As Martin Rees put it in a recent essay, “the history of human technological civilization is measured in centuries—and it may be only one or two more centuries before humans are overtaken or transcended by inorganic intelligence, which will then persist, continuing to evolve, for billions of years. … We would be most unlikely to ‘catch’ it in the brief sliver of time when it took organic form.”11 I agree with Jay Olson’s conclusion in his aforementioned space settlement paper: “We regard the possibility that advanced intelligence will make use of the universe’s resources to simply populate
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