And suppose that grabby aliens are not concerned with propagating their biological substrate, but rather their cognitive architecture. Then their approach to expanding could be to find worlds where chimpanzee-level beings have already evolved, and “uplift” them to higher-level cognition.
I think a wide variety of strategies can be imagined that would be far more effective at colonizing the universe, in the sense of squeezing out the most computations per unit of matter. Direct manufacturing of computing hardware aided by autonomous self-replicating AI around every star system would probably work well.
More generally, the insight of grabby aliens is that aliens should be big and visible, rather than quiet and isolated (as they’re traditionally depicted). This puts big constraints on what should be possible, assuming we buy the model.
Maybe a Dyson sphere consisting of a cloud of self-replicating nanomachines works better that a planet with biological organisms. But remember, whatever one might think from reading lots of posts on lesswrong, that’s not actually a proven technology, whereas biology is (although “uplifting” isn’t).
One issue is robustness to occasional catastrophes. If I may reference another work of fiction, there’s The Outcasts of Heaven Belt, by Joan Vinge.
I think a wide variety of strategies can be imagined that would be far more effective at colonizing the universe, in the sense of squeezing out the most computations per unit of matter. Direct manufacturing of computing hardware aided by autonomous self-replicating AI around every star system would probably work well.
More generally, the insight of grabby aliens is that aliens should be big and visible, rather than quiet and isolated (as they’re traditionally depicted). This puts big constraints on what should be possible, assuming we buy the model.
Maybe a Dyson sphere consisting of a cloud of self-replicating nanomachines works better that a planet with biological organisms. But remember, whatever one might think from reading lots of posts on lesswrong, that’s not actually a proven technology, whereas biology is (although “uplifting” isn’t).
One issue is robustness to occasional catastrophes. If I may reference another work of fiction, there’s The Outcasts of Heaven Belt, by Joan Vinge.