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Build the "USS Enterprise" in 20 years, for 1 trillion USD

buildtheenterprise.org

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Re: Build the "USS Enterprise" in 20 years, for 1 trillion USD

#61

Post by dullcrisp »

gouranga wrote: post #15

I'd rather spend the money replacing our fragile and short lived meat sacks first. Building massive space ships to sling us across the universe is a problem which only exists when we have meat sacks. Voyager 1 and 2 have done well with ancient technology and no meat sacks.

You realize that building new meat sacks is a much more difficult problem than slinging meat sacks into space? It's like wanting to rewrite an entire operating system from scratch instead of fixing a difficult driver bug (terrible analogy, I know).

Re: Build the "USS Enterprise" in 20 years, for 1 trillion USD

#65

Post by pygorex »

anigbrowl wrote: post #55
pygorex wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A big cause of waning public enthusiasm in space is, I believe, that it all still looks like the 60s. The ships look the same, the suits look the same, the propulsion technologies look the same, And the ideal of manned spaceflight should remain in the 60's - at least for the foreseeable future. We are magnificently evolved to inhabit this planet. The remainder of the solar system is insanely hostile to our form of…

We're not all that great at swimming either, and yet building oceangoing boats and ships has turned out to be an important part of our technological development. Likewise air travel; we're only evolutionarily optimized for walking about on land, but have used technology to travel and transport goods over large distances on water and in the air.

Those are all fair points. But they don't really address my assertion:

1. I am not arguing that our evolutionary past should dictate where we explore. Rather, I'm arguing it must inform how we explore. Space travel is so lethal for our species that we are better off engineering machines, robots or beings that are specialized to operate in space.

2. The energy expenditure, economic cost and sheer distance of space exploration is many orders of magnitude beyond the costs of land, sea or air travel. Comparing terrestrial forms of travel to space exploration is disingenuous.

3. No endpoint. When the great explorers were trailblazing across the oceans there was a reasonable expectation of finding a suitable endpoint with fresh water, edible plants & animals, other people (!) and exploitable resources. With space exploration none of these things are present. We have to carry a suitable endpoint with us during the journey and plant it where ever we happen to land.

Expanding on that last point - imagine a specialized mars robotic explorer that goes on a one-way mission, taps in a sub-surface source of water, erects a basic greenhouse structure, goes into sleep mode for a few months, wakes up, plants some seeds, sleeps a while longer, etc. - it bootstraps a suitable endpoint for human explorers to inhabit years, decades or centuries later.

Re: Build the "USS Enterprise" in 20 years, for 1 trillion USD

#66

Post by gouranga »

drostie wrote: post #56
gouranga wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. If you ever read Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near, that's what we'll end up as at some point in the near future. It starts with google goggles, proceeds to more integration and then becomes us. I wouldn't say no to assimilation when I think about it.

I remember a great comment from a talk by John Searle about the scariest way that this could happen. Imagine that you get just such an implant, and suddenly, you just feel woozy or tired, as if something is really going royally wrong, as if your consciousness is no longer really "in control." The Doctor starts the checkup and says "how do you feel?" and you internally think, "lousy! I need you to remove it, get it ou…

Society already does a good job of this without the need for technology or artificial intelligence.

I'd genuinely rather spend my day chopping wood, picking fruit or fishing, but no, I'm chained to a desk in front of Visual Studio 2010 pumping out code to prop up the insurance industry.

I still don't know why I do it. Something has taken me over and it's not artificially intelligent electronics.

Re: Build the "USS Enterprise" in 20 years, for 1 trillion USD

#67

Post by Tloewald »

gouranga wrote: post #15

I'd rather spend the money replacing our fragile and short lived meat sacks first. Building massive space ships to sling us across the universe is a problem which only exists when we have meat sacks. Voyager 1 and 2 have done well with ancient technology and no meat sacks.

Exactly right. Alternatively, if the meat sacks lasted longer, or could be stored for long periods of time, etc.

Re: Build the "USS Enterprise" in 20 years, for 1 trillion USD

#68

Post by SkyMarshal »

Isaac Asimov expressed an interesting view of the future development of space travel [1].

Basically, humans develop true AI first in the form of positronic computers/brains. Then, the AI figures out how to make Hyperspatial travel work, something humans had been unable to do.

Obviously we're nowhere near that yet, but one can dream.

1. http://literature.wikia.com/wiki/I%2C_Robot (search for 'Escape' or 'the brain')

Re: Build the "USS Enterprise" in 20 years, for 1 trillion USD

#69

Post by gouranga »

dullcrisp wrote: post #61
gouranga wrote: post #15

I'd rather spend the money replacing our fragile and short lived meat sacks first. Building massive space ships to sling us across the universe is a problem which only exists when we have meat sacks. Voyager 1 and 2 have done well with ancient technology and no meat sacks.

You realize that building new meat sacks is a much more difficult problem than slinging meat sacks into space? It's like wanting to rewrite an entire operating system from scratch instead of fixing a difficult driver bug (terrible analogy, I know).

Personally, I think that slinging meat sacks into space without breaking them or letting them rot is harder than building a new operating environment.

The meat bit isn't all that useful so we need to get rid of it. In fact it's a pain in the arse.

The thing that is superposed on top of the meat is the important bit, you know like CDs don't really matter but the data (music) does.

Imagine if you had 1000 hands that worked in -50oC to 300oC, another couple Tb of persistent state and a rewire which allowed you to do sequential calculations efficiently (rather than lots of useless parallel ones), oh and you never had to poop.

Re: Build the "USS Enterprise" in 20 years, for 1 trillion USD

#70

Post by mahyarm »

gouranga wrote: post #66
drostie wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember a great comment from a talk by John Searle about the scariest way that this could happen. Imagine that you get just such an implant, and suddenly, you just feel woozy or tired, as if something is really going royally wrong, as if your consciousness is no longer really "in control." The Doctor starts the checkup and says "how do you feel?" and you internally think, "lousy! I need you to remove it, get it ou…

Society already does a good job of this without the need for technology or artificial intelligence. I'd genuinely rather spend my day chopping wood, picking fruit or fishing, but no, I'm chained to a desk in front of Visual Studio 2010 pumping out code to prop up the insurance industry. I still don't know why I do it. Something has taken me over and it's not artificially intelligent electronics.

Change jobs, at least you don't have to prop up the insurance industry anymore.
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