61–70 of 187 posts
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That would not preserve our species, should planet Earth become inhabitable.
If you have robots that can raise babies into grown-up humans, the robots need to be pretty much the same as humans themselves at that point.
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I think the main challenge is whether there will actually be any desire to colonize in the first place. By the time we acquire the means to leave the solar system society will have transformed so completely that it's impossible to predict what our goals will be. Resources and population are not likely to be problems at all though.
Resources have always been a problem throughout history and prehistory.
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If you have robots that can raise babies into grown-up humans, the robots need to be pretty much the same as humans themselves at that point.
Not at all. You need sufficiently advanced AI, but the purpose is to preserve humanity. It's a one-way trip. You aren't doing anything on another planet that will affect Earth, just spreading the seed.
Re. the preservation thing, the question is exactly what counts as humanity. If you have limited resources and can only pick one, would you choose a planet colonized by biological humans who have lost all of the present civilization and language, and are reduced to stone-age conditions (assuming for the moment that the alien environment wouldn't kill them instantly), or synthetic beings with the sufficiently advanced AI with all human cultural knowledge and skills they'd need to survive on an alien planet and a cognitive and psychological makeup very close to actual humans they'd need to be able to raise babies into sane adults, and the ability to build more of themselves?
Basically, is humanity more about a culture or about being made of the correct chemicals?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have robots that can raise babies into grown-up humans, the robots need to be pretty much the same as humans themselves at that point.
Not at all. You need sufficiently advanced AI, but the purpose is to preserve humanity. It's a one-way trip. You aren't doing anything on another planet that will affect Earth, just spreading the seed.
That's a good, grounded assessment of the scale of the problem. I too believe that the human colonization of space, even near-space (ie within the orbit of the Moon) is a long way off. The energy costs are simply too high and resources too cheap on the Earth to make it viable (in spite of typical SF fodder of asteroid mining). This is a problem because with 6.5 billion people we're using up resources. Fast. Anyway, I…
Simple probability dictates that it is only a matter of time before a sufficiently large body travels through the Solar System with sufficient velocity (including direction) to reach somewhere else in sufficient time (but not too fast that we can't perform an orbital intercept) that we can essentially build a colony on it. Not really. You could also say that "simple probability dictates that it is only a matter of ti…
"That's the same as the yield of the entire US Minuteman III ICBM force." So you're saying there's a chance!
That's what I thought, too. I think the energy examples were supposed to scare me, and if he'd said something like total output of the sun, ever , they would have. But total power output of current civilization for five days garnered more of a "sounds doable" response from me.
In a few decades from now, the energy necessary for such a long distance space flight could come from half a ton of anti-hydrogen.
"As Bruce Sterling has put it: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live."
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Simple probability dictates that it is only a matter of time before a sufficiently large body travels through the Solar System with sufficient velocity (including direction) to reach somewhere else in sufficient time (but not too fast that we can't perform an orbital intercept) that we can essentially build a colony on it. Not really. You could also say that "simple probability dictates that it is only a matter of ti…
Hmmm... I don't think your analogy is correct. There is a very solid reason that all the air in the room will never only be in one half of that room. It's a matter of pressure, not probability. I don't think the 'rogue' planets are subject to such things, and on a sufficiently long time scale, it could very well be possible for one to travel through our system.
Refresher on pressure: http://littleshop.physics.colostate.edu/activities/atmos1/Wh...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Simple probability dictates that it is only a matter of time before a sufficiently large body travels through the Solar System with sufficient velocity (including direction) to reach somewhere else in sufficient time (but not too fast that we can't perform an orbital intercept) that we can essentially build a colony on it. Not really. You could also say that "simple probability dictates that it is only a matter of ti…
Hmmm... I don't think your analogy is correct. There is a very solid reason that all the air in the room will never only be in one half of that room. It's a matter of pressure, not probability. I don't think the 'rogue' planets are subject to such things, and on a sufficiently long time scale, it could very well be possible for one to travel through our system.
The gas molecules in the air don't know anything about the room's overall pressure, and don't individually obey any "pneumatic" laws. Pressure, in essence, is just a huge amount of molecules bouncing off a surface.
The air in a room is usually very evenly distributed, because it would be extremely unlikely that all the molecules happened to be in the same half.
Here's a link that might explain it better: http://webs.morningside.edu/slaven/physics/entropy/entropy3....