This is a study of the feasibility of launching an intergalactic colonization wave (and its implications re: the Fermi paradox), not a proposal that humans should do that (it would be just slightly ahead of its time for that!), or a discussion of the ethics or higher-level utility of doing so. It would be refreshing to see someone discuss the things paper actually discusses. To use early-2000s terminology, the paper's future shock level is higher than that of most HN readers, leading to rather banal discourse.

In any case, I'm fairly sure the authors agree that sending mindless automata to colonize the universe doesn't seem like a great idea. Nevertheless some alien intelligence (including an Earth-based AGI) might find it a completely reasonable, even imperative, goal.

But sentient machines or uploads (assuming for the sake of this this thought experiment that they are possible)? That's a different thing.

is there anything Collier doesn't sneer at? her purpose seems to be discouraging free and creative thinking.

The only person who seems to claim that Dyson Spheres were a "joke" is Angela Collier and people quoting her. I've seen no other source for this claim.

But even if it's true, which I don't think it is, it doesn't matter. Why? Because the idea is actually sound and a lot of thought has gone into it by people who have backgrounds in physics and engineering.

It's worth adding that "Dyson Swarm" is the more common nomenclature now because of a mistaken belief that a Dyson sphere was a rigid spherical shell you build around a star. That was never the case and there's no even theorized material that could support this kind of rigid structure. It was always a cloud of small orbitals so the "Dyson Swarm" should alleviate any confusion (hopefully).

Our civilization is ultimately energy-limited. I've seen estimates that we use ~10^11 Watts of energy. The Sun's entire output is ~10^25 Watts. That's a truly staggering amount of energy. We can barely comprehend what might be possible with that much energy. But one of those things is interstellar travel.

Many discussions on interstellar travel gloss over just how large the energy budgets are. But propelling objects with solar sails, particularly if you concentrate energy, seems feasible. At least the physics holds up.

Spreading throughout the galaxy becomes an almost inevitable consequence once you have the capability to do so.

In one case "we" is an imaginary humanity as a whole acting to fulfill a grand species defining mission, in the other case "we" is the real, decadent, ignorant and divided population of some countries.

Because we don't refer to the same entities in each case?

If we're talking about civilizations that have access to energy that's on the order of many stars, the civilization itself can be considered a meta-organism that spans many millennia. Launching probes that take hundreds or thousands of years to report back becomes a small fraction of overall lifespan.

There's no NIMBYs in Andromeda

Well, if you personally were building von Neumann machines do any purpose in the solar system, would YOU be interested in sending some to neighboring systems knowing that you could conceivably get a response in your lifetime.

Would you be at all interested in expanding that project to outlast you?

And even if you personally wouldn’t be so inclined, surely you know or have met people who might?

Once you have the self replication, expanding scope may just be additional code…

Some will do it, some won’t. The ones that do will be overrepresented in the universe.

There are no answers expected. This is a colonization wave.

You can ask same question about any decision that outlasts you. E.g. why write a will for your children?

Refreshing to see a technical criticism of this paper for a change.

We don't know however "It would take so long" is an anthropomorphic assumption of time scale.

To build more computronium than you can in your own system, assuming the demand for that will always rise.

Right. We have no idea how another species perceives time. This could be nothing to them.

And even if they do perceive it like us, that hasn't stopped humans from great projects. How many generations did it take to complete Stonehenge or the Great Wall of China? We're still on top of Voyager too after 50 years.

Sure, but you then can't access the computronium, because communication is so bad.

Also, I wonder if good old-fashioned computing is interesting at all to a civilization that's had access to advanced AI and quantum computing for a while.

Like we haven't really figured out how to get an ML model to run on a quantum computer, or how to build a quantum-native computer (i.e. surface of a black hole, or some other way that doesn't rely on our current sense of quantum error correction), but I don't know of any physical laws that preclude it.

I'd bet if aliens invaded our galaxy, they'd go for the super black holes in the center, or some other resource beyond our use and understanding, not this random water planet on the edge.

of course by the time we had the ability to do von Neumann Probes our anthropomorphic assumption of time scales may have changed.

How much would human life span need to increase for a von Neumann Probe to seem reasonable. I would think a life span of 600 and you're thinking, sure I won't get to see it through, but my allotted genetic offspring that I am allowed at age 500 if either of my other two have failed might.

I use the term "30,000 foot view" a lot: https://nanoglobals.com/glossary/30000-foot-view/

It appeals to me because if you've ever taken a flight you can see how the details get progressively erased as you lift. Details that matter for a lot of reasons even if you can't see them.

Life itself could arguably be a Von Neumann probe. It's so good at spreading that it's a problem, when we send probes to other bodies in our own solar system we often sanitize them because we worry life will hitch a ride and start colonizing.

Life on a planet is a lot like a continuous fire, fires often send out embers that start new fires elsewhere.

You send out little packets of life to new places, wait single-digit billions of years (a blink of an eye for the universe, really), boom: new intelligent species with potential to shoot more seeds out into the universe.

"Far-mode thinking".

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/near-far-thinking

> what we're currently capable of.

What we're capable of != what we're doing / not doing because of political will. We are technically capable of reaching significant fractions of c with tech from the 1960s. We'll never do that because there's no will to do it, but the tech is there.

Same for self replicating stuff. We could build self-contained factories that build stuff from raw minerals, but we'll likely not do it until there's a will for it. Or need for it.

Do we have anything that self-replicates physically?

Software, sure. I know 3D printer folks will sometimes 3D print parts for new machines. But nothing that fully replicates itself, right? Especially autonomously.

Maybe we'll see what a moon base can bring us.

If you expect to live past a few hundred years it isn't clear why your lifespan wouldn't be indefinite. The prerequisites for achieving the former appear to be more or less the same as those of the latter.

requirements change with purpose.

a "kilroy was here" sign has different purpose than "eat at joes".

is it enough to say "hi, your not alone" ? would we actually want to encourage discourse, or visitation.

Political will is part of the Fermi paradox. So are technical reliability and cultural stability.

The idea that you can just build a thing and send out a swarm and (slow) boom - you've colonised the galaxy, and all the adjacent galaxies - is hopelessly naive. To the point I'd call it stupid and silly.

Let's say you have a replicator thing that works. You send them out in swarms.

And then what? Some die, some miss, some are destroyed by accidents.

Some work.

But "a replicator landed and made some more" is not colonisation. Colonisation implies there's some kind of to-and-fro traffic, maybe trade, some kind of information exchange at a minimum.

And that implies the source civilisation has political, technological, and cultural stability, which can survive an incredibly slow diaspora.

Colonisation worked on Earth because it didn't take long to cross the Atlantic by sailing ship. Successful colonisers landed where humans already existed and trade was easy.

It doesn't work on interstellar, never mind intergalactic time scales, because nothing stays stable for that long. Not hardware, software, politics, or culture.

Nor, on slightly longer periods, biology. On much longer periods, geology, and eventually astrophysics, because stars change, and planetary systems aren't unconditionally stable.

So a colonising wave from a unified culture is an incredibly unlikely thing, not at all an obvious necessity.

This would mean bootstrapping current advanced manufacturing technologies to a new planet. You would need so many different tools to do that that I seriously doubt we are currently capable of making it compact enough to be sent into deep space with current technologies. We're currently sending at most small capsules into deep space, my gut tells me that for self-contained factories we would need to send something in the size order of a skyscraper.

Additionally, you also have to consider that a self-replicating space probe should be able to find, retrieve, and process the raw materials needed to build new probes on its own. A 3D printer can print some of its own parts, but with externally-provided material that it isn't able to produce on its own.

Basically all of life is self replicating, physically.

Yes, but this isn't what the paper is talking about.

I guess the OP meant something that is more flatous for human vanity to feel like a demiurge when at most it would be a tool of cosmos in its experiment.