Maybe I should have better defined colony in my OP, but I did allude to the earth becoming uninhabitable. If that was the case, there wouldn’t be any supply ships. I’m speaking of the eventuality that we could sent humans to another planet to live independently from earth.
I think most people in this thread understood that to be the case.
I think we all understand the OP. I’m just saying setting up a permanent base on another planet (call it a proto-colony if you will) is something that is technically in the realm of the achievable today, even if that planet is just our closest solar system neighbor. On the other hand, our understanding of how the consciousness works is still in the realm of “magic black box”. So IMO technologically they are not equivalent, while many posters here seem to be of the opinion that they are.
Assuming industrialized civilization doesn’t collapse, I consider colonizing another planet (or the Moon if it counts) to be basically inevitable. Somebody will do it at some point, as a prestige project if nothing else. Our present technological limitations aren’t really relevant since there’s no time limit on the question, and I rather doubt that our hypothetical posthuman descendants a million years from now will have the same limitations.
I consider “downloading consciousness” to be nearly as inevitable, the main issue is that as this thread demonstrates people don’t even agree on what would count as doing so, which makes predicting it problematic. I’m sure that at some point something that can be defined that way will happen; I’m also sure that there will be a lot of argument over whether the result is the same person or a person at all.
As for the continuation of identity question that’s come up, I don’t think there’s an objective answer. “Identity” isn’t an objectively real thing, it’s a human-created philosophical and emotional issue. Now, that doesn’t make it unimportant since we are talking about humans, but it does mean that we can’t expect scientists to discover an objective answer to the question, and that it likely won’t ever be fully settled.
As for me personally, my view is that a copy of me would be me, just a different instantiation; a “fork”. Whether it would continue to be fully me depends on whether both or either continue to run after the fork; but even then they’ll still be more “me” than anything else is.
Which, I agree, does kind of skew the ‘realm of possibility’ quotient. For instance, while I don’t think there will ever be a human-friendly atmosphere on Mars (no magnetosphere to protect, and hold, an atmosphere - even if we could generate one), I can envision some technology that would essentially be a work around coming to pass at some point. But after Mars, there would need to be a technological jump of many orders of magnitude to reach an earth-like planet around another star. Getting there alone, seems almost insurmountable.
But Mars is fair game.
Agree.
“Mars will lose its atmosphere” is a borderline issue, since if we could give it one in the first place it’ll lose it on such a long time scale that entire species could arise and fall, much less civilizations. Even the Moon could keep one for about 100,000 years as I recall, which is real long on the human scale.
As for “terraforming Mars”, the most plausible way to do that in my opinion would be to do it bit by bit rather than all at once. Dome it over segment by segment, rendering each area habitable before moving it on to the next. That lets you ignore the great bulk of the atmosphere and sidesteps one of the biggest hurdles of terraforming; it taking centuries at best before any real result.
And even if it doesn’t “count as real terraforming”, it renders habitable the part of the planet people would actually care about and experience. It’s not like the air on Earth twenty miles up is much more breathable, either.
Also; the complaint of how big a project it would be is fairly pointless since anyone who can terraform a planet is going to have much better technology and way more resources than we do. I strongly suspect that it would largely consist of dropping self-replicating robots and bioengineered lifeforms on the planet and letting them get to work, rather than the more brute force “slam comets into it and build air factories” ideas that come from trying to apply near-future technology to the problem
There is a huge difference between a ‘colony’ and a self sustaining colony. We are close enough to the tech required to start a basic colony of dependents, but self-suffiency is WAY beyond our current capability.
There was a panel discussion I watched years ago on how long it would take to rebuild society to the level it’s at now, if we could send time travelers into the distant past armed with all the knowledge we have now and as many pieces of equipment they could carry. That’'s a close analog to colonizing another planet., except that the Earth is habitable so you wouldn’t need to worry about air or water and food can be found on the land.
The consensus answer was, “About as long as it took the first time around.” It turns out that technological society just needs billions of people to fill all the supply chains, and that’s the limiting factor. The time travelers would spend all their time just surviving, and all tacit knowledge would be lost within a few generations. And even if it wasn’t, there wouldn’t be manpower to start building out the tech tree until you had quite a large population and excess wealth.
If a colony needs to maintain high technology to survive, it won’t survive being cut off from Earth for long.
The best place for a self-sustaining colony isn’t Mars anyway. It’s the Moon. Easier by probably orders of magnitude.
As for consciousness, we have no idea what it is, so the question is kind of moot. But what we have learned from LLMs is that much of whats makes us human is contained in language. I wonder what would happen if an AI was assigned to you at birth and followed you through life, watching your moves, listening to you, reading your writing, etc. At what point would it be able to mimic you?
Going a little farther, imagine human/AI hybrids, where from an early age your thinking is augmented by an AI connected through a brain interface. At some point, the line between you and the AI becomes blurry. What happens when you die? Can the AI continue? Will it be you, or at least a part of you? And if we discover that AIs can be sentient, would your consciousness continue to exist in some form?
What about Antarctica? We have bases there, people live in them for months and months, but without supplies from the temperate zones they would starve and freeze. Can we “terraform” Antarctica? With climare change, perhaps, at the cost of rendering the rest of the planet inhabitable.
Building domes to cover Mars? Give me a break! It would be easier to build a Dyson Sphere around the sun, at least we would not have to worry about Mars’ gravity collapsing the structure and about the gas leaks.
I remain completely unconvinced that either technology is feasible at all.
Mars has lava tubes, and a lot of people think that any lasting colony on Mars will wind up living in lava tubes.
The thing is, if you’re going to live in a lava tube, the Moon’s are better. Bigger, more stable, more pristine, more controllable. A single lava tube may be large enough for a million people plus farmland. And ‘terraforming’ a lava tube, while currently outside our capability, is many orders of magnitude easier than terraforming a planet.