Is it not possible that colonizing a galaxy is simply too hard, no matter what intelligence?
Ants live in cities surrounded by humans, but have no idea what a human is or what humans do, and literally cannot experience - never mind imagine - what a human is, what a city is, what transport networks are, what culture is, what technology is.
Every so often an ant nest is destroyed because it's an irritant, but if the ants notice at all they carry on relatively unthinkingly. There are only other ants, pheromone trails, and food sources. [Other] may register very fleetingly but does not align with any ant concepts or ant goals, and therefore leaves no lasting impression.
Wide differences in intelligence make more advanced lifeforms invisible - not physically but conceptually. Which turns out to amount to the same thing in practice. Even between two species who share the same physical space.
We could be surrounded by a universal or galactic civilisation and we wouldn't know.
I would think there is quite a bit of intelligent life in the universe that all feels equally alone.
Space constraints * time constraints make this a near insurmountable problem and then even if that is overcome then it gets multiplied again by the minuscule probability with sharing anything close to perception like the ants.
Not to mention we are going to be orders of magnitude closer to ants in perception than to aliens from a different planet.
All the action is out in the Kuiper belts, where there is abundant cold, which is more valuable than any material substance.
Say we stretch our optimism and do make it. Now the colonization of the Milky Way starts. It's a 100,000 light years to the other end. You'd be a completely different species by the time you arrive. Say you achieve that (you won't), now we need some type of coordination and communication. Suck badly though that messages have a delay of 100.000 years. There is no such thing as the human species if we spread out as the delay between even closest habitable zones would be so large that orchestration is impossible.
And we're still within the bounds of a single galaxy, not even intergalactic travel. It simply can't be done. We'll never even escape the solar system.
Long before that would even become a question, it's questionable whether our species continues to exist in its current form. Human level AI is at the horizon within our lifetime. And will then accelerate away. Add a few centuries to that and it's strange to assume we'll still be there, unchanged, as primates controlling a machine a billion times more intelligent. The only path would be to become a machine instead, slowly replacing biological parts with superior silicone. Until nothing biological remains.
Sounds crazy or unlikely? The idea that we remain as-is is far crazier.
Assuming you're traveling at light speed across the Milky Way, a distance of 100,000 light years, the trip would take 100,000 years for the person traveling, no? I wonder then how long it would be for everyone left on Earth. Millions of years?
The closer you get to light speed, the less time it seems to you to take getting there. If you could get close to light speed, "only" 100,000+ years would pass back home, never less, but could be any larger amount. At 1/10 light speed, a million years pass back home and almost a million on board.
If you don't get really, really close to light speed, it still takes thousands of years, on board.
Getting close takes way, way more energy than (e.g.) getting to half light speed did, which itself takes unimaginably much; getting to 3/4 takes way more than getting to 1/2.
You probably can't carry enough material to produce that much energy, but everything you encounter on the way is blasting you at a good fraction of lightspeed. Maybe a laser from home can keep providing you energy, but that has to keep working for 100,000+ years. The faster you go, the less energy it can provide; and the farther away you are.
To be clear I’m not talking about “almost light speed,” I’m talking about traveling at exactly the speed of light (ignoring for a moment whether that’s possible).
Reproduction has to be intact. But I do agree. We as a species are not fit to these interstellar or intergalactic travels. It has to be dominantly machines.
https://www.amazon.com/Saturns-Children-Freyaverse-Charles-S...