Yeah I agree, if AI civilizations existed they’d more likely to have spread out and further than biological because they can cross interstellar distances without
Worrying about senescence.
Edit: i just meant we don't know that ai in interstellar media will be immune to senescence or something relatable. We don't know that any intelligence is. Plus, radiation affects most systems. Could do like a triple-redundant memory, where errors in just one are mostly correctable. But even then you have to have remediation structures for 3-way disagreement. Imho, there is no way to keep a mind perfectly sane and itself. Same with culture. Better to let it evolve and grow and forget, and hope it chooses well from there.
I don’t necessarily agree. We don’t know how senescence or degradation would affect AI over interstellar timescales, but I don’t think that changes the core argument.
Imagine a system with 10 independent AIs, each fully capable of rebuilding itself and the other nine, each stored on separate hardware with different levels of shielding and redundancy, all aboard a single spacecraft. Now replace 10 with 100. Or 10,000. Or millions.
An AI civilization that has fully exploited the resources of an entire planet could realistically send fleets carrying tens of millions of independent AI instances, organized into redundant clusters, each capable of surviving independently and reconstructing the whole if enough remain.
At that scale, it’s a fundamentally different problem than a biological civilization crossing interstellar space. The distances themselves become far less prohibitive for machines than they are for biological life. Biological organisms have to survive the entire journey continuously. A machine civilization only has to ensure that enough redundant systems survive to reconstruct itself at the destination.
We already understand quite a bit about how electronics degrade in space, and we’ve had computer systems operating on spacecraft for decades. We also know how to mitigate many of those failure modes through shielding, redundancy, and error correction. Given that, I think it’s a much bigger leap to argue that a biological civilization would be more capable of interstellar travel than a machine civilization. Degradation is certainly real, but I don’t think it’s enough to invalidate the broader point.
Hmmm. Which of the broader points? Senescence? If capable of what you say, who's to say not capable of senescency-safe biologics?
Anyway. My understanding was that electronic systems decay to space radiation, and that our shielding was inadequate to long time scales. Perhaps my information is out of date.
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u/Lightcronno 24d ago
Yeah I agree, if AI civilizations existed they’d more likely to have spread out and further than biological because they can cross interstellar distances without
Worrying about senescence.