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No. As a matter of plain fact, we can't. Whatever exists on an interstellar scale, it won't be us, or anything like us, or remotely comprehensible to us. It will be some superorganism that at the very most uses humans as its agents, but even that seems highly dubious - there are probably much more efficient alternatives. We have no place in that future. Our descendants have no place in that future. You have no place in that future. Your engram has no place in that future. Anything that exists across stars functions with years of latency in communications. On such a scale, humans just plain cannot function. And you aim for spanning galaxies? Transhumanism doesn't do anything here. It's just straight-up post-human.
The only way for humanity to spread through the stars and still continues to exist at all, rather than be replaced by some completely new class of entity, is in fact to colonize new Earths and continue somewhat Earth-like lives and to not create technological deities that exceed all human understanding...which is of course exactly what would be done, given the kinds of resources you speak of.
p(doom) = 1.0.
But we already live in superorganisms that use individual humans as their agents!
You, individually, can switch superorganisms within your lifetime.
The same will no longer be physically possible for interstellar ones.
I don't think an interstellar superorganism that can only send information (and not resources, people, etc) between its parts at reasonable speed is going to remain a single superorganism for long (and one that can't even send information without a human lifetime of lag won't be one at all).
Space is the hope of liberty-minded people because it's bloody damn inconvenient to reach you there.
Yes, but only for those who can live with being confined to a single star system. And only for the descendants of those who can live with never arriving there at all.
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Huh? I'm rather confused.
What exactly is your argument for humans not being able to "function" when we've colonized multiple star systems? Latency? Coordination issues?
All that necessarily implies is that whatever interstellar civilization arises will be decentralized, rather than centralized.
I don't see an affirmative argument for why "mere" transhumanism won't suffice. I can easily envision a future iteration of self_made_human, or a descendant, that is as different from me as adult Einstein is from their baby self.
So what? That is still an enormous gulf in capabilities, without necessarily becoming something utterly alien. Obviously such an entitity would be very different, but why would it be unrecognizable? Why would it have values that are entirely divorced from their starting point? Why would that constitute extinction?
On p(doom) = 1.0: you've asserted this, not argued it. The mechanism matters a lot. If you think the problem is that any civilization capable of reaching the stars will necessarily have already created recursively self-improving AI that renders biological agents extinct (and also their non-biological counterparts and extensions, such as mind uploads), then the answer to that concern is not to stay on Earth, it's to think hard about how you build AI. Staying put does not help if the doom is endogenous to technological development at any scale. And if the doom is existential in the more conventional sense (asteroid, gamma ray burst, civilizational collapse), then spreading out is the only hedge available. Staying in Sol will also lead to a p(doom) of 1 given a long enough time scale. The Sun isn't going to make it till Heat Death.
We could, assuming an aligned ASI, insist on it spreading Humanity Mk. 1 across the stars while keeping us safe and preventing us from doing anything retarded (like making an unaligned ASI or unaliving ourselves). With an aligned ASI, you could have a universal-scale civilization of literal chimps, and be just fine. It's ASI dawg. I don't particularly care if biological humans are around, or in charge, if my transhuman descendants willingly become posthuman and unrecognizable, then I'll trust they have good reason to do that. The same way a baby isn't quite sure why their elder brother goes off to uni and stares at pages upon pages of arcane symbols. But it's alright nonetheless.
If you insist on biohumans being around and in control, you're going to need technological stasis, which will get us killed anyway. You will also need a mechanism for enforcing that stasis, which is AGI or ASI. If you have an aligned AGI/ASI, then you don't need that kind of nonsense in the first place.
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