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I was reading up about earth alternatives recently, and upon realizing the distance was always going to limit us, no matter how perfect the planet, I realized w
by rubicon33 10y ago
I was reading up about earth alternatives recently, and upon realizing the distance was always going to limit us, no matter how perfect the planet, I realized we need to travel at the speed of light.
I think our "best shot" at that right now, is to digitize humans. If we could store consciousness in binary, we could then transmit it at the speed of light (like we do with data every day!). You'd need a receiver on the distant planet though. So, your first 'payload' would have to be the receiver, and it would need to travel the slow old fashioned way :(
- NickBusey 10y agoWhy not just make that first payload contain actual humans? Seems a helluva lot simpler.
- rubicon33 10y agoYou could, and probably would. But, how would you send everyone else? That 'traditional' method (carbon based fuels to propel a heavy payload) is extremely expensive, and slow. So if you ever wanted to send more than just 1 payload, you'd quickly reach resource limitations (namely cost, and time).
- robin_reala 10y agoWhy would you need to send more? Humans are natural von Neumann machines.
- imglorp 10y agoYup, for several hundred thousand year's journey. No problem. :-) I would just hope my emacs session will stay up that long.
- batbomb 10y agoI think the magic speed is actually 10% the speed of light.
- methodover 10y ago40 light years isn't a big deal if humans lived to be thousands of years old. That's another solution.
- tim333 10y agoOr cryogenically freeze yourself with instructions to be brought back in a few millennia near the new star system. From the observer's point of view you could be there Tuesday week or so.
- twoodfin 10y agoIf you're going to assume heavy equipment on the other end (ours or "someone else's"), it's not ridiculously beyond our current capabilities to simply transmit DNA sequences along with enough digital training material to "grow" and raise a human population from scratch.
- NegativeLatency 10y agoNot to mention the reliability and throughout requirements of such a data link to another planet so far away.
- fudged71 10y agohas a mammalian fetus ever been developed to maturity outside of a natural womb?
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- ianmcgowan 10y agoI hate to always post links to Greg Egan, but he's sort of the XKCD of SciFi - if there's an out there concept, he's usually written a book about it. In this case Incandescence: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0070YQOHW https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0070YQOHW Top review has the best summary: "Egan's story is set in the galactic core, inhabited by a race known as the Aloof, because they seem almost indifferent to any attempts at communication from the Amalgam, the loose network of civilizations that inhabit the rest of the galaxy. However, they do allow thrill-seeking members of the Amalgam to enter their transportation network, digitizing themselves for transmission at the speed of light across the galactic core, instead of the long way around it."
- samuel 10y agoWhy humans? People are concerned about the survivability of human species, and it's certainly a noble goal, but at this point it's outside or technological reach. Preserving life, in the other hand, could be doable. We «just» need to take some prokaryotic cells to one of those planets, assuming they have the right environment, and in some million years you have a complete ecosystem... Assuming also, of course, that there is not life there already.
- nilson 10y agoThe whole idea of digitizing humans is silly. It would lead to spooky action at distance. For example what if when humans are digitized you send it to two different machines? Which one would be the real you?