>>13214403The truth is any discussion revolving around this is so speculative it's almost certain none of it is going to be the way it pans out. We are no different than those 5000 years before us who believed in heaven and immortality. We can currently touch the heavens by going into space and conceive immortality as uploading our consciousness to a computer but there is no way the ancients could have foreseen this is the way it would go. Similarly, we cannot conceive (even if we think we can) the way an intelligence after us will achieve interstellar travel. The best we got is look at contemporary technology such as computes and airplanes and extrapolate from that (conceive a space ship AI that explores the universe for us), but the technology is probably going to be so different by that point that it'll be inconceivable to us now. It'll be like telling a Roman soldier about smart phone and how radio waves work to produce a human voice on both ends. Kinda wild to me that 300 years ago Euler said the concept of a vibrating string that produces a human voice is "not completely impossible" and now microphones and speakers are taken for granted.
>"It would be a considerable invention indeed, that of a machine able to mimic speech, with its sounds and articulations. … I think it is not impossible."He was able to predict its existence. So probably everything we're talking about today such as Mars colonies, terraforming, interstellar von Neumann probes, AI and virtual reality are actually possible in the *near* future (500-1000 years from now) while the technology we'll have after that is just inconceivable to us now.
