[ExI] Send in the dwarfs

[Jeff Davis]

Almost two years ago, Eugen Leitl, in a thread re the Fermi Paradox,
commented that no way would galactic colonization be carried out by
"canned monkeys", but by Von Neumann probes.  Which took me back to
the old saw that it makes no sense to try to travel to the stars using
current tech, cause future tech will be superior, and if you leave
now, with current tech, those future folks having left after, will
arrive ahead of you, and be there to greet you when you finally show
up.

I thought about this awhile, and just got pissed off.  Applied as a
general principle, it basically says there's no point in ever giving
it a go.  I said "Screw that!" and decided someone sometime will have
to pull a "Nike", and "Just do it."   From there I thought about how
such an enterprise would come about: how would it start?, what would
motivate the participants?, and what sort of folks would make a
commitment to leave the planet forever and spend the rest of their
lives in space, knowing that they will never live to reach their
faraway new home?  And what of the children, without whom the "colony
ship" would end being little more than an interstellar mausoleum?
What sort of folks make such a decision for their descendants, who
would inevitably become a culture accustomed to living in transit
between the stars, with no habit of life in a planetary gravity well?
What would motivate them to disembark at their destination and walk
away from the only way of life that they had ever known?  Probably
only a fringe group of the descendants, a disaffected element desiring
separation, would choose to start a new planet-bound way of life.  The
rest would probably just resupply and refuel and he and






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