I don’t think I understand what the point of colonization would be. At some point, the cost of keeping slaves exceeds the benefit of the “free” labor you get from them; likewise with colonial administration. I think if a species had access to the kind of energy capabilities necessary to make an Alcubierre drive run, then that’s functionally a post-scarcity society for a number of reasons, and the only possible reason they’d want to colonize or enslave is if they’re just kind of hard wired to go out of their way to be major league assholes, even by human standards. Even if you somehow figure out a configuration of an Alcubierre drive that makes it so you could power it with a conventional energy source, that still bumps us way up towards post-scarcity because of all the cheaty/hackey bullshit we can now do in space. Deploying even a small array of solar panels around the sun to beam as much electricity as we could want to wherever we want would become a trivial task. Oh, an asteroid with sixteen quadrillion dollars of gold? Ez. Just pop on over and scoop up as much gold as you can fit on the ship. Want to colonize and mine the moon for a laugh? No problem, just pop on up there and set up your tent, no giant fucking rockets needed, that’ll be two seconds, please. Transporting goods, people, and cargo across the earth becomes comically fast and easy, no more need for big ass jets and airports. The Alcubierre drive would probably have a bigger impact on our QOL than the discovery of electricity.
I don’t think I understand what the point of colonization would be. At some point, the cost of keeping slaves exceeds the benefit of the “free” labor you get from them; likewise with colonial administration. I think if a species had access to the kind of energy capabilities necessary to make an Alcubierre drive run, then that’s functionally a post-scarcity society for a number of reasons, and the only possible reason they’d want to colonize or enslave is if they’re just kind of hard wired to go out of their way to be major league assholes, even by human standards. Even if you somehow figure out a configuration of an Alcubierre drive that makes it so you could power it with a conventional energy source, that still bumps us way up towards post-scarcity because of all the cheaty/hackey bullshit we can now do in space. Deploying even a small array of solar panels around the sun to beam as much electricity as we could want to wherever we want would become a trivial task. Oh, an asteroid with sixteen quadrillion dollars of gold? Ez. Just pop on over and scoop up as much gold as you can fit on the ship. Want to colonize and mine the moon for a laugh? No problem, just pop on up there and set up your tent, no giant fucking rockets needed, that’ll be two seconds, please. Transporting goods, people, and cargo across the earth becomes comically fast and easy, no more need for big ass jets and airports. The Alcubierre drive would probably have a bigger impact on our QOL than the discovery of electricity.