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Comment by jml7c5 | Hacker News Reader

The enigma is that if civilization is common, we should see evidence of mass colonization even if only a single "spreader" civilization developed. Among the millions of civilizations out there, are we assuming that none of them were expansionary?

The conclusion: civilization is uncommon OR we are unable to detect civilizations for some reason OR there is something intrinsic about civilization that prohibits the development of "spreaders".

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I might go with option that interstellar spreading is just impossible. There might not be ways around physics and sufficient energy budgets might not just be possible.

Or maybe it's just too impractical. Communication alone is a pretty compelling argument against "galactic civilisations". If the speed of light is indeed the ultimate limit for information exchange, then it would be completely pointless to have a "colony" more than a handful of light years away.

It'd be practically impossible to even just have a meaningful information exchange between worlds that are hundreds or even thousands of light years apart. Trading goods would be useless - it'd take thousands of years for a one way trip. Messages would be obsolete the moment they're sent, because the receiver would only be able to detect them after hundreds or thousands of years.

All those fantasies rely on FTL or basically unchanging civilisations that stagnate for aeons.

Also, wouldn't any type of generation ship be culturally resource constrained, maybe not energy, but at least in all meaningful raw materials. As such the initial start might be expansionist, but the spawns would have spend long time with very real limits, likely in all aspects of normal living. And with communication being what it is, they might be extremely unhappy about being sent away too...

If space travel were performed only by robots (and really, why would anyone do it any other way) then large scale “colonization” need not even make sense: the robots could travel around at sunlight speed doing whatever research is of interest to the aliens and gathering whatever resources are needed for people on or near the home planet. “People” might have long enough lifespans that the time taking by the robots to travel around might not feel significant, especially as it would mostly be happing in background.

Do you think in 100,000 years we'll still have big meat bodies, and all the massy trappings of civilization that come along with that?

I think it's the destiny of all intelligent life to merge into the ether and that happens in the astronomical blink of an eye after industrialization.

The expectation that any truly advanced civilization is still primitive enough for us to see is likely the flawed assumption here.

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