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The seeds of humanity won't be humanity at all, but the AI.
It's all fun and games until you think about the practicalities of building a self-repairing machine that can keep running for hundreds/thousands/millions of years with no significant software or hardware errors.
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It is a bit of hubris for us to think that we are the ones to travel the stars and not the AI we create. The "robots" will have little incentive to seed humans when they get there.
Fortunately my blender doesn't need an incentive to grind fruit, only a hundred and twenty volts.
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Programming machines to make the trip and then seeding with human life seems to be the best answer to distance.
I have enjoyed reading "The Songs of Distant Earth" by Arthur C. Clarke which talks about seed ships and the culture rise from that. It's an interesting read.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The seeds of humanity won't be humanity at all, but the AI.
It's all fun and games until you think about the practicalities of building a self-repairing machine that can keep running for hundreds/thousands/millions of years with no significant software or hardware errors.
The Destiny spaceship travels from one Solar system to the other, and occasionally dives into stars to refuel itself.
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Yip, although there's also length contraction in play. The universe just starts contorting itself to ensure nothing ever exceeds the speed of light. What the GP post is referring to is called a 'relativistic rocket'. You can find plenty of calculators for them, like here [1]. It leads to really mind-bending scenarios. For instance a single human could easily travel a billion light years within their lifetime, requiri…
Yea, the calculators really help show how wild it is. I could outlive Earth's sun by simply accelerating away at 1.25G for ~35 years (ship time), not to mention how stacked I'd be from the workout of merely existing at 1.25G for half my life. The very concept of simultaneity is completely whack at such distances, times, and speeds.
Joking mainly. With this much time dilation it would be fascinating to just send out tons of probes in different directions at high speed and constant acceleration - this would massively extend their service life - and potentially also massively extend our knowledge of the universe as well. Of course relatively to the people on Earth it would take a long ass time.
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You know you're awake because reality has continuity and makes sense. Conversely, dreams are fragmented and implausible. You can train yourself to check this to lucid dream (become aware that you are dreaming).
Yes you can sometimes do that (I've lucid dreamed quite a few times before and it's pretty wild), but it's nowhere near 100% reliable. you can get pretty good with practice, but even then it's not a scientific test. It's more of a process of reasoning and gut checking. The human mind can fill in an incredible amount of detail when needed. In one lucid dream I was playing a song on the guitar that I had (as far as I k…
So if you train yourself to check your watch for consistency (in your normal everyday life), your unconscious will continue the practice in your dreams, and you'll notice the inconsistency.
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Is this really how time dilation works?
Speed through space + Time adds up to the speed of light or something like that (not a physicist). So as you get closer and closer to the speed of light, your motion through time (from your point of view) slows tremendously. So a few years to you, could be centuries to outside observers. Source: some Kip Thorne lectures I saw like 15 years ago.
I mean (so Energy is massaccel^2) so does that make space and time equal to energy.
i need a coffee for this one*
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That would be so interesting - could be many a sci-fi stories created on that premise. Some mechanical robot/starship storing frozen embryos for 100 years to be released on a far-away exoplanet, the starship taking care of them while they grow up and learn how to live on this new world - the beginnings of a new civilization - a technological adam and eve of sorts.
I feel like the reverse situation kinda writes itself as a sci-fi horror short story: You've got people living their every day lives, when a probe from space lands and starts producing aliens. At first it's treated as a strange curiosity, but with time the aliens begin to make inroads conquering the planet. Ending twist: the aliens are humans, and the "people" were aliens!
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The seeds of humanity won't be humanity at all, but the AI.
Kind of a fun hybrid where AI is clearly dominant in an established solar system, but it ends up being impossible to miniaturize the enormous supply chain necessary to fabricate microprocessors, so to colonize a new solar system it actually ends up being necessary to send self-replicating carbon-based humans who will then bootstrap the industrial supply chain necessary for AGI. (repeat ad infinitum for the rest of th…