You’re Not A Mote of Dust
By: Jay Olson
Tags: Future, Astronomy, Cosmology, Technology, Future Technology

Spheres of influence

Consider mere humanity, once again.

Despite being dwarfed by the immensity of the cosmos, some people are working on some pretty neat things. For example:

Breakthrough Starshot aims to launch tiny, interstellar spacecraft at 20% of the speed of light within 20 years, on a realistic budget.

Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) is estimated by poll-of-experts to be around 50 years away.

These things are likely to happen within a human lifespan, and if you can imagine them, it’s not hard to fill in some more details.

— Intelligent, self-replicating machines will likely be developed after ASI, but we know they’re physically possible. After all, you are one. And we know they can be robust and powerful.

— We could also imagine a seed for a self-replicating ASI. Something that isn’t superintelligent now, but can become so, given the resources to grow and improve itself. Back in 1878, even Einstein was just a single cell, packed with potential.

— The escape velocity of our galaxy is something like a tenth of one percent of the speed of light. The tech to travel to the nearest star at high speed is about the same as the tech to travel to the nearest galaxy. The galaxy trip just takes a lot longer. But, coasting while dormant for a few million years shouldn’t be that big a leap (the more challenging part, it turns out, is slowing down enough to land). As a last resort, put the ASI on the problem for a few minutes to work out the details. If it gets done early, maybe it can work on boosting that “20% of the speed of light” target a bit.

What’s the point of this? We’re talking about the tech required to initiate full colonization of the Milky Way Galaxy, followed by the entire local group of galaxies, the local supercluster of galaxies, and so on. Forever. A growing sphere of influence that expands outward at a large fraction of the speed of light for billions of years, overtaking many millions of galaxies. Because these spacecraft can reproduce exponentially, the total cost of this project is just the cost to launch the first one. Depending on how the tech trends unfold, it might be initiated by someone alive today (or likely, many competing groups, when the tech begins to seem tantalizingly close-at-hand).

To be clear, we’re not talking about building fleets of Battlestar Galacticas, packing them with thousands of warm human bodies, and sending them on multi-million year voyages. Maybe that’s physically possible in a narrow sense, but also absurdly expensive and prone to failure. On the other hand, sending human minds will be absurdly cheap. Bodies are hardware — they can be built at the destination, when the time comes. What actually needs to be sent through space is information (e.g. instructions and mind content), and a minimal seed from which to build infrastructure — stuff that weighs mere grams, and will be dramatically more stable over a long voyage. Send the info, leave the meat behind.

Such a project will come to have serious resources at its disposal, to expend over cosmic time. Moons, planets, stars, dust, black holes, etc. Everything to be found in galaxies. Hundreds of millions of them, as the sphere of influence expands.

What will it do with those resources? I don’t know. For the argument I’m making here, we don’t need to know the end goal yet— I hope it’ll be something nice. But I can take a SWAG at how it gets there. There is a thing called the “maximum power principle” from ecology. It says that in a big, competitive environment (like an ecosystem, or an economy), the systems that survive and thrive tend to be those enabling the fastest use of energy. Maximum power. Gains in efficiency are always nice, but only insofar as they enable greater speed of energy use.

Imagine that principle, unleashed on a cosmic scale. The waste heat from such massive expenditures will, of course, have to be disposed of — radiated away into deep space. In fact, a very few SETI searches have looked for this kind of heat, coming from nearby galaxies. They haven’t looked far enough to see anything, but that’s a story for later.

The geometry of colliding civilizations is surprisingly simple at this scale, due to the uniform distribution of galaxies. Galaxy position data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

The bottom line is this — if we do it, others will too — starting from their own homeworld in a galaxy far far away. They can’t be too close, else the universe would already be fully-packed with them (that principle limits how often they could appear, and thus how large our domain might grow). But if we do it, the question immediately shifts from “if” to “how often” other life appears and embarks on such massive projects. Perhaps our ever-expanding, intergalactic domains will collide, in the distant cosmic future.