It’s been proposed - I forgot the objection. But why couldn’t the training/selection process that the navy uses be employed for picking astronauts with the same results?
I have heard several podcasts and read several articles that explain the overwhelming challenges of setting up a colony on Mars - and Mars is practically in our backyard.
It’s their second one. ‘Soonish’, about the promise and threat of emerging technologies, is at least equally as readable.
Yes; this should work. We all have a brain with two hemispheres, with a relatively limited neural linkage between the two halves; but we perceive ourselves as a single entity.
Adding another artificial hemisphere (or more) might serve to expand our mentality while maintaining a sense of identity, and if part of that identity ceases to operate, then there would be something left behind to carry on (just like someone who has had a hemispherectomy).
Well, part of who we are includes the sum of our experiences. Riker and Riker-2 were identical when they re-materialized but separate entities who then each went on to have very different experiences.
If you run a similar thought experiment where instead of a transporter malfunction, Riker is hit by an inverse tachyon pulse caused by reversing the polarity of the main deflector dish, and is thrown back in time* 24 hours, you still have two people in the same general vicinity who both believe they are Riker, and both have the trombone to prove it.
*The fact that time travel is probably impossible is irrelevant to the thought experiment. Transporters are probably impossible.
Sure. The point being, at least IMHO, that there are two separate consciousnesses, not one consciousness controlling two separate bodies. The same situation would apply to any technology that allows us to download our consciousness to a computer, whether transporter, inverse tachyon pulse, or anything else.
Indeed. I think a sufficiently accurate process for uploading/duplicating consciousness would bifurcate the narrative that is ‘me’ into two stories; both of them with a separately-valid claim to have been me all their lives up to the point of division. One of them would still die and one of them would carry on. From the point of view of the one that is still going to die, it sucks because nothing changed. From the point of view of the one that isn’t going to die, it’s amazing to have been uploaded.
It would be interesting if we copied a person’s consciousness so there were two copies and then put each in an identical simulation of the world and see if both consciousnesses would evolve along the exact same lines. I suspect probably not. There would be some little differences (like going left instead of right) which would butterfly effect themselves into big differences eventually.
Just thinking out loud. Might make an interesting sci-fi story.
We have the technology right now to put people on Mars and establish a permanent colony there. It would be hideously expensive and every step of the process would be miserable for the colonists, but there’s no big unanswered question keeping us from doing it. It’s just that there’s no good reason to do it.
Meanwhile, we don’t know what consciousness is, we don’t know what thoughts are, and we have very little idea how the brain works to produce either of those things. We don’t know how to make a simulation that replicates all the things brains do to generate consciousness, and we don’t know how to extract meaningful information from a brain that could be applied to such a simulation. I think we will produce a non-human artificial intelligence long before we produce a digital copy of a human intelligence. Maybe someday we will have artificial intelligences designed to closely mimic a specific human, but I doubt we will ever have the technology to copy human brains into artificial ones.
I disagree. Can you define what you mean by “permanent colony”? We do not have the technology to terraform the planet. The ‘soil’ is untenable for farming. There is no way to keep an atmosphere on the planet - even if we could get an atmosphere there, there’s no magnetosphere.
Radiation is a huge problem. No matter how much money we through at it, we are a long way off from technologically possible.
I’m not talking about terraforming, I’m talking about establishing a “base on Mars” as the OP says. People would live in habitats, or better yet sealed caverns deep enough to shield from radiation. They’d harvest what water they could from the Martian surface and grow food in underground farms. They would probably need decades of resupply missions from Earth before they get anywhere near self-sustaining, but like I said there’s no insurmountable hurdle preventing this from happening other than the ludicrous monetary and human costs involved.
This is all pure fantasy. We can barely get to the moon and back, a mere three days away, never mind a “base” there, with our current and foreseen technology. And Mars is what, 9 months away, depending on the position of the planets? There are going to be a million problems emerging we haven’t even dreamed of. These are not just insurmountable, but impossible to hurdle, no matter how much money and human costs you throw at it.
We can barely get to the moon and back, sure, but we can. We can land a car-sized rover full of delicate instruments on Mars. We can keep people alive in space for months. We’ve had the technology to do all these things for decades.
Can we download a single memory from a human mind? Can we read a single thought?
All I’m trying to say is one of these is massively more feasible than the other.
These things are far, far cry from colonization. I agree with the article I linked to above (and others) - we will never colonize Mars. And we have earth nearby to re-supply.
Colonizing the next nearest star’s planet is impossible.
Not that downloading a mind is any easier… but there are folks who think so.
I agree with most of the points raised, but “never” is quite an extreme word to use.
There are people alive today who were born when humans had not sent anything beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
So I wouldn’t want to put such a hard limit on what humans could do in a few centuries time, let alone for the deep time we potentially have (if we don’t nuke ourselves).
Interesting strides are being made in this direction.
From that link; an attempt to decode a train of thought via non-invasive (but immersive) scanning.
The subjects were played audio recordings, and their brain activity decoded to see what their reaction was.
Stimulus:I don’t have my driver’s licence yet and I just jumped out right when I needed to, and she says: ‘Well, why don’t you come back to my house and I’ll give you a ride?’ I say OK.
Decoded response She is not ready – she has not even started to learn to drive, yet I had to push her out of the car. I said: ‘We will take her home now’ and she agreed.
I suspect that if you read my brainwaves while I was listening to the radio, the response would be just as woolly and inaccurate sometimes.
To allay the fears of the tinfoil hat brigade, this result requires a motionless subject inside an fMRI scanner; the CIA can’t read your thoughts at a distance (yet).
As an engineer, I say this is complete nonsense. The limitation is cost, lack of economic incentive, and lack of political will. There is nothing about the Mars environment that prevents humans from establishing a permanent base there, with current and near “developed to meet the need” tech and engineering expertise. Will it be a shit show and miserable experience for the first generation or two of colonists? Absolutely. But crossing the oceans and establishing colonies in the Americas in the 1600s was an absolute shit show and miserable experience as well.
Space travel and trans-oceanic travel is not a good comparison. In the 1600s travelers could count on air to breath and deadly solar radiation to be filtered during the journey, and when they reached land they would find food and water, and lumber to fix their ships. Leaving Earth means bringing an artificial human-friendly environment along for the trip, along with all the fixings, and it has to work flawlessly for the duration of the journey, be it 3 days or 3 years. And the people involved need to get along, which is the biggest bugaboo. It’s just not gonna happen. I agree it’s slightly more likely than downloaded memories for the purpose of this thread, only because we have done some toe-in-the-water space travel. There’s no problem in the Earth environment that we shouldn’t be able to engineer our way out of, too, but we’re not capable of even doing that, which is why I say we wont be around long enough to do interesting stuff elsewhere.
Establishing a base and colonizing are two completely different things. Sure, if we throw enough money and political will at the problem, we could build a bubble for people to live in there. But it would need to be continually re-stocked from earth.
The differences being, the soil in the the new world was essentially the same and could grow crops. And by contrast, the landscape on Mars is covered by fine, toxic dust. The air in the new world was the same and breathable. There was no radiation concerns in the new world. Opportunities to generate electricity via wind, solar, and nuclear power using resources on Mars are poor. The gravity is different. Because of the low atmospheric pressure, your blood would boil without a spacesuit. And so on and so on.
All of the challenges faced in the new world had been worked out many times before by many wandering civilizations. The key point point is there was a basic common denominator - Earth. What’s nonsense is comparing the establishing colonies in the Americas of the 1600s to the challenges for potential colonizers of Mars.
EDIT: Ninja’d while composing.
Except we’ve literally done all that, just not on Mars. We can build rockets strong enough to escape Earth’s gravity. We can build an artificial habitat that can survive for years in space - the ISS has been up there for more than 20 years now. The longest time a human has spent in space is 437 days, which is about how long it would take to travel to Mars and back. And we’ve got thousands of examples of people living in close quarters for extended periods without murdering each other. There’s absolutely nothing physically impossible about putting humans on Mars right now, it’s just that it would be very dangerous, insanely expensive, and there’s really nothing on Mars that justifies either of those. But it’s not remotely impossible from a science and technology stand point. It doesn’t even require any significant breakthroughs from where we are now, just iterations on existing tech.
A colony doesn’t have to be self-sustaining to be a colony. If we send a bunch of people to Mars with the expectation that they live there permanently, that’s a colony, regardless of how many follow up rockets we need to send to keep them alive.