aiming points

[They're discussing interstellar colonization in sff.net . . . ]


Perhaps when we're talking about interstellar travel, even if it's a thousand or ten thousand (given some backing and filling) years in the future, the notion of colonialism is a distracting fantasy. Analogy is not useful, because nothing in human history presents a physical barrier as profound as the limitations imposed by the nature of time and space on an interstellar scale.

It might be more interesting to think about (physical) interstellar exploration as a scientific endeavor on the Antarctic model and reserve considerations of "colonization" more as a kind of futuristic publishing: we send out our thoughts, including complex models of ourselves, and see what happens.

Of course the von Neumann idea is a sort of middle ground. Send out a payload that might be relatively small, but which includes instructions to find materials and reproduce itself. And sell Cokes and porn to any creatures it finds.

Joe