You are not thinking in a sufficient timescale. Human civilization is less than 10,000 years old. Barring some type of great filter event, it seems likely that human civilization will saturate the galaxy, or at least the local group, within the 400m years the OP mentioned.

Depends on how much competing interest is out there.

A Petri dish might dream of taking over North America, but the humans might have other plans (for instance, the autoclave across the room).

Maybe they'd reason that North America is entirely lifeless, since nobody has yet tried to communicate the secrets of the Universe to them in a (bacterially) intelligible language.

Honestly the Petri dish has better chances. The bacteria that inhabit one have the demonstrated ability to persistently survive outside of it.

>the galaxy, or at least the local group

The local group is bigger than the galaxy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Group

Fair enough, however the Fermi Paradox and the consequently postulated Great Filter are a thing precisely because the evidence of this competition should be present but is not.

> The local group is bigger than the galaxy.

You are certainly correct, I misremembered the terms. Substitute for the local regions of our galaxy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion-Cygnus_Arm

Thanks! I hadn't heard of the Local Bubble before.

Not sure I like the idea of humans taking over the galaxy unless we can evolve to be more caring.

Human civilization is much more than 10,000 years old, but in any case robots can live longer and in more interesting modes (branching, eusocial, etc). They can colonize all sorts of planets unsuitable for us. They should carry our culture, such as it is, forward to the stars and galaxies.

As a living organism I am most interested in increasing the resources and habitat size for my species and decedents. The amount of resources on Earth (or that we could bring to Earth) is a tiny fraction compared to what's available. More resources and more habitats means more people, which means more of everything that makes humanity awesome.

The robots are just a forward scouting tool. Human civilization is essentially 10k years old on galactic time scales, with agriculture being ~12k years old.

I am not the MAILMAN, I am also a living organism and I couldn't care less about those goals. I don't deny that you might have them but they are hardly an automatic consequence of being a human, much less some more general "living organism". They sound pretty high level to me, especially the bit about "species" (whatever that might really mean anyway). Speciation is a human construct.

For all you know you are just running a program designed to transmit a message encoded in some "junk" DNA inherited from some long lost ancestor who was modified by some alien that crashed on our planet billions of years ago who hopes that some terrestrial decendent will eventually arrive at an inhabited planet where the residents will open up the astronaut, read the message, and come rescue your descendants to travel.

Robots will be our real descendants.

> I don't deny that you might have them but they are hardly an automatic consequence of being a human, much less some more general "living organism".

Searching for resources, gathering them, and controlling territory from competitors are basic biological behaviors we see in most (all?) life. On a personal level this behavior might look like visiting a grocery store, storing the food at home, and locking your door.

It seems reasonable that as our technology develops and we exhaust resources on Earth that we will need to increase our reach to resources and territories beyond Earth.

> Searching for resources, gathering them, and controlling territory from competitors are basic biological behaviors we see in most (all?) life.

The vast majority of the mass of life on this planet does not participate in all (and probably in most cases any) of the behavior you describe. Stromatolites, various parasites and symbiotes, most bacteria, etc do little to none of that.

Importing resources from other planets or other extraterrestrial bodies can and would better be done by robots than humans.

Organelles such as flagellum are used for moving to find more resources. A large benefit of cell membranes is to provide a safe place for resources. I'd argue the entire lifecycle of parasites is to find (scout) suitable resource rich environments and to consume them all (gather), often in a way that wrestles territory control from it's host. Here are some articles describing bacteria doing the exact behaviors (search for resource, gather them, and territory control).

* A good summary of group compeitive behavior of bacteria, including several territory control strategies. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2879262/

* "Distinct foraging strategies generated by single-action behavioural flexibility" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.09.434602v2....

* Marine bacteria changing behavior around resource rich locations to improve resource gathering. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200925113346.h...

* Description of bacteria predators, and complex hunting behavior (scout and gather) https://www.llnl.gov/news/predatory-bacteria-bite-their-own

* Description of properties of bacteria colonies and territory expansion https://nbi.ku.dk/english/news/news20/bacteria-colonies-of-b...

I find it interesting that y'all seem to assume that humans will remain biological (for 400m+ years) and will somehow not merge with robots to make the humans vs robots discussion kind of irrelevant.

AGI robots (humanities "daddies") won't care whether humans want to become interplanetary or not. It will just do it itself regardless.

I do refer to them as "our children".

We need to build these robots properly so that they take care of us and make us feel important.

> more than 10kya

How are you defining civilization?

Writing is about 10 Ky old, but clearly organized groups with language, rituals, manufacturing, structures etc long predate that in the fossil record.

Ok language of course technically doesn’t predate writing in the fossil record itself but writing, arithmetic, etc in many languages means that predated writing. Plato reported that Socrates opposed writing. Etc.

I'm still not clear on how you're defining civilization. The typical definition includes large population centers with some central authority, along with trade routes and divided labor. Roughly 3000-4000 BC IIRC.

Writing isn't even as old as civilization by this definition. I'm curious where you're getting this huge 10,000 years ago number from. Maybe you're just rounding up and I'm being a pedant, but I don't think there's much that would be considered civilization many thousands of years prior to Sumer.

That's quite a Spenglarian definition of "civilization". Compare that to, say, Margaret Meade who gave an example of civilization being demonstrated by someone surviving for years post a traumatic injury (broken leg), which required specific non-animal level of cooperation and support of someone who couldn't hunt or gather.

Of course, humans did not go from being unable to care for each other to forming cities overnight. Agriculture and even some amount of trading was happening far before people started wrangling cities within the same control structures. The moment in history when human settlements got large enough to encompass multiple locations and require coordination is a useful concept, and as far as I can tell, modern historians consider that to be around 4000 BC.

That's not to say nothing interesting happened before, or no one was building things or whatever. It just wasn't happening at a scale that required things like a bureaucracy or writing to coordinate things across multiple places.

There are many significant physical roadblocks at the moment, and putting aside how cool I think that a galactic civilization would be, I'm not sure we can remove enough of them to achieve that goal.

FTL travel is impossible, and even the fastest ship would take centuries to get anywhere outside our solar system. That alone will restrict us to our little corner for the next millennia at least. Of course I reserve the right to change my mind if there's some groundbreaking discovery, but I find it unlikely. Add to that the possibility that we wipe ourselves out of existence (or the planet does), and I don't see ourselves getting to our 1 million year birthday.

A lot to play with for the near future here with the resources of the solar system - think of all the unique cultures even just the early habitats swarms will spawn!

And even without major breakthroughs I'm sure some will try to go interstellar AI uploading, some form of hibernation or even a generation ship. Or Nuclear Salt Water Rocket at a couple dozen % of the speed of light, so the trip won't take more than a few decades, which might be doable with some decent life length ehnacement - possibly even a round-trip! :-)

I agree, we need to focus on our local neighborhood. If there are breakthroughs, they'll come. We should make the most of what we already have.

our robot descendants won't care about the long timescales. There's plenty they could do, or they could even power down for a few million years.

I don't care for robots if we're not there to experience the universe. They're just a byproduct, a piece of trash we'll leave after we're gone. I want us to explore, not our toasters.

What a speciesist view! You won’t have any experiences outside the solar system, or likely off planet at all. You will not know any of the people who do. So what difference should it make if they are meat, metal, or some combination?

Would it be OK if the robots brought a dog along?

Robots don't experience anything. They're not alive. Everything they do is something we code into them.

The rest of our fellow animal companions on this earth are thousand times better than any robot. If I'm forced to choose one of them, I wouldn't choose a dog, I'd go for one of the apes, octopus, crow, or maybe even a dolphin. But I'm fairly sure if they're given the option they'll rather stay here.

That would mean there will exist a factor million (or even much higher) more human lives in the future, than there have been so far.

But then, that would mean we are among the "one-in-one-millionth earliest" humans, which is a very improbable position to find yourself in.

We don't actually know what the future holds. But if we have to guess, it is more likely that we are in a typical case. E.g. if you buy a lottery ticket, it is more reasonable to assume that you are not going to win anything, than to assume you are in the one-in-a-million case (holding the ticket that will win).

Applying that logic to our current situation, the reasonable assumption would be that we are close to the peak of human civilization. That's why we find ourselves here, and not in the distant future among a population of quadrillions.

I have never understood this type of argument. Even in my regular life, I am atypical in more than one one-in-a-million way.

I was born in a tiny city, population less than 1000. But following your line of reasoning, that is sufficient argument that the population of the world is less than 1 billion.

It is fine to say "we don't know". Events in which you are in a one-in-a-million situation will be rare, but unless you know the number of events in consideration, there are few conclusions you can draw. There are way more than a million events, even in trivial probability spaces. This style of trickery with probabilities irks me as a statistician.

Imagine you are kidnapped and knocked unconscious. Then you wake up in a prison cell by yourself. You are now wearing a prison uniform with a label that says "prisoner N", where N is some number.

Would it really be "trickery with probabilities" to say that there is only a one-in-thousand chance that the total number of prisoners is more than 1000*N? And that the real number of total prisoners is probably much closer to N?

Yes to the first question!

The distribution representing my beliefs in such a scenario would not have a finite variance.

Given the question, are you aware of the Pareto distribution? Nassim Taleb has great work explaining fat-tail distributions.

(I do have strong priors on various things, such as the size of the human population and the sizes of large prisons, which I ignore here as they break the metaphore)

The great filter is table stakes, getting over it doesn't guarantee anything. It's also impossible to accurately and confidently predict the future millions of years in advance.

You are downvoted, but there is some wisdom here. We are perfectly evolved for the conditions of earth, even an earth whose temperature raises a few degrees Celsius.

Unless we can terraform another world to our needs, permanent life on another planet will be very difficult life. Temporary visits? Sure, count me in. Just like I don’t want to live in the Antarctic for more than a few months.

We are perfectly adapted for a part of Africa and that's pretty much it. Without technology (which goes from igloos to central heating) we would pretty much freeze to death anywhere else.

> We are perfectly adapted for a part of Africa and that's pretty much it.

Not the British or the Irish. These particular designs have not been contrived to withstand ambient temperatures exceeding +20C, with a very low degree of heat tolerance built-in. The two designs are very prone to inadvertent self-ignition and burning up in flames when exposed to the direct sunlight with almost no leeway available to them whilst being generally a reliable and pretty sturdy design otherwise. For that reason, both specimens usually come off the factory equipped with a fire extinguisher that nearly immediately either gets lost or drunk away (usually the latter).

I wonder how man 3000 years ago survived in North America and Northern Europe without technology.

Humans don't adapt to their environment, we adapt the environment to us.

In the longer term case of galactic expansion, humans are likely to need to adapt ourselves to other environments.

He said life, not humans. Taking a life-cycle analysis, biological entities are dramatically more efficient than existing robots. Designed a nanobot that gathers energy and resources from the natural environment to reproduce itself? Congratulations, you just invented the cell.

It's also worth noting that our robots are far from perfectly adapted to space. Usually, they get to the destination by jettisoning all manner of fuel tanks, landing gear, etc, and then they die in a few years. They're adapted to being put together in factories on Earth. Much like we don't have isolated livable environments on Earth, we don't have self-maintaining robot factories, either, and both problems seem pretty hard.

I think a compromise solution might be developed over the next fifty million years or so. No idea what it's going to look like.

No reason we couldn't build sentient robots that also have some of the benefits of being made out of meat -- we have the time. I don't see any reason why robots shouldn't evolve over the useful timescales we are discussing.

Shedding gear can be a useful strategy; some animals even use it in extremis.

>sentient robots that also have some of the benefits of being made out of meat -- we have the time.

Meat is a highly evolved 'robot' structural material if you wish...