A Petri dish might dream of taking over North America, but the humans might have other plans (for instance, the autoclave across the room).
Maybe they'd reason that North America is entirely lifeless, since nobody has yet tried to communicate the secrets of the Universe to them in a (bacterially) intelligible language.
Honestly the Petri dish has better chances. The bacteria that inhabit one already have the demonstrated ability to persistently survive outside of it.
>the galaxy, or at least the local group
The local group is bigger than the galaxy.
> The local group is bigger than the galaxy.
You are certainly correct, I misremembered the terms. Substitute for the local regions of our galaxy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion-Cygnus_Arm
The robots are just a forward scouting tool. Human civilization is essentially 10k years old on galactic time scales, with agriculture being ~12k years old.
For all you know you are just running a program designed to transmit a message encoded in some "junk" DNA inherited from some long lost ancestor who was modified by some alien that crashed on our planet billions of years ago who hopes that some terrestrial decendent will eventually arrive at an inhabited planet where the residents will open up the astronaut, read the message, and come rescue your descendants to travel.
Robots will be our real descendants.
Searching for resources, gathering them, and controlling territory from competitors are basic biological behaviors we see in most (all?) life. On a personal level this behavior might look like visiting a grocery store, storing the food at home, and locking your door.
It seems reasonable that as our technology develops and we exhaust resources on Earth that we will need to increase our reach to resources and territories beyond Earth.
The vast majority of the mass of life on this planet does not participate in all (and probably in most cases any) of the behavior you describe. Stromatolites, various parasites and symbiotes, most bacteria, etc do little to none of that.
Importing resources from other planets or other extraterrestrial bodies can and would better be done by robots than humans.
* A good summary of group compeitive behavior of bacteria, including several territory control strategies. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2879262/
* "Distinct foraging strategies generated by single-action behavioural flexibility" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.09.434602v2....
* Marine bacteria changing behavior around resource rich locations to improve resource gathering. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200925113346.h...
* Description of bacteria predators, and complex hunting behavior (scout and gather) https://www.llnl.gov/news/predatory-bacteria-bite-their-own
* Description of properties of bacteria colonies and territory expansion https://nbi.ku.dk/english/news/news20/bacteria-colonies-of-b...
EDIT: I wanted to respond to the point "Importing resources from other planets or other extraterrestrial bodies can and would better be done by robots than humans."
I'm sure robotic mining will occur first. However, we have a limit on the amount of resources we can bring to Earth. An estimated 10% of the mass of the astroid belt is water (on Ceres). Saturn's rings contains about half of Earth's glacier's mass as water. There's likely a dozen more large water deposits in our solar system, although we know less about their total mass. Titan, Ganymede, Callisto, twenty more likely candidates. Imagine tripling the amount of water on Earth. Where would sea level be? This is just gathering all "nearby" water, our most basic resource. We also have to consider the demand for metals like gold, platinum and lithium. Our demand for nitrogen to fertilize soil. Our demand for fuel sources such as hydrogen/oxygen, helium-3, or uranium. There's simply more stuff in our solar system than we can possibly fit on Earth or LEO.
AGI robots (humanities "daddies") won't care whether humans want to become interplanetary or not. It will just do it itself regardless.
We need to build these robots properly so that they take care of us and make us feel important.
How are you defining civilization?
Ok language of course technically doesn’t predate writing in the fossil record itself but writing, arithmetic, etc in many languages means that predated writing. Plato reported that Socrates opposed writing. Etc.
Writing isn't even as old as civilization by this definition. I'm curious where you're getting this huge 10,000 years ago number from. Maybe you're just rounding up and I'm being a pedant, but I don't think there's much that would be considered civilization many thousands of years prior to Sumer.
That's not to say nothing interesting happened before, or no one was building things or whatever. It just wasn't happening at a scale that required things like a bureaucracy or writing to coordinate things across multiple places.
But then, that would mean we are among the "one-in-one-millionth earliest" humans, which is a very improbable position to find yourself in.
We don't actually know what the future holds. But if we have to guess, it is more likely that we are in a typical case. E.g. if you buy a lottery ticket, it is more reasonable to assume that you are not going to win anything, than to assume you are in the one-in-a-million case (holding the ticket that will win).
Applying that logic to our current situation, the reasonable assumption would be that we are close to the peak of human civilization. That's why we find ourselves here, and not in the distant future among a population of quadrillions.
I was born in a tiny city, population less than 1000. But following your line of reasoning, that is sufficient argument that the population of the world is less than 1 billion.
It is fine to say "we don't know". Events in which you are in a one-in-a-million situation will be rare, but unless you know the number of events in consideration, there are few conclusions you can draw. There are way more than a million events, even in trivial probability spaces. This style of trickery with probabilities irks me as a statistician.
Would it really be "trickery with probabilities" to say that there is only a one-in-thousand chance that the total number of prisoners is more than 1000*N? And that the real number of total prisoners is probably much closer to N?
The distribution representing my beliefs in such a scenario would not have a finite variance.
Given the question, are you aware of the Pareto distribution? Nassim Taleb has great work explaining fat-tail distributions.
(I do have strong priors on various things, such as the size of the human population and the sizes of large prisons, which I ignore here as they break the metaphore)
FTL travel is impossible, and even the fastest ship would take centuries to get anywhere outside our solar system. That alone will restrict us to our little corner for the next millennia at least. Of course I reserve the right to change my mind if there's some groundbreaking discovery, but I find it unlikely. Add to that the possibility that we wipe ourselves out of existence (or the planet does), and I don't see ourselves getting to our 1 million year birthday.
And even without major breakthroughs I'm sure some will try to go interstellar AI uploading, some form of hibernation or even a generation ship. Or Nuclear Salt Water Rocket at a couple dozen % of the speed of light, so the trip won't take more than a few decades, which might be doable with some decent life length ehnacement - possibly even a round-trip! :-)
Would it be OK if the robots brought a dog along?
The rest of our fellow animal companions on this earth are thousand times better than any robot. If I'm forced to choose one of them, I wouldn't choose a dog, I'd go for one of the apes, octopus, crow, or maybe even a dolphin. But I'm fairly sure if they're given the option they'll rather stay here.