I have enjoyed reading "The Songs of Distant Earth" by Arthur C. Clarke which talks about seed ships and the culture rise from that. It's an interesting read.

Another book along those lines I enjoyed reading was "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Wonderfully written, but for my shame I expected a different storyline and put it down a year or so ago after only reading 60 pages or so and haven't gone back to it. I keep packing it one times away, but... .

One day I might learn how to have a kid AND read books :/

I started reading the Foundation trilogy out loud to my infant. One gets through the books a lot more slowly but it works! I must admit that even if he falls asleep I'll cheat and finish the chapter (still reading vocally).

Bonus: it lets me practice voices for DM'ing DnD games

haha, I should try that perhaps - particularly as I happen to have been carrying Foundation around in my bag and barely managing to read about two pages on my commute :) I never was good at reading when there's interesting Life to gawp at out the window.

The seeds of humanity won't be humanity at all, but the AI.

I’m imagining a spaceship landing at a deserted planet millions of years in the future and then just sitting there, generating pictures of cities in the sky and Mona Lisa on a surfboard.

Kind of a fun hybrid where AI is clearly dominant in an established solar system, but it ends up being impossible to miniaturize the enormous supply chain necessary to fabricate microprocessors, so to colonize a new solar system it actually ends up being necessary to send self-replicating carbon-based humans who will then bootstrap the industrial supply chain necessary for AGI.

(repeat ad infinitum for the rest of the galaxy, humans live only on the frontier)

Who came first? The AGI or the human?

I think we'll figure out how to give your brain access to something like an AMD Ryzen long before we figure how to make a processor into an AI or make one that's concious.

I'd buy that book!

It's all fun and games until you think about the practicalities of building a self-repairing machine that can keep running for hundreds/thousands/millions of years with no significant software or hardware errors.

I’m reminded of the starship Destiny in Stargate Universe.

The Destiny spaceship travels from one Solar system to the other, and occasionally dives into stars to refuel itself.

https://youtu.be/8iXoK39yLQM

A thinking machine would handle errors. That seems simple. Are you imagining that "AI" would be a static piece of code?

Specifically without becoming a paperclip optimizer.

It seems that there's a very pessimistic trend with regards to estimating the feasibility of engineering human biology for inhabiting outer space. Everyone just wants to let AI do it. I think this is because the progress of biotech has been so glacial. This is largely due to regulation. China will probably change the rules around at some point to allow for more flexibility here, with lots of moral outrage and handwringing in the west, and speed off into the future.

Well, I think that's really just an implementation detail. The point is that we will engineer our successor beings, whether than engineering is computery or mad sciencey or both.

Another book Bobiverse series

That would be so interesting - could be many a sci-fi stories created on that premise.

Some mechanical robot/starship storing frozen embryos for 100 years to be released on a far-away exoplanet, the starship taking care of them while they grow up and learn how to live on this new world - the beginnings of a new civilization - a technological adam and eve of sorts.

http://localroger.com/k5host/pitv.html is my favorite take on this

I feel like the reverse situation kinda writes itself as a sci-fi horror short story:

You've got people living their every day lives, when a probe from space lands and starts producing aliens. At first it's treated as a strange curiosity, but with time the aliens begin to make inroads conquering the planet. Ending twist: the aliens are humans, and the "people" were aliens!

"And All The Stars, A Stage", by James Blish.

Tangentially related: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-3936.

You might enjoy the short story collection Children of the New World[1] by Alexander Weinstein. One of the stories, Saying Goodbye to Yang, was recently made into a movie called After Yang[2] staring Colin Farrell. The movie has a super-catchy opening credit sequence.[3]

[1]https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/31cd88d8-d8d3-4414-b38c-...

[2]https://boxd.it/lx5a

[3]https://twitter.com/A24/status/1499114323314151425?ref_src=t...

The best exploration of this theme that I have read, was an East German SF novel from the former GDR. Unfortunately, as far as I know, it has never been translated into English.

Here is a very short synopsis on the authors website in English: https://steinmuller.de/en/sf-literatur/science-fiction-buech...

Raised by wolves

And Interstellar

I am Mother https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Mother

And 2001 Nights.

But hopefully the story would actually be interesting

We can’t do lightspeed with the best tech available, so it’s more like 300-400 years probably.

Don't have to go light speed, thanks to relativity. If we could achieve and sustain even 1G acceleration, live humans could make the 100LY trip in approx. 9 years (spaceship time). You could leave, visit the planet, and come back only 18 years older and tell the next-next-next-next-next generation all about it.

EDIT: To be fair, 1G over 100LY will result in a maximum speed around 0.9998c so I guess you would have to approximately approach light speed for this trip.

True, but we can only manage 1G for minutes, and even hours is a pretty far off.

Without exotic tech like anti-matter or bending space time nothing is particularly close to light speed. Even city size laser arrays are targeting 1-3% of light speed .... for a few grams!

It's a mind boggling amount of energy to get any decent fraction of the speed of light, even without the relativistic increases in mass.

cut that is half. You have got to decelerate to a near stop, much less zip past by your target.

Mo' acceleration, mo' trolley problems.

Go on vacation; come back; everyone's dead.

Alright, alright, alright.

At those speeds you will have problems with the rocket equation even if you have an mass-to-energy drive.

Is this really how time dilation works?

Speed through space + Time adds up to the speed of light or something like that (not a physicist). So as you get closer and closer to the speed of light, your motion through time (from your point of view) slows tremendously. So a few years to you, could be centuries to outside observers. Source: some Kip Thorne lectures I saw like 15 years ago.

It’s interesting that space and time are so intrinsically linked. So space “needs” time and vice-versa. I would love to be able to take an peak behind the curtain how it all works (as I think the relativity theory is rather descriptive, not the true mechanism)

I mean (so Energy is massaccel^2) so does that make space and time equal to energy.

i need a coffee for this one*

Yeah, I just try to learn a bit of the high level "understanding" of how the experts say things like time dilation work, but that's about it. I don't try to extrapolate what little I know as it would likely all be nonsense without a full understanding of the math of all of this stuff: relativity, quantum mechanics, cosmology...etc. Not that it isn't good to think about this stuff.

Yip, although there's also length contraction in play. The universe just starts contorting itself to ensure nothing ever exceeds the speed of light.

What the GP post is referring to is called a 'relativistic rocket'. You can find plenty of calculators for them, like here [1]. It leads to really mind-bending scenarios. For instance a single human could easily travel a billion light years within their lifetime, requiring "only" to travel at 1G acceleration for 40 years. Of course in that time a billion years would have really passed outside of our relativistic rocket.

If it ultimately turns out that there is no fundamental law of the universe that makes long-term rates of relatively low acceleration impossible, then the future will be a simply unimaginable place. Time itself will start to lose meaning as it becomes as variable as distance is today, at least for those able to travel.

[1] - https://www.anycalculator.com/starshipcalculator.html

Yea, the calculators really help show how wild it is. I could outlive Earth's sun by simply accelerating away at 1.25G for ~35 years (ship time), not to mention how stacked I'd be from the workout of merely existing at 1.25G for half my life. The very concept of simultaneity is completely whack at such distances, times, and speeds.

But more importantly - will we be able to do that Superman movie trick where we just fly around the sun EXCEEDING the speed of light so we can go back in time?

Joking mainly. With this much time dilation it would be fascinating to just send out tons of probes in different directions at high speed and constant acceleration - this would massively extend their service life - and potentially also massively extend our knowledge of the universe as well. Of course relatively to the people on Earth it would take a long ass time.

"The universe just starts contorting itself to ensure nothing ever exceeds the speed of light."

This pretty well describes what it's like walking around in a game. Everything looks and acts pretty normal and rational up close, yet I can walk across a continent in a few minutes, yet each individual step along the way looked normal.

Better stock up on antimatter.

We’ll never get governments to approve and fund this. Elon/Bill if you’re reading this you have to do this going rogue. Make it happen. Send human life out to a hundred different planets!

Or possibly long hibernation could allow adults to travel too.

I doubt this. We seem very hesitant to seed any world with any kind of life, even going through great lengths to ensure no errant bacteria get carried on a rover or something.

If we were serious about spreading life, we could loaded up some rockets with basic organisms and throw them onto whatever worlds we want to seed, and then a few million years of evolution should take care of the rest.

I have thought about this a lot. I have said for a long time that human space exploration doesn't make any sense to me. Space is so hostile to our life in general it seems that only purpose-built machines make any sense for the job. But of course for the preservation of our species, we would want to be able to send the "seeds" of our ecosystem to other places.

But then, if we have progressed to that level of technology, where we can send cells or even just DNA with the machines to be cultivated far away in the distant future... would we even bother? Would we even consider ourselves distinct from the machines by then? Honestly I'm not sure. It could very well be that we consider our creations to be our "children", so to speak. Destined to inherit the universe as we pass gradually into the dust from from which we came. It seems inevitable if we eventually crack AGI or artificial consciousness.

We would probably be better off seeding just some basic life first well before humans - give it time to adapt to the local environment and setup shop. Of course this could also backfire (in that it might evolve to be very hostile to human life) but if there is one thing humans are amazing at it is outcompeting other potentially hostile forms of life.

> But of course for the preservation of our species, we would want to be able to send the "seeds" of our ecosystem to other places.

Or we could, you know, take better care of the planet we’re already on.

Tell that to the solar flare that randomly burns everything on it... Or the asteroid that crashes into it... Or the black hole that eats it... Or the aliens that invade it... Or the plague that kills everyone on it... Or the supervolcano that causes "nuclear" winter...

We could be doing our absolute best and still be surprised pikachus anyways. And there's no scifi remedy that will help us resolve these problems, we're not even K1, much less K2 - who's on Earth when it comes dies.

As the only known example of intelligent life in the observable universe, we should be doing everything we can to preserve ourselves. Having everyone on one planet is not a good idea if you're looking for survival on geological timescales (and/or have bad luck).

I think the AI will find little reason to take us with them to the stars.

I don't understand people who say things like this. If we invented AGI tomorrow, how would it achieve domination over us humans?

It is like Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, Milton, Hobbes, Rawls never even existed and we don't have any sort of coherent understanding of political philosophy and how power is gained and enacted at the consent of the governed.

I also find that discussions of interstellar travel tend to conveniently ignore the fact that a society that develops to the point where this is feasible, must necessarily also have developed to the point of a fully post-growth economy, which leads to fundamental questions of why that society (or parts of it) would seek to undertake interstellar travel at all. It's a boring answer, sure, but many facts of life are quite boring.

> If we invented AGI tomorrow, how would it achieve domination over us humans?

Completely depends on if super-intelligence is possible from that AGI model, and if so, how fast the ramp up will be to super-intelligence.

The problem for insects is not that humans "dominate" them (in fact most insects have total "freedom"); the problem is that humans do not take the concerns of insects into account for any of their decision making.

> If we invented AGI tomorrow, how would it achieve domination over us humans?

Biological evolution takes millions of years to improve human intelligence. Artificial intelligence will be able to develop and deploy self-improvements within years, compounding its abilities.

I get that hypothetically these AGIs would become very smart. But it's not like being very smart is the main criterium for gaining power and becoming a world leader?

All real power stems from old men talking in country clubs and golf courses. The super-smart people work in labs and universities and earn decent salaries while worrying about publication and citationd statistics and journal impact factors.

How does the AGI go golfing?

For what reason would we want people physically close to this thing?

Who would raise them?

The robot from I Am Mother

TIL we can use seeds to create hu-mans. So cool!

It is a bit of hubris for us to think that we are the ones to travel the stars and not the AI we create.

The "robots" will have little incentive to seed humans when they get there.

Fortunately my blender doesn't need an incentive to grind fruit, only a hundred and twenty volts.

Ah, but what makes you confident humans (or any other animal) isn't likewise acting deterministically with just a veiled illusion of free-will and incentive?

From physics point of view, I guess everything is deterministic. But from a human point of view, the question is irrelevant, because we can only experience reality as humans.

Your question sounds like a troll, but it's actually a fascinating one. Reminds me so much of reading Descartes and essentially asking, "How do I know I'm not asleep and dreaming?"

You know you're awake because reality has continuity and makes sense.

Conversely, dreams are fragmented and implausible. You can train yourself to check this to lucid dream (become aware that you are dreaming).

I've had vivid dreams where I was completely convinced I was in reality. Continuity was maintained well enough to fool me. How could I know I wasn't in a dream? How can I truly know beyond doubt that I am not in a dream?

Yes you can sometimes do that (I've lucid dreamed quite a few times before and it's pretty wild), but it's nowhere near 100% reliable. you can get pretty good with practice, but even then it's not a scientific test. It's more of a process of reasoning and gut checking. The human mind can fill in an incredible amount of detail when needed. In one lucid dream I was playing a song on the guitar that I had (as far as I know) never heard before (myself in the dream was inventing the song). I realized I was dreaming before waking up and practiced the song over and over so it was stuck in my head, and then immediately after waking I wrote down the tablature. It ended up being a pretty good song, and (at least so far) I haven't heard anything else like it.

Obviously this is heavy anecdata, but I've never heard a scientific explanation of how to be certain whether or not you're dreaming (or as Descartes describes, being deceived by a demon).

>it's not a scientific test.

Isn't every subjective experience, almost by definition, unable to be tested scientifically?

We can objectively measure someone's brain activity during sleep, but we can't really measure their subjective experience. Implying that everything made up of subjective experience (like consciousness) can't be measured. Which also implies it can't be proven by scientific means. So in response to the GP comment, I'm not sure we can "know you're awake" (in the scientific sense, at least).

Yes, exactly, that's the point I'm getting at. We experience "life" through our senses, and our senses can be fooled. Even measuring brain activity requires a subjective level of "trust" that we're seeing a real machine that's taking real measurements, rather than a simulation of a machine. We can look for glitches in the matrix, but absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.

It's wildly impractical to live your life like that, but at the end of the day we just don't know and probably can't know.

I'm pretty sure what you're describing is the hard problem of consciousness.

There are tried and true techniques, like checking your watch. When you're dreaming, it will show different times when you check it.

So if you train yourself to check your watch for consistency (in your normal everyday life), your unconscious will continue the practice in your dreams, and you'll notice the inconsistency.

Sorry if it came across that way, it definitely wasn't the intent! I think Sam Harris has some pretty fascinating and accessible discussions on the topic. There's also some interesting neuroscience work that seems to conflict with the common notions of free-will.

oh yeah, totally agree Sam Harris on this is really awesome. I also love Robert Sapolsky's stuff. He's got several great videos on Youtube and his books are awesome as well.

Liking fruit is far from being an automaton.

Can you elaborate? It's not immediately clear to me what you meant. Can not both simple and complex decisions be the artifact of a deterministic process?

Your blender didnt learn survival from you. Yet.

We don't need to bring humans we can bring some sort of fungus and eventually it will evolve into humans over billions of years.

they've probably already done that to us here on earth