by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
It seems to me the logical way to settle the universe is to simply turn people into data then shoot tiny probes out across the galaxy at near the speed of light. Once they reach, say, Alpha Centauri, you zap the all the information to the probe. Using nanotech, you re-create humans and look around.
Now, that last bit is a bit much even for me.
More likely, what you do is, you have hard AI and that hard AI is zapped to your tiny probe which then creates an android body of some sort using the aforementioned nanotech.
Anyway, the point is, it seems like a huge fucking waste of time to actually send humans anywhere off planet. Using hard AI, nanotech and the speed of light, you could look around the galactic neighborhood pretty easily. Or, put another way — you’d be an idiot to throw any resources at terraforming Mars when you could wait for technology to reach the point where you could zap humans to a livable planet at the speed of light.
In the 10,000 years it would take to terraform Mars, you could settle hundreds — thousands — of planets within 10,000 lightyears of earth. Seems a no-brainer to me.
