Hey, don’t blame it just on Southerners. You need to do some more reading on that. Sending the darkies back to Africa was also a project of white Northerners who wished to (as Emerson put it, not approvingly) “abolish the black man” from their midst. That effort began well before the war. Lincoln was a booster of the general idea (“We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races…It is better for us both, therefore, to be separate.”), though he thought Central America might be more practical than Liberia.
You think intelligence is evolutionarily favored? In the long run?
I’m not sure of that?
Presumably you’re thinking of cars and such. Lots of industrial machines last much longer than a decade.
In any event, that’s on planet. Interstellar ships would be built in space, and will be more subject to fluke events destroying them than to just wearing down.
You don’t see the possibility of reaching any foreign star sooner, by more mundane means?
I can’t vote because I say: “No, because of physics or engineering limitations.”
I voted for the generation ship option, but with the caveat that communication will still be possible, just slow. Earth and the ship will continue to beam messages to each other with the most important developments, and occasionally you’ll even have unmanned ships sent packed to the gills with DVDs or whatever replacement the then-current technology allows of as much information as each world can assemble.
I would say FTL is more likely than a generation ship. All FTL requires is a new scientific discovery that gets around the speed of light. Who knows, it’s unlikely but maybe it’s there. If it isn’t, we’ll have to build a ship that can somehow accelerate to an appreciable portion of light-speed while having enough mass to house and feed a breeding population of humans. You’d need stellar levels of energy for this. Even if you got those, how do you accelerate the ship without crushing its passengers? Or if you go very slow, how do you keep the ship from failing over a voyage of hundreds of thousands or millions of years?
Tangentially pertinent article.
I think we will at least try to send generational ships at some point. I however, won’t be volunteering to go on the first one. My reasoning is that the first one will head off to a likely extrasolar planet at some velocity x but, a few years later, we’ll have the technology to send off another ship at a velocity of 10x. And then, a few years later, another ship at 100x. So if you are on the first ship you would end up landing on an already overpopulated planet.
Humans will never travel to the stars as human beings. It’s just too hard to keep the meat alive.
As far as we know, FTL travel is impossible. Not really, really hard. Impossible.
On the other hand, there’s no apparent fundamental barrier to downloading a human mind into another receptacle. We don’t know how to do that now, but it’s not hard to imagine a time a few centuries hence when its possible.
So forget about generation ships. What you want are von Neumann probes – small robotic spacecraft that can mine resources from asteroids and use those resources to modify themselves. You shoot a von Neumann probe to a nearby solar system. When it arrives, it wakes up and goes to work gathering resources to build a beachhead. When it finishes building its antenna, it sends a message back to Earth saying “I’m ready!” The humans digitize their minds and beam them at light speed to the beachhead where they are instantiated in the artificial bodies that probe has already prepared.
The engineering challenges to pull off something like this are immense, but they’re easier than the engineering challenges of building generation ships. And it doesn’t require anything that breaks our current understanding of how the universe works.
Why the hell would we bother? I wouldn’t. It wouldn’t be me on the other end.
It will never be you on the other end.
But, quibbles over the definitions of “human being” aside, it would be your people–our pioneers.
Right. Would you oppose a manned mission to Mars within your lifetime now on the basis that you wouldn’t personally be riding along? No, the important part is that someone goes.
I think we have a lot to learn about the engineering challenges of either of those alternatives.
If you’re going to digitize human minds, then it’s much easier to do it at the start of the journey, not at the end. I don’t know how much information there is in a mind, but it’s probably safe to say that it’s a very large amount, and it’s going to be tough to get significant information bandwidth on any connection over a range of lightyears. On the other hand, we know for a certainty that the information content of a mind can be stored in hardware massing a few kilograms, and it’s probably possible to make it significantly smaller than that. So scan your explorers’ minds, put them on discs, and pack the discs into the probe before it even launches.
Cite?
Is that just based on a calculation about numbers,states and network connections of neurons, or is there more to it than that?
I believe it’s based on the fact that you and I each are carrying a piece of hardware around in our skulls that (demonstrably (to me) in my case and I’ll take you on faith :)) contains the information content of a human mind.
That could work too. It has the added benefit of getting human intelligence to the destination even if civilization collapses on Earth before the probe arrives. And there’s no reason you can’t do both.
Oh, I imagine we’ll have the ability to suspend and resume human life “perfectly” within a few generations. Once you’ve got that, it’s just a matter of acceleration and time; we could almost do it with today’s tech. But my point was that that’s just the first step on a much longer journey. Once we have the ability to leave the planet and live somewhere else, the number of things that can wipe out all of humanity drops precipitously.
Build a ship that could take 10,000 people to another world, with the caveat that you would be “suspended” during the journey, decades or centuries would pass, and there’s be no way to get back…and you could sell those seats for pretty much whatever you wish.
I’m hopeful that within my lifetime we’ll be able to confirm life on other worlds, or as a consolation prize, find another world that can “probably” sustain human life. Going there will be left to my increasingly hypothetical descendants, but go they will.
But the assertion was in relation to a proposal for digital encoding, made necessary (it was contended) by the fact of it being “too hard to keep the meat alive.”
I’m neither a neurologist nor a computer scientist, but in my understanding human brains are more complicated and less well-understood than any tech built to date.
So if Chronos was just talking (joking) about biological brains, that’s much less interesting than what I thought he was saying.
Sure, but I think it’s reasonable to assume that some time in the next 500 years we’ll be able to at least duplicate the human brain’s storage capacity in something of equal or smaller size.
But the mass of a human brain does place an upper bound on the minimum mass necessary to store a record of human consciousness. Maybe it could be packed into something substantially smaller, but we know at least that 1.5 kg is doable. And since the minimum mass of a von Neumann probe is probably much larger than that, sending a few brains along for the ride probably wouldn’t increase the trip time by much.
I tend to agree with a blogger who wrote:
"We are never getting off this rock. Oh sure, we might get a couple people to Mars to walk around. Maybe a space station. Maaaaaaaybe a moon station. But that’s about it. We’re never going to colonize the planets (it would be far easier to colonize Antarctica and make it a liveable place). We’re NEVER gonna go to another star. This is pretty much it. We must learn to face the fact that the frontier period is past and we ain’t going anywhere.
Now. Tell me why that ticks you off, makes you feel hopeless, and makes you think I am defeatist trash."