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The problem with interstellar travel in general is that it is so expensive, in terms of energy usage. I speculate that even for Kardashev type 3 civilizations, shipping matter around will be impractical.

The future is software. For entities that live purely as software, and aren't so picky as us meatbags are about continuity of consciousness, "traveling" from place to place by sending data is the most practical method.

All that is needed is that the destination be prepared appropriately. So that means firing off a kilogram (or so) of self-replicating molecular nanotechnology which can build the infrastructure you'd want to live in (compute on) at the destination.

I haven't seen any indications yet with physics that something more practical is in the offing. There's still a lot we don't understand (GUFT, dark matter / energy), but there doesn't seem to be much hope for life as we know it to flit around the universe faster than light.

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> The future is software. For entities that live purely as software, and aren't so picky as us meatbags are about continuity of consciousness, "traveling" from place to place by sending data is the most practical method.

Sure, but for entities that live purely as software the concept of "being" in a "place" is probably completely unimportant.

There's no reason to assume that software entities would have any reason to want to interact with meatspace, especially when they can conjure every possible world (and every impossible world) out of nothing.

Well, at some point the local system will run out of unclaimed matter and energy (Dyson swarm consuming all output of the local sun, built using all available matter in the system). So if you want to expand, you will have to leave.

There would also be some astronomical phenomenon that aren't easily reproducible locally, so it might be useful to travel to them instead.

That is a fair point. Exploration for resources (including non-consumables like hard-to-reproduce phenomena) certainly would still make sense

I wonder if such software civilization couldn't automate the exploration process away, so that the beings themselves don't care about it day to day. From the outside perspective, the whole thing will look like a weird blob of something, expanding in the direction of usable resources at speeds close to c. And beings inside may not even be aware they're consuming some "real world" around them.

I guess I've just sketched a sci-fi story. I wonder if someone wrote it already.

_Accelerando_ by Charles Stross: one of the stories is about a civilization that grew so much in complexity that it couldn't afford the physical cost to leave its system, but its star was being consumed so it couldn't afford to stay either.

Once you've maxed out your abilities with the resources available in one place, then you'd probably start specializing for different abilities in different places to the extent you can gain additional value through comparative advantage. With that in mind sharing the unique results of the different specializations means location is still important in the absence of instantaneous communication over arbitrary distance.

P.S. Your name seems strangely familiar. /s

I'm the evolved-into-a-software-being version of you, of course

Where you are affects the latency of your communications, and less crowded areas may have more computing power available.

They could colonize not to actually interact with the environment there, but for computing resources and redundancy.

There's no need to do faster than light, or even all that fast. The diameter of the Milky Way is at most 200k light years, with technology we could develop today we could populate the entirety of it with generation ships in the span of less than 100 million years, which isn't all that big in the scale of the universe.

I read this, and about ideas like the Von Neumann probe[0] all the time, and it really fills my head with concrete to try and reconcile those ideas with the fact that we haven't found any signs of extraterrestrial life yet. If it's so feasible in a "short" time relative to the age of the universe, where are all the probes?

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft#Vo...

If you read about this all the time, then you're probably also familiar with the Fermi Paradox and the possible explanations for it. 2016 may have given us a clue as to which one of them seems most likely.

Please elaborate? What did we learn in 2016?

There is a star we've observed between 1400 and 1500 light years away with odd, non-cyclical light fluctuations. It may be indicative of a megastructure being built or falling apart around a star.

Unfortunately, I think a pulsar type situation is much more likely. There's many things that could potentially cause those fluctuations, especially considering our relative lack of knowledge about extrasolar space. In 1967 when we started detecting regular, precise bursts of EMR from deep space it looked a lot like aliens.

A great book that explores this topic (and is pretty funny) is "We are Legion, We are Bob" [1].

Well that and Spin [2], which probably addresses your point - maybe they're out there and they're already messing with us?

Ultimately, whenever I think about Fermi's Paradox, I am reminded of xkcd [3]. Maybe we just can't tell they're right in front of us.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Are-Legion-Bob-Bobiverse-Book-ebook/d... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Spin-Robert-Charles-Wilson/dp/0765348... [3] https://xkcd.com/638/

Also Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds for a more sinister solution to the Fermi problem.

The Three Body Problem trilogy (Cixin Liu) also proposes a fascinating (dark) explanation

That's exactly right, nuclear pulse propulsion is all you really need, and that was studied in the 60s with project Orion. The lack of probes is paradoxical i.e. Fermi's paradox (yuk yuk).

Software entities may experience reality a million times faster than we do now. Do you want to wait a quadrillion years to finish colonizing the galaxy? That is a really long time.

Also, if you okay more StarCraft, you won't be so relaxed about claiming unoccupied resources.

> Also, if you okay more StarCraft, you won't be so relaxed about claiming unoccupied resources.

As long as you build your army fast enough to cover them, there's no problem, and you want to be the first to claim those resources.

Yes. That sentence you quoted makes more sense when you replace 'okay' with 'play'.

I do wonder why we exist at all. In that, why hasn't our solar system been consumed by someone else's resource collection process yet.

Maybe we are very lucky. Maybe intelligent life doesn't arise that often. Or maybe it typically self destructs by the time it gets to this point.

I just recently learned the term "Bracewell probe" for this kind of device: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracewell_probe

Instead of sending radio signals or etching words or pictures in matter, you send a software agent that is reasonably intelligent in a hardware device into space seeking ETIs. The intelligence aboard the probe can have a conversation with the ETIs and communicate back to home the results.

We can't even make bots have a reasonable conversation with us in our own language :)

15 yrs ago we were impressed that an apple computer could turn text into audio. Imagine giving us another 10,000yrs (blink of an eye to a blink of an eye in terms of the scale of the galaxy) before deciding how much we're really capable of there

Or you can just send a freezed brain of a volunteer, hoping that alien civilization will be advanced enough to give it means of communication.

(Yes, there was a book with exactly such a plot point.)

"...so that means firing off a kilogram (or so) of self-replicating molecular nanotechnology which can build the infrastructure you'd want to live in (compute on) at the destination."

i just got a chill thinking we are living that exact thing in this simulation O_O

None of that was original, but I read the very best (Vinge, Drexler, Stross, Schroeder).

My best argument against living in simulation is similar to the argument against the intlelligent design or solipsism - if you could simulate anytning, why would you simulate this?

So many things in universe make sense if they have happened by accident, but make no sense to include in an intentionally created simulation.

If I would have the power and intelligence to create/simulate a universe, there's no way in hell I would make the world to work like this.

"if you could simulate anything, why would you simulate this?"

I want to agree... but then... I look at Youtube and wonder why a large portion of that gets made.

With the computing power we have NOW... look at all the stupid stuff that gets made. Imagine 50 years from now.

Well, making a silly youtube video for no reason is not the same as making a world where millions of sentient beings suffer/die for no reason.

Have you saw those YouTube videos about genetic algorithms teaching a thing to walk of fly? You may think: this thing do not suffer or feel any pain in repeating millions of times the same moviments just to fall on the floor less and less, no problem at all.

Advance a thousand years in the future and someone may happily simulate the world where you live among trillions of another things trying to evolve.

Yes and no. I'll agree that simulating a universe isn't the same as making a stupid video...

But I stand by my assertion that people waste a LOT of time doing stupid stuff.

There are projects that do AMAZING things and are spectacular. Then there is the other 95% of Youtube.

I'm sure there will be some AMAZING simulations... and then there will be the majority of them...

The real question in my mind... is which of those simulations are we in... an Amazing one... or a subpar one used for comparisons.

Simulating a universe like your own except simpler would let you spot-test solutions to problems, and study analogous of issues in your universe to greater depth.

We do economic simulations all the time, with weak-minded agents.

An argument from personal incredulity is still a logical fallacy. It's easy to see why this line of reasoning doesn't make sense.

If we're living in a simulation the thing most likely to running the simulation is ourselves, in the future.

It's easy to see why that would be valuable, e.g. this could be a simulation to see what happens if a war broke out in 1914, and all the downstream effects on that happening.

I think simulations will be used to help people live more productive / happy lives in the future. Imagine having many "lives" worth of experience, perhaps from many different periods throughout history, and you're still only 16 years old.

Not just the "matrix" flavor where the goal is to learn specific skills. I'm talking about being born, growing old, and dying in a simulation many times in a matter of hours? / days? / weeks? and being able to recall those experiences / decisions and their rewards and/or consequences once you're back to living your "real" life.

do you know the series "Rick and Morty"? reminds me exactly of this part: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szzVlQ653as

There is plenty of hope, even with standard physics. "Faster than light" has lots of wiggle room. Sleeper ships are certainly an option. So too are near-lighspeed ships that, from the perspective of those on board, could get between stars in reasonable times. Even then, what is "reasonable" is a function of human lifespan, a number that could easily grow exponentially without breaking any physical laws.

To a sufficiently advanced civilization matter and energy are just flip sides of the same coin. Why make the distinction?

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