>Even at the slow pace of currently envisioned interstellar travel, the Milky Way galaxy could be completely traversed in a few million years.
The entire premise is rather bizarre.
"Let's send out probes that make probes that send out more probes until we've covered the galaxy!"
"But... why would anyone do that?"
It seems obvious until you think about it - and then it stops being obvious.
So you cover your galaxy with probes that keep sending probes back and forth. So what? What have you actually achieved?
If you assume massively superhuman intelligence, what are the odds there are more interesting goals for a civilisation to aim for?
100% my problem with this. We're applying a human-centric lens to this. Remember that these theories are based on a life-form that evolved completely separate from anything we have ever known. That doesn't just mean separate body structures, but an entirely novel and completely unknowable circumstance.
This is why these theories all upset me - they should all say things like "we should have seen (an alien species that is similar to us) in this amount of time.
Because fuck only knows what an alien who evolved in a system based on helium or some other gas would think. We certainly can't try to figure it out. The most creative minds in this area are those writing hard sci-fi, I would argue. And most of them only treat that subject with a hand-waving and 'we can never know those mysterious aliens' sort of thing.
If yes, is it possible that there are also other ideas that all intelligences are likely to almost necessarily converge on?
The sun will go boom soon enough, so survival is also temporal. We understand distributed systems are more reliable and require 1+n
Depends on your definition of 'soon enough'. The sun will have exhausted its hydrogen supply in about 5 billion years. In about 1 billion years, the temperature on this planet will probably become unsustainable for life.
Your right of course, but that event is so far in the future, I doubt we can speak of anything even resembling humanity by that time. I was thinking in timeframes of about a ten to hundred thousand years, not billions.
If we can think of it (and here we are, thinking of it) then why wouldn't any other civilization contain a member that thinks of it? Because humans are the greatest smartest species in the galaxy? Now that would be a far-fetched idea.