7 ms·
So realistically we have two ways of colonizing this. Either we cure aging so a few decades of space travel wouldn't make a dent in our life and our physical ab
by cynusx 6y ago
So realistically we have two ways of colonizing this.
Either we cure aging so a few decades of space travel wouldn't make a dent in our life and our physical ability to colonize an uninhabited environment OR we invent real AI and leave space colonization to the machines as they have both don't age and can transport themselves at the speed of light.
I'd say machines will be cheaper.
- weejewel 6y agoYou should read the Bobiverse books, they’re exactly about this with a lot of geeky humor added.
- thom 6y agoI really enjoyed the audiobooks of these, which on the face of it ought to have been tricky, voicing dozens of copies of the same person.
- ssijak 6y agoI liked the start of the first book very much, but then it started to get repetitive and after the second book I decided to skip the third.
- fierarul 6y agoUsing AI seems pointless. Not to mention that what need would an AI have for a planet. Might as well put a solar sail in our system. Maybe make a few thousand clones... How about sending a whole village for the voyage? Some will die, some will be born, culture will be thought and the next generation would colonise the new planet.
- simcop2387 6y agoA fun book about this idea, Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora.
- johnnylambada 6y agoI just read Aurora about a month ago. Loved it. So much in it. A great not-evil self actualizing AI, an unexpected story arc. Beautiful book.
- soared 6y agoSimilarly, Red Mars by the same author takes the much easier goal of colonizing mars!
- cynusx 6y agoWhy pointless? Assuming real AI are incorporated into our economy this would be a classic case of comparative advantage. They could operate mining facilities on these planets and live to see the profits of a big mineral haul back to earth.
- airstrike 6y agoSend a bunch of frozen embryos piloted by an AI, then fertilize them in 2-3 batches 40-60 years or so prior to arriving so that you have 2-3 generations of people, the first of which are trained by video / VR / interaction with the AI. Have a few cuddly dogs aboard too so that the first generation doesn't grow up completely devoid of affection by only talking to machines
- cynusx 6y agoThe engineering complexity of this is orders of magnitude higher than curing aging. In this case you have to fully automate healthcare and education. Then you still have to steer these individuals towards some sort of economic goal because presumably you are not just sending kids to a foreign planet for fun.
- nkingsy 6y agoIt sounds hard, but might not be orders of magnitude harder than impossible.
- cynusx 6y agoI think we'll get to cure aging eventually, mankind has been investing in extending life very consistently (a quick google says we spend about 10% of global GDP on healthcare). It may take a very long time to get there though, but I don't see any reason why people would stop funding progress towards this goal. Compared to that, what investment is going towards automating childcare, education and healthcare today?
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoThat healthcare spend is not medical research, most of it is ruitine medical procedures like treating someone's broken rib. That's like taking all of global spend on IT, motors and robotics and claiming thats our automation research. It has no bering on making us live forever, and I am willing to bet that 'curing' aging for good is impossible unless we figure out brain uploading, which could be impossible and opens a new can of worms - is the new copy actually you? By contrast we are making a massive investment to automate more or less everything, for instance advances in robotics and machine vision clearly help to automate both healthcare and car assembly.
- hellofunk 6y agoThe third option is to just have multiple generations live and die on the journey to getting there, with which ever generation is alive at the end colonizing the planet.
- cynusx 6y agoTrue, that's even more expensive though cause you need to cary the full spectrum of educational and healthcare institutions onboard
- zelly 6y agoVery high probability they all kill each other onboard
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoIt's not actually a thing, and has never happened historically, at least not that i could find. Even widespread crime and civil wars don't result in 'they all killed each other', and no war ever killed even 30% of the population. There have been many isolated communities and if they die, thats because they succumb to diseasse or disaster.
- zelly 6y agoHow would there be a historical record of a community that killed itself entirely? Also, all these historical examples occur in the context of having millions of acres to roam, probably access to a lake or ocean, sunshine, fruits, seeing other animals, and so on (the natural habitat of humans). Even in prison they get yard time, and prisons are extremely violent. The number of generations it would take to travel ### lightyears away is so high that _something_ is just bound to happen. What if one of the generations gets hooked on bath salts? What if they get irradiated and lose fertility? What if they start a cult? What if there's a lone wolf killer who takes them all out?
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoObviously there are tools, books, houses and buildings. A civilisation doesn't just vanish, it leaves a mark on the world.
- dylan604 6y agoRather than curing aging (about as likely as interstellar human travel), it could be a ship capable of supporting multi-generational passengers. 11 years at light speed would still be 100s, 1000s of years at speeds obtainable by humans. Building a ship capable of that kind of life support is just beyond capabilities. A ship of that size is not getting off the ground. Our current manufacturing capabilities outside of the gravity well is assembling modules together or maybe a 3D printer
- bitexploder 6y agoHere I think aging is far easier to tackle. Aging is a discrete set of biological processes that we understand more every day. The bounds we need to make in science are not so extreme to defeat aging, a process we have a pretty good view on now. Interstellar travel requires significantly more leaps. Light speed travel, or some big fraction of light speed [and slowing down from light speed]. It requires a huge amount of engineering and physical resources to even contemplate. It will take a concerted effort by a nation state. Aging is something that can be tackled collectively by the nations of the world, and just gets better understood every year naturally. Just spit balling this some, but that's roughly how I see it breaking down
- dylan604 6y ago>It will take a concerted effort by a nation state. It will take a concerted effort by our species. Just as you go on to say that solving aging would require multinational support, why would you limit interstellar travel to a single nation? The fastest way for us to become space voyagers would be for us to receive that signal from somewhere near Vega that tells us how to build the machine to take us places.
- bitexploder 6y agoWell I don’t limit it on purpose. But the idea of nations cooperating right now seems a little in the future. Whereas with aging, science will just naturally progress. No changes required to the current cooperative structure. It just happens because that is how science goes. Space is just much more political than biology.
- fabiospampinato 6y agoYou can also "just" make a fast enough ship and get there in 10 years, o 1 month, from your perspective at least.
- cynusx 6y agoTravelling 11 lightyears in 10 years would require faster than light travel, which last time I checked is impossible in this version of the universe.
- dragonwriter 6y agoYou are talking about time in a frame at rest at either endpoint, not the frame of the ship/passenger, which relative to the rest frame is experiencing time dilation.
- cynusx 6y agook, if we can have breakthroughs in propulsion (and braking) then that would be possible. My understanding is that acceleration gets exponentially more expensive at higher speeds making it practically unfeasible to build a ship like this
- dragonwriter 6y ago> My understanding is that acceleration gets exponentially more expensive at higher speeds Asymptotically approaching infinity as you approach light speed, not merely exponential.
- jodrellblank 6y agohttp://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...
- bpodgursky 6y ago"The Songs of Distant Earth" by Clarke had a sorta-third option, where we sent out ships with just frozen embryos, and some automation which in theory kept infants alive long enough to watch videos / and other automated "parenting" material to get them to adulthood and kick-start civilization. Of course... this was to avoid an extinction-level event, is assumed to have failed on 95/100 attempts, and was even in-universe acknowledged to just be the best of a number of catastrophically bad options. But, a sorta-kinda solution.
- yummypaint 6y agoThat's a pretty solid idea actually. Have robots build everything and then grow the people as the last step. This could actually be doable in this century with continued incremental improvements in computing and robotics, which we're already working on. No need for propulsion breakthroughs or hypersleep. From the perspective of people on earth, it doesn't matter that much because it's such a long term project that no-one will be alive for both the launch and the landing anyway.
- brutt 6y agoWe can just send seeds, and in just few dozen million years they will form new civilization. It's dirt cheap.
- SkyMarshal 6y ago> and can transport themselves at the speed of light. Since when is this possible? Did I miss something?
- misnome 6y agoVia radio signals. It’d still require a ship flying there though, but that wouldn’t have to be built to support life.
- cynusx 6y agoexactly. you'd have to send a ship with all the robotics and equipment but there's no need for intelligent beings to lose conscious time during this period. Although at this point you (=the AI) would lose 11 years transmitting yourself, you won't actually be conscious of this process.
- cynusx 6y agoAI can be copied and all its state transmitted, this is actually one of the biggest gamechangers towards human brains. Suppose you have a real AI inhabiting a robot here on earth, it would only require to copy the AI, transmit it and boot up the AI on compatible robotics hardware on the new planet. This would be the equivalent of transporting your brain into a cloned body.
- gmuslera 6y agoRealistic should take into account required time, tecnology, biology, culture, politics and economics (just to name a few). Taking out of the map colonization, and trying a very long term (decades, or centuries) plan to send something like the Voyager or even the Mars Explorer just to learn what is there is more realistic. And once we know more decide what are the next realistic steps. But think in hundreds or thousands of years if everything gets right. In our current stage it would be easier (not easy) to colonize Venus, the moon or the asteroid belt, and could have a more realistic time frame.
- cynusx 6y agoI agree current solar system would be easier to colonize and definitely economically more sensible but I do think that when lifetimes expand to be 100s of years, that the timelines on what you can invest in would expand accordingly. For example, the longest timeframe in pension fund investing is 25 years. Which is 1/3th of a lifetime. If lifetimes increase by 10x then the timeframe would become 250 years and mineral explorations of other solar systems becomes a feasible financial endeavor.
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoThe idea of travelling to another star in a little ship that is launched from earth and is barely able to make the journey is both a very bad plan and a persistent trope. I dont wan't to travel on a wing and a prayer. You have to have a large space industry, mining and construction, to be able to build large ships and send autonomous drones, supllies, etc. You would do that ahead of any colonists actually arriving.
- dorkwood 6y agoWhy do we need to cure aging? Humans have already been hurtling through space for over 100,000 years. We just need a way to continue that streak, but headed in the direction of a new solar system.