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PlaidX comments on Subjective Relativity, Time Dilation and Divergence - Less Wrong
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I love this article, but I disagree with the conclusion. You're essentially saying that a post-singularity world would be too impatient to explore the stars. I grant you that thinking a million times faster would make someone very impatient, but living a million times longer seems likely to counterbalance that.
Back in the days of cristopher columbus, what stopped people from sailing off and finding new continents wasn't laziness or impatience, it was ignorance and a high likelihood of dying at sea. If you knew you could build a rocket and fly it to mars or alpha centauri, and that it was 100% guaranteed to get there, and you'd have the mass and energy of an entire planet at your disposal once you did, (a wealth beyond imagining in this post-singularity world), I really doubt that any amount of transit time, or the minuscule resources necessary to make the rocket, would stand in anyone's way for long.
ESPECIALLY given the increased diversity. Every acre on earth has the matter and energy to go into space, and if every one of those 126 billion acres has its own essentially isolated culture, I'd be very surprised if not a single one ever did, even onto the end of the earth.
Honestly I'd be surprised if they didn't do it by tuesday. I'd expect a subjectively 10 billion year old civilization to be capable of some fairly long-term thinking.
My case against outward expansion is not based on issues of patience. It's an economic issue. I should have made this more clear in the article, perhaps strike that one sentence about how long interstellar travel will subjectively take for accelerated intelligences, as that's not even really relevant.
Outward expansion is unimaginably expensive, risky, and would take massive amounts of time to reach a doubling. Moore's Law allows a much lower route risk for AGI's to double their population/intelligence/whatever using a tiny tiny fraction of the time and energy required to double through space travel. See my reply above to Mitchell Porter.
What's the point? In the best case scenario you can eventually double your population after hundreds or thousands of years. You could spend a tiny tiny fraction of those resources and double your population thousands of times faster by riding Moore's Law. Space travel only ever makes sense if Moore's Law type growth ends completely.
There's also the serious risks of losing the craft on the way and even discovering that Alpha Centauri is already occupied.
Why WOULDN'T moore's law type growth end completely? Are you saying the speed of light is unbreakable but the planck limit isn't?
IIRC, one of the concerns about AIs grabbing as much territory and resources as possible is that they want to improve the odds that nothing else can be a threat to their core mission.
The latter point is in tension with the rest of your argument. "No one colonizes the vast resources of space: they're too crowded" doesn't work as a Fermi Paradox explanation. Uncertainty about one's prospects for successfully colonizing first could modestly diminish expected resource gain, but the more this argument seems persuasive, the more it indicates that potential rivals won't beat you to the punch.
If older, powerful alien civilizations are already around then colonization may not even be an option for us at all. It's an option for that lucky first civilization, but nobody else.
Agreed. Another detail that is often overlooked is that an electronic intelligence doesn't have to run at maximum possible speed all the time. If an AI or upload wants to travel to alpha centauri it can easily slow its subjective time down by whatever factor is needed to make the trip time seem acceptible.