I don’t think we would be terraforming planets without checking what was already there, and there would be no reason to interfere with a planet that was already inhabited.
You make the decision to send the resources necessary to transform a galaxy without knowing much about the galaxy. The only things you know are based on the radiation that you can pick up many light years away.
Once you have sent your vehicle to the galaxy it could of course decide to do nothing or fly into the sun but that would be a waste of resources.
I don’t think we would be terraforming planets without checking what was already there, and there would be no reason to interfere with a planet that was already inhabited.
You don’t need terraforming for a self-replicating AI to take root in a galaxy and convert the galaxy into useful stuff.
I don’t think gathering information about whether or not a solar system is populated will be significantly more expensive then colonizing it.
So you’re saying that people will send self-replicating AIs to convert galaxies into useful stuff without paying attention to what is already there?
That doesn’t seem at all likely to me. The AI will probably pay attention even if you don’t explicitly program it to do so.
I don’t think that there’s a way to “pay attention” that’s significantly cheaper then converting galaxies.
I think converting galaxies already includes paying attention, since if you don’t know what’s there it’s difficult to change it into something else.
Maybe you’re thinking of this as though it were a fire that just burned things up, but I don’t think “converting galaxies” can or will work that way.
You make the decision to send the resources necessary to transform a galaxy without knowing much about the galaxy. The only things you know are based on the radiation that you can pick up many light years away.
Once you have sent your vehicle to the galaxy it could of course decide to do nothing or fly into the sun but that would be a waste of resources.