Terraforming for robots
Terraforming would not strictly be the appropriate term for the type of planetary modifications I am asking about.
Say humanity develops advanced AI robots, who are then left alone in space (as humans have completely perished and Earth destroyed). The robots may have a vague memory of what Earth was like. They have a highly equipped colony ship and land on a new planet to settle it for themselves.
If they have the capability to (fairly easily) transform the planet to fit their needs, what should some of the main things to keep in mind be? For example, on first thought they may not be interested in fostering biological life - but then again, why not? It could prove useful for them for various things (that are useful for us here on Earth).
Their only "programming"/objective is to live; they could do it on the ship, but they want to do it on a planet. How and why would they choose to terraform one instead of just "living" on a barren desert planet?
The initial reasoning I came to was a sort of biological/hybrid phisiology that is similar to the human one, so that they may need water, nourishment, air, etc. But I want to explore other options and motivations as well.
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1 answer
Why would they live on a planet?
These robots, with sufficiently advanced AI, could have a pretty advanced social system. They could have community leaders, followers, criminals even (if the programmers didn't consider this, that is - or they've altered their own code (have a look at the recent Challenge of Controlling AI for detailed looks at this kind of stuff)).
If, as you say, they remember planet Earth, it is entirely possible that at least one of them would want to return to that sort of environment as a kind of 'base habitat'. Due to the nice social system they have, this issue could be debated and would probably be accepted. Computers, logically, are programmed to return to a sort of ground state - nicely ticking along, memory to spare, disk space to spare, spare CPU power, etc. If the AI was similarly programmed, they may take Earth as their ground state, and since they are advanced they can affect their surroundings a lot more. If, therefore, they want to return to an Earth-like state, they might well choose to land on a planet. Again, being advanced, they may even realise that landing on an Earth-like planet such as Kepler-10b would be advantageous.
Why would they terraform?
For similar reasons. Now that they have a planet to live on, that's still only half the ground state - it's not exactly like Earth yet. So, to make it like Earth, they need to terraform it. I won't detail how here, that's a separate question, but it's a fairly safe assumption that the resulting planet would be generally similar to Earth.
We can even go so far as to assume that they'd have cities and hamlets and different types of settlement. Cities arose because of people's desire to live near other people - it enables easier trade and social interaction. Hamlets are often retreats for those less sociable. If the original programmers included that standard AI Personality module, then the robots would have these types of people and so settlements would develop similarly.
My last point is their requirements. If Kepler-10b doesn't have any silicon, what are they going to do when they need repairing? As part of the terraforming process, they could hijack the nearest star for some nuclear fusion, create silicon and then put it into their planet. Not that I know why they'd do that: it's far more likely they'd just make it and stockpile, but it's a possibility. The same could be said for any other required materials.
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