Who Actually Colonises the Cosmos—Humans or Our Robots?
Elon Musk wants to send Tesla's Optimus Robots to Mars, which is a logical choice from several perspectives such as safety, cost, and efficiency.
Credit: Tesla/SpaceX
The philosophical tease hides the real economic question: who owns and operates the probes?
A popular framing—advanced by Ray Kurzweil and others—is that machines (perhaps carrying human consciousness uploads) will do most of the travelling, and humans will extend their reach through these robotic and artificial intelligence vanguards. This debate shows up in mainstream science outlets asking whether cosmos-colonising robots need to be conscious, and in research that outlines early designs of such super advanced tools. It’s a thoughtful conversation and may one day happen, but once you leave the podcast studio and land in logistics, regulations and money, it’s a different story.
From a technical standpoint, robot-first colonisation is feasible in stages. Concepts include self-replicating or self-expanding systems that mine local resources to build out infrastructure, and “upload-capable” craft that could, in principle, carry digitised minds. Those architectures must close on three hard fronts: communications (latency and autonomy under light-hour to light-year delays), energy/thermal management (computing produces heat; heat must be rejected), and materials supply (in-situ manufacturing beats hauling everything). Even optimistic extrapolations put brain-scale computing payloads at many tonnes for decades yet, which in turn drives propulsion and mass. These engineering realities shape missions far more than any metaphysical opinion about consciousness.
The consciousness question still matters for politics and procurement. If a probe hosts uploaded people, is it a crew with rights, or a device with a licence? Space and Earth law barely touch on this. Ownership of extracted resources is getting clearer in certain jurisdictions, but personhood for software agents aboard sovereign-less assets is a blank page. Operators and insurers will steer away from ambiguity. Early commercial programmes will present as devices—auditable, resettable, with clear control hierarchies—because that is what regulators can approve and underwriters can price today.
Commercially, the route that resonates is to productise robotic expansion as a service. Near-term: probes that deliver data and relay services to earthside customers; mid-term: robots that pre-build depots, power nodes and comms links in cislunar and interplanetary space; longer-term: autonomous factories that seed local industry. Each rung on this ladder can be sold with a familiar bundle—hardware, autonomy software, and an availability SLA measured in data-return, uptime or asset completion milestones. The winning narratives don’t promise civilisation at light-speed; they promise cash-flowing stepping stones that expand capability and market size with each mission, perhaps spanning decades to centuries.
Kurzweil’s versions sometimes lean on “uploads” to keep humans in the loop at cosmic scale. Even if you buy the premise philosophically, it doesn’t change near-term procurement. We are at least a century away from transference of consciousness being a realistic medical option and a dependable solution. Buyers—space agencies, defence customers, comms and logistics firms—will ask the same questions they do today: how is autonomy bounded; how is fault recovery handled; where does liability live? A mission that requires novel legal definitions of personhood to launch is a non-starter. A mission that upgrades today’s autonomy within existing regulatory envelopes can sign customers next quarter.
What about “spreading at light-speed”? The information can, if we overcome some technological constraints; the assets cannot. Kurzweil himself has acknowledged speed-of-light constraints even as he speculated about saturating the universe with our technology, if they were overcome. However, this is a far-fetched notion from our foreseeable technological position. For operators, practically, that translates into designing for asynchronous empires—far-flung nodes that can improve themselves locally because they won’t get timely help from home. It makes verification, update distribution and cyber-resilience central design problems. Vendors that show robust use of Edge AI and on-board governance (who can change what, under what cryptographic keys) and methods for remote attestation under extreme latency will look bankable; those relying on constant high-bandwidth reach-back, will not.
So who actually colonises? In the timeframes that matter to investors and programme managers, robots do—and they do it as products with clear interfaces, power budgets and service terms. If uploads ever arrive, they’ll slot into those productised stacks, not replace them, making iterative progress essential here. The business case will hinge on autonomy that earns, not agency that feels. That may be less romantic than a galaxy filled with conscious travellers, but it is the path that converts lab curves into contracts, and contracts into capability that endures.
