Five years after AGI, will another spacecraft have overtaken Voyager 1 as the farthest spacecraft from Earth?

The leaders of today’s frontier AI companies have talked about AGI solving humanity’s hardest problems and “aiding in the discovery of new scientific knowledge that changes the limits of possibility.” At the same time, discussions around what humanity should do post-AGI often involve some form of “colonize the stars.” This question aims to shed light on whether colonization will have started in the few years following AGI.

The twin Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft are exploring where nothing from Earth has flown before. Continuing on their more-than-40-year journey since their 1977 launches, they each are much farther away from Earth and the sun than Pluto. In August 2012, Voyager 1 made the historic entry into interstellar space, the region between stars, filled with material ejected by the death of nearby stars millions of years ago [...] Both spacecraft are still sending scientific information about their surroundings through the Deep Space Network, or DSN.

The primary mission was the exploration of Jupiter and Saturn. After making a string of discoveries there — such as active volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io and intricacies of Saturn's rings — the mission was extended.<br/> —NASA JPL a

Voyager 1, as of July 2024, is 15.2 billion miles away from Earth and traveling away at 38,000 miles per hour, which is roughly one seventeen-thousandth the speed of light (NASA JPL b). Theoretically, however, there is no reason why spacecraft cannot travel at speeds approaching light speed: such spacecraft would quickly overtake Voyager. There have been various proposals for what these spacecraft of the future might look like, ranging from “nukes as rockets,” to light sails, to antimatter drives and pion drives, to “kugelblitz” black hole engines (PBS Space Time, 2015). If there is an explosion in technological advancement following AGI, as some experts think there will be, then these spacecraft of the future might in fact be on our horizon. Humanity could soon be on its way to colonizing the stars.