[ExI] Should we still want biological space colonists?

[Jason Resch]

On Fri, Feb 7, 2025, 11:05 AM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 7, 2025 at 7:06 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> Any civilization that has mastered technology to the point of being
>> capable of building artificial bodies and brains will see the engineering
>> of customized robotics as far preferable to terraforming planets and will
>> see the transport of uploaded minds inhabiting the unlimited space of
>> virtual realities as far more efficient than trying to haul fragile,
>> radiation-sensitive, prone to spoil, meat bodies to the stars in generation
>> ships.
>>
>
> Even if AGI was about to happen, there is a vast gulf between AGI extended
> from current AI efforts and mind uploading.
>

You are correct that there is a vast gulf in technological sophistication,
but the exponential speed at which technology advances implies there's only
a short gulf in time between those two milestones.

In my estimation, there's less than two decades between AGI and mind
uploading. And with superintelligent AI timescales collapse further still.



> Besides, building space habitats seems preferable to terraforming
> planets.  Even without AGI, the robots we have today are capable of setting
> up mining and manufacturing operations on Mars to support people living
> outside the gravity well, on habitats that are built (including radiation
> shielding, on-board/local agriculture, et al) to sustain life in far better
> conditions than any world we can soon reach other than Earth (and,
> depending on the habitat, perhaps even any place on Earth) is likely to
> support in the next few centuries.
>

I agree space habitats make more sense than terraforming. But what habitat
is better than virtual reality whose only limit is imagination?

With a sufficiently powerful computational substrate, all of humanity could
exist on a computer that could fit within the space shuttle. Each of those
billions of uploaded human minds would have access to an entire universe of
their own choosing. Options for growth, learning, experiencing, relating,
entertaining, exploring would be unbounded for everyone.

With the whole population together, there's nothing tying them to Earth.
Copies of these ships can be split off at any time and sent in new
directions, and within a few million years fill the Galaxy with human
consciousness, with a redundancy and resiliency to last for trillions of
years. We would be positioned to watch every viable planet and await the
rise of the next such technological species.

At the physical limits of computational efficiency, the computation
required to run 100 billion human minds could fit in a computer with a
volume no bigger than a grain of sand.

Can we rule out that we already inhabit a universe filled with such "dust
ships"?

Jason
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