A study looked at robotic exploration but found that humans do it faster and cheaper, assuming you invest enough money for manned exploration. Perhaps future generations of technology will change that, but we'll have to wait and see.
Historically humans explore and settle wherever we can, which likely will happen with the rest of the system too. And if we get to the Oort cloud we will go interstellar and perhaps never bother with the energetically costly and risky gravity wells earlier generations called "planets". Then we will speciate, meanwhile it takes only one crossbreeding per generation on average to prevent such splits. It is unlikely to ever happen in the Sun system.
the authors are probably correct that somebody somewhere will do it, even if illegally. It has become too easy to control effectively.
It is costly but fairly easy to
try, but current techniques has too many unintended inserts to work in individuals or safely on fertilized eggs. It may never change, chemistry is basically random and crowded cell chemistry even more so (stochastic metabolism, cancer, mutations).
300,000 years ago there were multiple human species on Earth. I'd argue the Earth was more interesting, a little like Tolkien's Middle Earth. With gene editing and AI, perhaps the solar system will host multiple intelligent species once again. Some will be 100% biological, some robots, and some a mix of the two. Some will live in the real universe and some will like their simulated virtual worlds. in 1,000 years it will be a place even Tolkien could not imagine
Unless you develop technology that reproduces, there will only be one human population due to the population genetics I described above - one crossbreeding per generation on average suffice.
Looking back at the histories of the populations of other animals, exponential population increases such as humans are currently experiencing are typically followed by major population crashes.
So, the real question is whether humans are actually so much smarter than the other animals of Planet Earth that we can avoid crashing our own population.
The population projections is that we are heading for a crash from 10 billion people to about 1 billion sometime after 2100. Not because of primarily technology (though birth control has made it a possibility) but because of social reasons. C.f. China's shrinking population, having children cuts into your personal time as well as your economy.
I am not so sure that building robots that are smarter than humans is a smart idea.
That ship has sailed, current LLMs have made better medical diagnoses and behaved better to patients than your average above average intelligence doctor.
Like ChrisA says, they are different though. Currently they have limited introspection for adjusting on the parameter level during basic training, say.
We have the same situation with AI. some say "it must be regulated" but the reality is that even undergraduate computer science majors can read journal articles and make their own AI and thousands of them can and do. The technology is now in the wild.
AI is regulated. Like GMO technology it isn't feasible for hackers. It takes access to vast amount of data to make LLMs. And costly cloud computing power to make their transformer cores even if you want to make some limited AI such as cat image recognition (say).