To reduce astronomical waste: take your time, then go very fast

In a paper published with Anders Sandberg, we looked at the ease and difficulty of intergalactic or universal expansion.

free pdf

Similar considerations apply to possible singleton-ish AGIs that might be architecturally constrained to varying levels of efficiency in optimization, e.g. some decision theories might coordinate poorly and so waste the cosmic commons. Thus optimizing for an AGI's mere friendliness to existent humans could easily be setting much too low a bar, at least for perspectives and policies that include a total utilitarian bent—something much closer to "ideal" would instead have to be the target.

So, in conclusion: To efficiently colonise the universe, take your time. Do research. Think things over. Go to the pub. Saunter like an Egyptian. Write long letters to mum. Complain about the immorality of the youth of today. Watch dry paint stay dry. But when you do go... go very, very fast.

Your general argument that speed is more important than starting time seems plausible, but this paragraph (despite being well-written!) is a bit misleading. As you imply, colonising "the closest galaxies" gives us far more resources to put towards research.

Actually, it seems odd to limit it to just the closest galaxies. If spreading is pretty easy (as you say), and more resources means more research, we should still be trying to colonise pretty fast.

Presumably our colonisers should be programmed to use the resources they find to both replicate and research more efficient propulsion (before converting to running emulations/simulations at the heat death of the universe or doing the hedonic shockwave or whatever).

So, in conclusion: To efficiently colonise the universe, take your time. Do research. Think things over. Go to the pub. Saunter like an Egyptian. Write long letters to mum. Complain about the immorality of the youth of today. Watch dry paint stay dry.

Unless you are in competition with others - which most modern agents currently are. Then the optimal strategy is quite different. Thus The Perils of Precaution.

I think there are two potential problems with this argument, given below.

For these reasons, I think in practice everyone will keep dividing resources between both research and launching probes with existing technology, as soon as we have technology good enough to launch colonizing probes at all, even extremely slow ones at (say) 0.01c to neighbouring stars. Of course there'll be different tradeoffs depending on the balance of costs: perhaps research is hard but probes are cheap. As a result, there will be some waste of resources as later, faster probes overtake earlier slow ones.

Competition:

If you were alone in the universe, or could speak for everyone even when they're spread out across a galaxy, then your analysis would work. But if, deciding for yourself, you wait and research, then others could launch first. Since others generally have different values, and because people want things for themselves and their own clans, this is undesirable. So people will launch first to get first-mover advantage.

Suppose your research will eventually develop fast probes that can overtake their earlier, slow probes (though you can't be certain ahead of time, when deciding not to launch). The sphere of space right around you will have been taken by others, which is not a good position to be in. They might be able to stop you from spreading your probes through their occupied space, if they choose. Or they could use their resources to interfere directly to stop you from launching probes.

Even others who are generally friendly may prefer to lose some time copying your fast probe technology, to having most of the universe settled by you instead of them.

In fact, it might be much easier to buy, copy or steal new technology than to develop it in the first place. Then if I know others are working on research, I may decide to launch early and try to free-ride on their research later. In particular, if people wno do research aren't guaranteed to share the results with all of humanity - if not everyone is offered to be a part of the research project, or has resources to contribute to pay their way in, or lightspeed limits prevent cooperation across star systems - then those excluded will launch slow probes if they can, and hope to acquire the fast probe technology later.

Competition and value divergence may be prevented by a singleton AGI. Fear of such a singleton appearing will drive people to colonize other stars before it happens, and to keep expanding instead of slowing down to research. Some people believe that the only probably futures in which we colonize other stars at all, are ones in which a Friendly AI singleton is created first. This sounds probable to me, but not the only possibility.

Acquiring more resources:

(HaydnB already suggested the first part of this.)

Suppose it's expected to take a long time to develop faster probes, compared with the time it takes to settle and develop new nearby systems with existing, slow probes. Then it would be worthwhile to divert some resources to expanding with slow probes, and then use the acquired resources - new settled systems - to speed up the research. This might lead to the same balance of "always send out probes of existing technology, and divert some percentage of resources to research for faster probes."

Why would that be possible? If the research is expected to take a long time despite big investments, there is probably a limiting factor that can be raised by adding resources of some kind. Like matter/energy/space for building things and running experiments. Or like more sentient minds to do research.

Also, if new star systems can become highly developed quickly enough - compared with the time you need for your research - then it's more likely faster probes will first be developed on one of the many worlds first settled by slow probes, than by those who stayed behind, simply because there are many new worlds and few old ones. For reasons of competitino, people will want to settle new worlds to increase the chance that they or their descendants will first develop new faster probes and colonize even more worlds.

Differences of distance:

Matter is clumped on different scales: as stars and planets, then star systems, then galaxies, then groups and clusters, superclusters, sheets and filaments. At each transition there is a jump of many orders of magnitude in the distances involved. So if expansion is going to stop temporarily, it will probably be at one of these points. (We've stopped for a long while after colonizing the entire planet.)

Interesting stuff. It might be worth noting that by colonizing a few galaxies early on, you would gain increased research capacity with which to improve the way you colonize the rest of them. So the problem might be a bit more complicated.

As a thought experiment, this is interesting, and I’m sure informative, but there is one crucial thing that this post neglects to examine: whether the inscription under the hood actually reads “humanity maximizer.” The impression from the post is that this is already established.

But has anybody established, or even stopped to consider whether avoiding the loss of 10^46 potential lives per century is really what we value? If so, I see no evidence of it here. I see no reason to even suspect that enabling that many lives in the distant future has any remotely proportional value to us.

Does Nick Bostrom believe that sentient beings living worthwhile lives in the future are the ultimate value structures? If so, whose value is he thinking of, ours or theirs? If theirs, then he is chasing something non-existent, they can’t reach back in time to us (there can be no social contract with them).

No matter how clever we are at devising ways to maximize our colonization of the universe, if this is not actually what we desire, then it isn’t rational to do so. Surely, we must decide what we want, before arguing the best way to get it.

it takes a lot of reaction mass to decelerate even a small payload.

Braking is not likely to be a problem, if you travel far enough: both the interstellar/intergalactic medium and the cosmic microwave background radiation will provide some.

given sufficient automation or AI (which has a lot of implications for the Fermi Paradox)

No. See, Katja Grace's article here. AI can act as a Filter for doomsday type arguments but expansion in a lightcone is not a likely Filter from a Fermi standpoint since if the expansion is going at almost any rate that is not extremely close to lightspeed we'd still expect to have time to likely see it coming, and if one thinks speeds slower than that (like the 50% and 80% used in your article), this becomes even more severe.

A thought strikes me, given the accelerating expansion of galaxies. How do the numbers of galaxies reached vary when considering very big head-starts or big delays?

Imagine that another civilization started expanding 1 billion years earlier than us, or 5 billion, or 10 billion years earlier: how many more galaxies than us could it reach?

Alternatively, imagine that we die out, and another civilization starts expanding 1 billion, 5 billion or 10 billion years later than us: how many fewer galaxies could they then reach?

Is there an easy formula to plug-in different assumptions like this?