The Slow Boat Theory

The Slow Boat Theory is a strategic, decision-theoretic argument — in the longtermist tradition of Bostrom (2003) and Ord (2020), rather than a contribution to physics or observational astronomy — for treating relativistic one-way interstellar colonization as civilizational-continuity insurance. Its premise is that a mission's success need not depend on the launching civilization's survival, or on any continued interest in the colony it dispatches. Two structural arguments carry the weight. The wait-calculation inversion shows that Kennedy's (2006) "incentive trap" — the worry that a slow ship will be overtaken by later, faster ones — dissolves under a continuity-insurance objective: being overtaken becomes the retrieval mechanism rather than a wasted sacrifice. The Convergent Targeting Principle argues, by transposing the instrumental-convergence framework (Omohundro 2008; Bostrom 2014) to interstellar target selection, that habitable worlds are convergent destinations for any rational expanding civilization, so a colony placed on one enjoys materially elevated — though not guaranteed — contact probability relative to a randomly chosen world. The paper situates these claims against the existing literature on the wait calculation and contact (Kennedy, Heller, Armstrong & Sandberg, Long, Wandel), confronts the strongest published objection to convergent targeting directly, offers a toy expected-value model that makes the contact probability's dependence on parameters explicit, justifies the crewed mission profile against seed-probe alternatives, and addresses the principal counterarguments: the Great Filter, value drift across long timescales, terraforming abundance, and destination-characterization uncertainty. This is Paper I of a planned series developing the Slow Boat Theory from a theoretical proposal toward a deployable strategic architecture for civilizational continuity.