Trump orders mini nukes

[Anomalocaris]

Just because hitherto humans have required natural reproduction, normal growth and socialized education and experience to come into being as a cog in The technological society does not mean this will necessarily remain the case very far into the future.

I personally think the technology required to fabricate a flesh and blood human being with pre-encoded biological firmware for the required skills from raw material and genetic Blue print will be perfected long before the technology to allow a sizeable object to attain substantial fractions of the speed of light.

So One possibility for a drone to deliver a Human colony would is for the drone to carry onboard the machinery needed to fabricate human beings, and database of the genes of a sizeable population.  The drone will arrive, mine and process the raw material needed and then fabricate the humans beings required to populate a colony.

If the drone arrives at a system without suitable planets it would be no big loss as there are no living humans aboard.  The drone could simply not proceed to fabricating the colonists, and there would be no casualties resulting from the unfortunate lack of appropriate condition for colonial development.

That's an interesting concept. Given the rate of advancement in cybernetics and biology vs. the energy equation, yes, I could see that. I think we are more likely to spawn new life in the form of artificial intelligence across interstellar distances but I agree that your scenario is a more likely one than transporting fully-developed humans in gigantic colony ships traveling at a high fraction of the speed of light. In fact, I think you just effectively killed the idea of the colony ship.

Furthermore, I personally think the ability to definitively establish whether or not a suitable planet exists orbiting a particular target star will exist before we develop the technology to act on such knowledge. I doubt we'll be sending anything out blind.

The important thing is a drone with a database of human population gene pool, equipment to extract raw material and manufacture humans and support equipment may be quite compact and relatively cheap and therefore can be made ubiquitous, unlike a true colony ship with thousands of laboriously naturally grown humans. So an ambitious colonization Drive may involve sending thousands of these small, relatively low mass, but high information content ships out in massive waves. Since no life would be lost if the target environment is unsuitable, the threshold for ascertaining the suitability of a system for colonization may be quite low.

I think this approach would allow humans to colonize enormous numbers of systems comparatively quickly even when starting out with a relatively modest industrial base and resource access.