In hundreds of years when settlers head into space, they will look back at us wishing they had been at the start or toward their future for when people leave the solar system. Maybe far into the future folks will pine over missing our phase of early discovery and look forward to new galaxies.
Or maybe liberalism will great filter us instead. Did you know that since Earth is on the very inner edge of the habitable ring, most habitable worlds would be relatively further from their stars? Also, the prediction is life is more probable with weaker stars? This means space colonisation is another form of milk drinking by light skinned shitlords who want to disenfranchise black people and we should redirect money from nasa towards reparations.
LOL the only "settlers" we'll be sending anywhere in interstellar space will be digitized human uploads living in a heavily shielded computing substrate roughly the size and weight of a coke can.
__MAYBE__ they'll bring a few million frozen embryos with them, if their energy budget is flush and they can afford to accelerate a massive "sweeper mass" heavy asteroid a full AU ahead of their ship to absorb interstellar impacts. But that would be almost as wasteful as sending full sized humans. The best way to mitigate the impact risks of travelling through a dust cloud at .25c is to launch MILLIONS of tiny attritible seedships with super light payloads. They just need the minimum capacity to build the drones and landing craft from materials and resources left over from the sweeper mass.
But if a civilization can achieve post-physicality, then there's no reason to "downgrade" to less efficient physical states that need to directly metabolize resources, shit it out, have babies, raise them and die after spending 99% of its existence on maintenance. Once a species builds a more efficient version of itself, it can more easily maximise local energy and progress up the Kardashev scale---eventually building solar collectors to power their computing substrates, then converting the rocky planets in their solar system for bigger and faster computing substrates.
Eventually they would crowd their sun with so much energy capture infrastructure that it would be for all intents and purposes a dyson swarm. Dyson swarms start ad hoc at first so are essentially suboptimal, so eventually they would knit the swarm's components into a solid shell, a Dyson Sphere.
And once you have a dyson sphere, you can just selectively open billions of little apertures on ONE hemisphere of it to create a Shkadov Thruster:
Once they can build a Shkadov Engine, they don't need colony ships---it can sustain acceleration indefinitely and they can "steer" by opening and shutting apertures on the opposite hemispheres. The sun's magnetosphere would protect them from anything too small to intersect and redirect from impacting the shell.
aasnova.org
