@El'endiaStarman Finally was able to finish the article. Very through and thoughtful. I appreciate that kind of writing. I was a little disappointed to see one obvious possibility not really addressed: FTL travel may simply be impossible. With out relatively fast access to the vast expanse of the universe, there's little reason to plan for millions of years from now, even if you are immortal. The only exception being that you may want to leave before your sun goes supernova.

But the whole replicating drone thing to colonize the whole galaxy in 3 point something million years is a little silly. Why would you bother in the first place, when "living within your means" seems a much more attainable goal.

Taking thousands of years to get anywhere is not any kind of control or reliable energy usage system. Instead, it would be horribly wasteful, as drones would be sent equipped for everything, because you really can't know what to expect, or they would never be equipped enough, so the second one would have to come through.

In such a system, I would be more than 80% waste of all harvested materials.

And you'd never really know what's coming tomorrow. You could have centuries of nearly nothing, followed by centuries of incoming drones that you can't even count.

Not to mention that you couldn't really exploit resources as you found them, because they may be gone by the tine you have the information to act on them.

If an immortal humanity were faced with the reality that FTL travel is truly impossible, I rather doubt we'd care to try to colonize anything outside out solar system. We might try to use a drone system for the nearest stars (under a thousand travel years), but ultimately, we'd have to humble ourselves and realize that the glory days of besting our fathers' endeavors are long past.

The only exception is that we would have contingency plans to travel to planets outside the solar system if it proved necessary to save the species.

Which I suppose may be executed if Earth fell under significant political unrest. I could see a new civilization being started somewhere, but i don't think that can rightly be called a colony, as there's no way it would bother being loyal or subjugated to Earth.

I can't remember, but I think it is Warhammer 40K lore that talks about an age where space travel was very slow (before the discovery of the warp and using it for travel). There was nearly 10,000 years of humans running off into the stars, looking for a fresh start on any planet they could find. This led to the current state, being there are countless, unknown human civilizations in the galaxy now.

I kind of feel like Star Wars paints a picture like that, but they seem to have FTL travel, best estimates putting about a month or two time frame to traverse the whole galaxy.