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.