the mathematically correct choice, which confounds me.

Good point, but I think those are "worth" less from a risk-analysis PoV: 1km diameter is apparently about 200 times more likely (1/500000 years) according to wiki, but would need to kill 40M people to match the extinction-level asteroid risk (so basically-- unmitigated hit on Tokyo or bust).

To be honest, I think the 1km diameter range might still be a major fraction of the actual risk, because the estimates around "human exctinction every 100Ma" are probably much too pessimistic.

I think what I’m trying to express is that it feels like the answer isn’t any amount of money, it’s just undefined, like a division by zero or trying to read the value of a binary register on a machine that’s turned off. I think Pirsig called it a Mu answer.

That's the most interesting application of capitalism-as-as-resource-allocation mechanism I've ever seen, that's something I look forward to thinking about more.

My immediate reaction though is to doubt the mapping of dollar to value - e.g., the 10 million dollar valuation of the human life, but also the valuation then of all the things that year-dollar-cost could be spent on. Many of those things probably don't map very well between true value, and dollar cost (my go-to example of this is teachers fulfilling one of the most critical roles to ensure a functioning society, yet the dollar cost paid for their labor being typically far lower than most other jobs).