I agree with much of what you say, and will think about it further. However I don’t think this makes as much sense:
Also, you need to assess how quickly a competition can arise. If that is fast relative to the time needed to go from system to system, you should focus on finding planets with habitable zones and monitor them, maybe even send automatic probes there as early as you can.
My guess is that the automatic monitoring probes aren’t going to be meaningfully faster/more resource-intensive than the colonization probes. So might as well do the latter.
(I’m assuming colonization won’t be with biological humans or transhumans, for maybe obvious reasons)
I agree with much of what you say, and will think about it further. However I don’t think this makes as much sense:
My guess is that the automatic monitoring probes aren’t going to be meaningfully faster/more resource-intensive than the colonization probes. So might as well do the latter.
(I’m assuming colonization won’t be with biological humans or transhumans, for maybe obvious reasons)