Another implication of c is that there's really little point in trying to send robots out on journeys longer than a human lifespan. The person who asked the question through the act of sending out the robot won't be around to learn the answer; there's no emotional payoff to robotic interstellar exploration. And gratification matters greatly in human affairs.

If we send an AI out on a journey beyond the informational event horizon imposed by c and the human lifespan, who are we doing it for? Sure, we could build an emotional feedback loop into the AI so that it "feels" satisfaction at having accomplished its mission and "feels" gratified by its "knowledge" and happy to send back a data stream to the masters who may not be listening anymore, but isn't that a little bit masturbatory from the human perspective? I could write a small program that declares a variable named satisfaction_quotient and fill it with an infinity of numbers between 0 and 1...but so what? It doesn't do anything for me.

The reader will be pleased to know that I just deleted four rambling paragraphs, because I hit on a simpler way to make my point.

History records that humans first went to the Moon in July 1969 CE.

Robots went to the Moon several years earlier, but clearly that doesn't count. By human reckoning, what really matters at the end of the day is what humans accomplish for ourselves.

Nobody but us eggheads would be thrilled when a robot makes it to Alpha Centauri. The world will go nuts when a human makes it there.

The answer to the robots-versus-humans debate isn't to be found in engineering studies. Ask simply which path satisfies the human heart.