You must be misunderstanding me, because what you just said seems like a total non-sequitur. What does pockets and deep conviction have to do with general intelligence indeed?
Starting with a rhetorical question was probably a bad idea. Let me try again:
But an AGI wouldn't be an AGI if it wasn't able to figure out how to solve the problem of getting from here to there and using in-situ resources to replicate itself.
I don't think this is true. An AGI which - due to practical limitations - cannot eat its future light cone can still be generally intelligent. Humans are potentially an example (minus the "artificial", but that isn't the relevant part).
Claiming that general intelligence can eat the universe by definition...
An Article on Motherboard reports about Alien Minds by Susan Schneider who claiThe Dominant Life Form In the Cosmos Is Probably Superintelligent Robots. The article is crosslinked to other posts about superintelligence and at the end discusses the question why these alien robots leave us along. The arguments puts forth on this don't convince me though.