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What's the point of these huge generation ships? It's not like there's not enough atoms on other planets. You should send a tiny fast robotic ship, maybe with a

What's the point of these huge generation ships? It's not like there's not enough atoms on other planets. You should send a tiny fast robotic ship, maybe with an uploaded mind if your AI tech isn't good enough. It will mine materials at the destination and build a receiver antenna. Then you can send more uploaded minds by radio, which will arrive at the speed of light with low energy cost. Another reason why you shouldn't send human bodies in tin cans, or even grow them from eggs on the spot, is that human bodies are not adapted to the conditions in space or at the destination, so they would need an unreasonable amount of life support equipment. If you really want a colony of biological creatures with human minds for some reason, bioengineer the right kind of bodies on the spot and download minds into them.

snowwrestler 13y ago
If we're going to stipulate fantastic concepts like "uploaded minds" then let's just invent a hyperspace engine too and solve all the problems at once. In the real world, we want to send human bodies because that's what human minds are. Cartesian duality is a religious/philosophical concept for which no scientific basis has yet been found.
- Tloewald 13y ago
  Uploaded minds is hardly an argument depending on cartesian duality. Arguing that there's something irreproducible about the human brain is quite close to cartesian duality. I am not arguing that uploading minds is any more feasible than a generation ship, but it is at least more plausible than hyperdrive -- based on what we think we know right now.
  - mitchty 13y ago
    I guess I disagree that uploading minds is more feasible. One is more of an engineering/physics challenge, and uploading minds is dependent upon a vast set of unknown unknowns. We aren't even out of the door on the idea of biological computing let alone at the mailbox.
    - TheCraiggers 13y ago
      One key difference is that we know brains can exist. We might not know the entirety of how they work, but the important thing is we already know they can be reproduced in some fashion. Hyperdrive or any other form of FTL travel is purely in our thoughts. Nothing currently exists that even proves it is possible in our current reality. For all we know we could spend an infinite time attempting it and never achieve it.
      - mitchty 13y ago
        True, however a key distinction i'm making here is knowing something exists and knowing how it works and being able to replicate that in another system could be just as much of an infinite timesink. I'd rephrase the "nothing currently exists that even proves it is possible" to, nothing has been observed to demonstrate its possibility. That and things like warping space could throw a wrench into the "we can't travel faster than light". But maybe we can end run around it. Though the same can be said of the brain, we really know we don't know a lot more than what we don't know about physics.
      - snowwrestler 13y ago
        We have no evidence at all that a given brain can be reproduced. We know that new brains can be made and developed (i.e. procreation), and even then we don't really know how that works. But the post above said "mind" not "brain" which typically signifies that the author draws some sort of distinction between the two. I'm just saying: I don't know of any physical evidence for that distinction.
  - snowwrestler 13y ago
    Human brains are no more difficult to exactly reproduce than any other piece of matter: extremely difficult. The best we've done to date is a few previously entangled particles. Edit to add: what I'm talking about here is quantum teleportation of the matter of the brain. Typically when people talk about "uploading a mind" they mean that the mind is software running on the hardware of the brain--like Windows running on a PC. I'm not aware of any scientific evidence that the mind and brain can be considered separately in that way.
    - Tloewald 13y ago
      The question comes down to "could you run a sufficiently accurate simulation of a brain on a sufficiently powerful computer that it could pass for the mind of the person whose brain was being simulated"? I'd say the belief that the belief this is impossible is a variant of the cartesian duality.
- Houshalter 13y ago
  >If we're going to stipulate fantastic concepts like "uploaded minds" then let's just invent a hyperspace engine too and solve all the problems at once. We don't know if breaking the light-barrier is possible regardless of a civilizations level of technology. Brain uploading will certainly be enormously complex and a fantastic feat of technology, but it's certainly possible based on everything we know. Yes it's possible there is more to consciousness than just the physical brain, but that's such an absurd and outlandish assertion, it isn't remotely worth the time to worry about it.
- cousin_it 13y ago
  I think you have "fantastic" and "real world" backwards. The Blue Brain project is planned to have an uploaded rat brain this year (2014). Uploading human minds is very likely to be closer than capturing the whole energy output of the Sun, which is discussed in the OP. Though uploading will likely cause so many changes that space exploration will seem insignificant in comparison, see Robin Hanson's "The crack of a future dawn" [1] and Carl Shulman's "Whole brain emulation and the evolution of superorganisms" [2]. In general I think most people don't take this scenario seriously enough, the authors I mention are the rare exceptions. [1] http://hanson.gmu.edu/uploads.html http://hanson.gmu.edu/uploads.html [2] https://intelligence.org/files/WBE-Superorgs.pdf https://intelligence.org/files/WBE-Superorgs.pdf
  - darkmighty 13y ago
    The Blue Brain project will have a rat brain model. It reproduces some of the responses you'd expect from a real. That's orders of magnitude of technical progress away from what an upload would require. We don't even know for sure if it's physically possible to perform an upload (due to quantum mechanics), much less have a device which can come close to measure a significant part of the quantum state of a working brain (i.e. the technical problems beyond physical feasibility).
    - jessedhillon 13y ago
      Can you point to some introductory reading about the quantum mechanical effects at work in the brain? I've read The Emperor's New Mind but was left with the impression that it was more conjecture than research.
  - wazoox 13y ago
    I'm afraid you fell for the hype. We're still unable to understand the puny brain of Caenorhabditis elegans, or how the bees achieve all that they can do with as little a brain. Rat brain is several orders of magnitude harder.
mistermcgruff 13y ago
The only problem is when you send ships to mine other planets, there may be eggs with face-huggers in them on those other planets.
userulluipeste 13y ago
I heard about this interstellar communication silver-bullet before. You're just taking communications on earth for granted - need more bandwidth between points A and B? Just throw in another independent physical communication channel between them! Well, that's fine here but it doesn't work the same way at creating data links between Earth and another celestial body inside our solar system and definitely not between the solar system and another star system. Think how much info can we theoretically send at a time to another star and how much time will it take to send a brain of knowledge! I think it will be more feasible to send those brains of knowledge in some physical form (and guess what the most intuitive way for doing that would be).
- cousin_it 13y ago
  Hmm. Theoretically it seems like lasers should support speeds of terabytes per second, so you should be able to transmit a human mind in minutes to hours (maybe faster with compression), and that should take less energy than sending an actual brain at reasonable speed (rocket equation). If you want more bandwidth, use multiple lasers located close to the solar system, but still far enough that they can be distinguished from another star. At longer distances, use multiple intermediate stars in parallel, like the internet. Or is there some theoretical limit that I'm missing?
  - userulluipeste 13y ago
    "is there some theoretical limit that I'm missing?" Well, considering that the closest star (Alpha Centauri) is 4.367 light-years away, that only means that if something's wrong with the transmission itself, we can figure it out only after almost nine years. Other than that, I don't really imagine any feasible solution for communication on interstellar scale other than laser-based one, so my initial point was put forward exactly in that use-case. If there ever will (and I hope it will) be a galactic-scale communication system, humanity will have to: - Improve the current laser technology to the point of sending laser beams without much dispersion over light-years distances. - Improve the optical sensor technology in order to receive (and distinguish) from (multiple) artificial sources of light orbiting close to a noisy star. - Set up the laser system(s) taking in account: the time-frame of the moving celestial bodies - both stars and the orbiting emitter(s)/receiver(s), the gravitational time dilation factor, other currently known factors that I don't know of (I'm not a professional physicist), and whatever any other new additional subtle effect that may be still discovered in such setting! I think this fine calibration will be the cake's top-cherry, BTW. So yes, theoretically all is just an engineering problem. The development speed cycles of such systems though, are already dictated by the laws of physics - years (and in human time - generations). The mere reliable communication on such scale will be a great success, but I don't dare to hope of sending brains of knowledge['] in mere hours. ['] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-memory-capacity/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-memory...

snowwrestler 13y ago

If we're going to stipulate fantastic concepts like "uploaded minds" then let's just invent a hyperspace engine too and solve all the problems at once. In the real world, we want to send human bodies because that's what human minds are. Cartesian duality is a religious/philosophical concept for which no scientific basis has yet been found.

Tloewald 13y ago
Uploaded minds is hardly an argument depending on cartesian duality. Arguing that there's something irreproducible about the human brain is quite close to cartesian duality. I am not arguing that uploading minds is any more feasible than a generation ship, but it is at least more plausible than hyperdrive -- based on what we think we know right now.
- mitchty 13y ago
  I guess I disagree that uploading minds is more feasible. One is more of an engineering/physics challenge, and uploading minds is dependent upon a vast set of unknown unknowns. We aren't even out of the door on the idea of biological computing let alone at the mailbox.
  - TheCraiggers 13y ago
    One key difference is that we know brains can exist. We might not know the entirety of how they work, but the important thing is we already know they can be reproduced in some fashion. Hyperdrive or any other form of FTL travel is purely in our thoughts. Nothing currently exists that even proves it is possible in our current reality. For all we know we could spend an infinite time attempting it and never achieve it.
    - mitchty 13y ago
      True, however a key distinction i'm making here is knowing something exists and knowing how it works and being able to replicate that in another system could be just as much of an infinite timesink. I'd rephrase the "nothing currently exists that even proves it is possible" to, nothing has been observed to demonstrate its possibility. That and things like warping space could throw a wrench into the "we can't travel faster than light". But maybe we can end run around it. Though the same can be said of the brain, we really know we don't know a lot more than what we don't know about physics.
    - snowwrestler 13y ago
      We have no evidence at all that a given brain can be reproduced. We know that new brains can be made and developed (i.e. procreation), and even then we don't really know how that works. But the post above said "mind" not "brain" which typically signifies that the author draws some sort of distinction between the two. I'm just saying: I don't know of any physical evidence for that distinction.
- snowwrestler 13y ago
  Human brains are no more difficult to exactly reproduce than any other piece of matter: extremely difficult. The best we've done to date is a few previously entangled particles. Edit to add: what I'm talking about here is quantum teleportation of the matter of the brain. Typically when people talk about "uploading a mind" they mean that the mind is software running on the hardware of the brain--like Windows running on a PC. I'm not aware of any scientific evidence that the mind and brain can be considered separately in that way.
  - Tloewald 13y ago
    The question comes down to "could you run a sufficiently accurate simulation of a brain on a sufficiently powerful computer that it could pass for the mind of the person whose brain was being simulated"? I'd say the belief that the belief this is impossible is a variant of the cartesian duality.
Houshalter 13y ago
>If we're going to stipulate fantastic concepts like "uploaded minds" then let's just invent a hyperspace engine too and solve all the problems at once. We don't know if breaking the light-barrier is possible regardless of a civilizations level of technology. Brain uploading will certainly be enormously complex and a fantastic feat of technology, but it's certainly possible based on everything we know. Yes it's possible there is more to consciousness than just the physical brain, but that's such an absurd and outlandish assertion, it isn't remotely worth the time to worry about it.
cousin_it 13y ago
I think you have "fantastic" and "real world" backwards. The Blue Brain project is planned to have an uploaded rat brain this year (2014). Uploading human minds is very likely to be closer than capturing the whole energy output of the Sun, which is discussed in the OP. Though uploading will likely cause so many changes that space exploration will seem insignificant in comparison, see Robin Hanson's "The crack of a future dawn" [1] and Carl Shulman's "Whole brain emulation and the evolution of superorganisms" [2]. In general I think most people don't take this scenario seriously enough, the authors I mention are the rare exceptions. [1] http://hanson.gmu.edu/uploads.html http://hanson.gmu.edu/uploads.html [2] https://intelligence.org/files/WBE-Superorgs.pdf https://intelligence.org/files/WBE-Superorgs.pdf
- darkmighty 13y ago
  The Blue Brain project will have a rat brain model. It reproduces some of the responses you'd expect from a real. That's orders of magnitude of technical progress away from what an upload would require. We don't even know for sure if it's physically possible to perform an upload (due to quantum mechanics), much less have a device which can come close to measure a significant part of the quantum state of a working brain (i.e. the technical problems beyond physical feasibility).
  - jessedhillon 13y ago
    Can you point to some introductory reading about the quantum mechanical effects at work in the brain? I've read The Emperor's New Mind but was left with the impression that it was more conjecture than research.
- wazoox 13y ago
  I'm afraid you fell for the hype. We're still unable to understand the puny brain of Caenorhabditis elegans, or how the bees achieve all that they can do with as little a brain. Rat brain is several orders of magnitude harder.

mistermcgruff 13y ago

The only problem is when you send ships to mine other planets, there may be eggs with face-huggers in them on those other planets.

userulluipeste 13y ago

I heard about this interstellar communication silver-bullet before. You're just taking communications on earth for granted - need more bandwidth between points A and B? Just throw in another independent physical communication channel between them! Well, that's fine here but it doesn't work the same way at creating data links between Earth and another celestial body inside our solar system and definitely not between the solar system and another star system. Think how much info can we theoretically send at a time to another star and how much time will it take to send a brain of knowledge! I think it will be more feasible to send those brains of knowledge in some physical form (and guess what the most intuitive way for doing that would be).

cousin_it 13y ago
Hmm. Theoretically it seems like lasers should support speeds of terabytes per second, so you should be able to transmit a human mind in minutes to hours (maybe faster with compression), and that should take less energy than sending an actual brain at reasonable speed (rocket equation). If you want more bandwidth, use multiple lasers located close to the solar system, but still far enough that they can be distinguished from another star. At longer distances, use multiple intermediate stars in parallel, like the internet. Or is there some theoretical limit that I'm missing?
- userulluipeste 13y ago
  "is there some theoretical limit that I'm missing?" Well, considering that the closest star (Alpha Centauri) is 4.367 light-years away, that only means that if something's wrong with the transmission itself, we can figure it out only after almost nine years. Other than that, I don't really imagine any feasible solution for communication on interstellar scale other than laser-based one, so my initial point was put forward exactly in that use-case. If there ever will (and I hope it will) be a galactic-scale communication system, humanity will have to: - Improve the current laser technology to the point of sending laser beams without much dispersion over light-years distances. - Improve the optical sensor technology in order to receive (and distinguish) from (multiple) artificial sources of light orbiting close to a noisy star. - Set up the laser system(s) taking in account: the time-frame of the moving celestial bodies - both stars and the orbiting emitter(s)/receiver(s), the gravitational time dilation factor, other currently known factors that I don't know of (I'm not a professional physicist), and whatever any other new additional subtle effect that may be still discovered in such setting! I think this fine calibration will be the cake's top-cherry, BTW. So yes, theoretically all is just an engineering problem. The development speed cycles of such systems though, are already dictated by the laws of physics - years (and in human time - generations). The mere reliable communication on such scale will be a great success, but I don't dare to hope of sending brains of knowledge['] in mere hours. ['] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-memory-capacity/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-memory...