Many of the utopias from the golden age of science fiction (long before nanotech) had recognisable humans, who were not immortal and whose robots were good butlers, at best. While for the sake of plot they generally had faster than light travel, that isn’t actually a requirement for the human species to spread out to the stars.
If you’ll grant sub-light interstellar travel, then all these become possible. Let groups bid on planets, set a pre-requisite that the group survive in a bio-sphere for 3 generations, as a test to see if their proposed society is sufficient stable to avoid shooting each other, then ship them off.
That then transforms the question into what sort of meta-Utopian society would support investing the time and effort required to mine the asteroids, set up massive solar powered anti-matter production factories, and keep seeding the universe generation after generation?
Given said technologies would also offer plenty of ways for individuals or small groups to blow up the Earth, it would need to be either a very tightly controlled one, or a very sane one. Or possibly both. Heavy investment into improving education, parenting (and possibly designer babies). And getting people used to lack of privacy and the goldfish bowl surveillance society.
Can that be done without changing human nature beyond existing parameters? Well, the boundaries of the current parameters are actually pretty wide: they include sealed nuclear subs, monastic communities, military academies with no privacy, and life-logging 24⁄7 facebook-blogging twitter-addicted web-cam-dorm residents.
Many of the utopias from the golden age of science fiction (long before nanotech) had recognisable humans, who were not immortal and whose robots were good butlers, at best. While for the sake of plot they generally had faster than light travel, that isn’t actually a requirement for the human species to spread out to the stars.
If you’ll grant sub-light interstellar travel, then all these become possible. Let groups bid on planets, set a pre-requisite that the group survive in a bio-sphere for 3 generations, as a test to see if their proposed society is sufficient stable to avoid shooting each other, then ship them off.
That then transforms the question into what sort of meta-Utopian society would support investing the time and effort required to mine the asteroids, set up massive solar powered anti-matter production factories, and keep seeding the universe generation after generation?
Given said technologies would also offer plenty of ways for individuals or small groups to blow up the Earth, it would need to be either a very tightly controlled one, or a very sane one. Or possibly both. Heavy investment into improving education, parenting (and possibly designer babies). And getting people used to lack of privacy and the goldfish bowl surveillance society.
Can that be done without changing human nature beyond existing parameters? Well, the boundaries of the current parameters are actually pretty wide: they include sealed nuclear subs, monastic communities, military academies with no privacy, and life-logging 24⁄7 facebook-blogging twitter-addicted web-cam-dorm residents.