311–320 of 369 posts
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Like none of The Expanse books would appear...
Not one of the culture books either, even though several have spaceships as main characters. And only a handful of Hamilton books. And I reckon a single Polity book.
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Our trajectory is to meld ourselves with machines. Fleshy humans may he stuck on earth but our machines have no such restrictions and can be engineered for all kinds of extremes. We will eventually figure out how to imprint our consciousness into a chip. Maybe not for another thousand years but weve been building machines our entire existence to conquer nature. We will figure it out.
If there's not a constant stream of consciousness throughout the entire process, I'm just assuming that's gonna be nothing more than a copy. What else could it be? When "you" wake up, it'll be 100% convincing either way, so I assume you can only prove it going in. I'm not great at philosophy though. Edit: biology is pretty efficient though. We might as well just start growing new bodies/parts for people, enhancing it…
On the other hand dementia eats away at memories and personality. My grandmother doesn’t remember having children (who are now in their late 70s), a husband (she had two), but does remember (mostly) life as a child. She wasnt unconscious though.
(It’s basically the inevitable same end game as the rom com “50 first dates”)
As you say it’s philosophical - a bit like Triggers Broom. Or 1 minute Time Machine in a way.
I like the answer to ship of Theseus (define the ship by the keel or whatever), If you were to replace every cell in your body are you still the same person? That happens multiple times over your life. What if you were to replace some cells with non human parts - a false leg, a pig heart. When do you stop being “you”
If you replace every neuron in your brain with a synthetic neuron, one at a time, a there a point you no longer exist. Is it a continuous reduction. What if those neurons are put together elsewhere, which is you. Both? Neither? A fraction of each?
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> physics says they can't exist in the way they are described If we assume advanced genetic as well as bio engineering that admits the possibility of self reproducing cybernetic organisms that closely match many or all of the key characteristics. I'm not sure it's actually a cyborg if the lineage is fully independent without involving any technology external to the species but I use the term there because that's the…
No, then it still wouldn't work. Not until you use that other thing to get you to a planet where gravity is low enough that a dragon would be able to take off. The whole power-to-weight and wing-surface-area-to-weight ratio simply does not work. It (barely) works for bats though some of them can be of impressive size. The idea that something the size of a dragon can fly with that size wings on Terra is something that…
We've already got examples of dinosaurs that come fairly close to qualifying so I'm sure something vaguely in the ballpark is within the realm of possibility. Exactly how close to the mark though I have no idea.
For example, what would you make of something visually resembling a massive western dragon but with a largely hollow body? I don't think that would disqualify it in most people's eyes. Pushing the concept a bit farther could yield something vaguely like a living cross between a hot air balloon and a deep-sea anglerfish with a weaponized tail.
Vaguely related to that hypothetical, we've got examples in the fossil record of 2 foot wide dragonflies estimated to have weighed in at under 150 grams. There's a pretty large solution space to explore here.
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Dragons are physically impossible in many more ways than the firebreathing. For one, things that large would probably struggle to fly. We can make larger things fly, but have to cheat using jet (or rocket!) engines to generate incredible thrust in ways not typically accessible to living beings.
That's ok, we just need to put them on the moon or somewhere else with lighter gravity.
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Interstellar space contains neutral hydrogen atoms. Hitting a spaceship, they would produce electromagnetic radiation. When the collision speed goes past about 0.25c, the radiation becomes hard gamma rays which are dangerous to living things, and cannot be efficiently shielded against. At this speed, the time dilation is slightly above 3%, so you're still not going to reach even Alpha Centauri in one human lifetime,…
Right, we are never leaving. We should get comfortable here, and take better care of the only habitable planet, rather than doing insane things and justifying that as "Don't worry, we'll make Mars habitable" and other silliness.
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With D-D fusion it might be possible to "live off the land" between the stars which probably have numerous interstellar objects of various sizes between them with a much larger cumulative mass than planets orbiting stars -- and it may be possible to completely disassemble those kind of bodies which are much richer overall in carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen than terrestrial planets. A species with that kind of c…
A true spaceborne civilization, assuming anti-gravity isn't in there bag of tricks, probably wouldn't bother with the gravity well planets.
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Right, we are never leaving. We should get comfortable here, and take better care of the only habitable planet, rather than doing insane things and justifying that as "Don't worry, we'll make Mars habitable" and other silliness.
Life cannot leave, no. A radiation hardened, self healing computer could.
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Right, we are never leaving. We should get comfortable here, and take better care of the only habitable planet, rather than doing insane things and justifying that as "Don't worry, we'll make Mars habitable" and other silliness.
Life cannot leave, no. A radiation hardened, self healing computer could.
But importantly that's not us leaving. Some distant future descendent of humans could have engineered itself to leave, but it's not us and we shouldn't fixate on that distant and unknowable future.
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And that takes, what, a million of those "Starships?" To be plausible you have to be able to get it a lot smaller than that. If you can fit it into someone's hand the rocketry gets to be trivial.
I was thinking less than 2000. One each for the huge machines, a few hundred for the smaller machines, a hundred to few hundred full of people. And you could cut those numbers 10x and still have a huge variety of manufacturing capabilities. I don't see why we would need a near-magic factory box just to build a colony.
https://www.amazon.com/Pencil-History-Design-Circumstance/dp...
Those big machines have lots of little parts and if you have to wait three years to get a spare part that’s a big problem. (Never mind anything that Earth sends to a Mars colony is a gift because it is inconceivable that it would be profitable to bring anything back)
Anyone who starts sketching out what a space manufacturing complex looks like (e.g. Drexler, myself [1]) comes to the same conclusion Drexler did —- there is this diverse residue of difficult to manufacture small but complex things. The good news is that we have molecular assemblers, they built you, and now that people are decoding the “junk DNA” we are getting a handle on genetic regulation networks and will be able to make them much more productive and reliable.
[1] unpublished study on manufacturing sunshades on an asteroid which is rich in something which is more-or-less “coal”, out of a lack of imagination I assumed it was going to use a pyrolysis system like https://www.netl.doe.gov/research/Coal/energy-systems/gasifi... and I can tell you that sort of thing on Earth has almost as many things that can go wrong with it as a fast reactor
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I was thinking less than 2000. One each for the huge machines, a few hundred for the smaller machines, a hundred to few hundred full of people. And you could cut those numbers 10x and still have a huge variety of manufacturing capabilities. I don't see why we would need a near-magic factory box just to build a colony.
Manufacturing is hard, even for something “simple” like a pencil: https://www.amazon.com/Pencil-History-Design-Circumstance/dp... Those big machines have lots of little parts and if you have to wait three years to get a spare part that’s a big problem. (Never mind anything that Earth sends to a Mars colony is a gift because it is inconceivable that it would be profitable to bring anything back) Anyone who starts sket…