The difficulty of practical interstellar travel is horrendously underestimated. … Known physics will never deposit living people on Earth-like planets around other stars. (more) That was Donald Brownlee, who said something similar in
If the star is a million light years away, I have doubts even of the former. What is more difficult, traveling to a world, terraforming a world, or evolving life adapted to a world in that time? What if the former makes no sense without the latter? If possible, why hasn't life already evolved the capability to do so? Or has it and we are the result? Would any possibility of colonization already be occupied? Why would you chose to produce humans if you could produce factories, assuming factories have some capability of sex and selection? Would we have any interest in seeding distant stars with our ancestors from a million years ago? We view space, time, form, and environment as independent but what if they are closely interrelated?
If the world is more than a million light years distant we should be skeptical. What is more difficult, traveling a million years, terraforming a world in a million years, or adapting to a world in a million years? What if all are necessary? What if none? We think of space, time, environment, and adaptation as independent but what if they are not? If we could build and transfer factories, why would we build and transfer anything other than factories? Would we have any interest is transferring a progenitor from a million years ago elsewhere?
Assuming em's are possible (not a certainty) it probably would be easier to send an em factory. BUT - it's still insanely hard. We can't design any complex mechanism to last thousands, or even hundred of years without maintenance; plus, an em factory will most likely be an extraordinarily complex one.
Also, the public action limitations are significant too. It's hard to get a bond passed to pay for local school improvements. Just imagine how hard it will be to get some group to spend likely staggering sums so that tens of thousands of years later something *kinda* like people *might* exist on another planet somewhere.
Millions of years is way too long. Even at Voyager's 62 thousand km/h speed reaching the nearest star system would only take 70,000 years. Propulsion technologies that are only a few centuries away could make the trip on the order of millennia. Solid state electronics can easily last for thousands of years with the proper shielding. As can many modern nuclear reactor designs.
It is more than just a problem with biological systems. You need a power source that can also last a million years during interstellar travel, even in a dormant mode. Is there one?
Photovoltaic cells do not last that long, and degrade when bombarded with typical densities of particles in space. Chemical batteries will not last that long. Plutonium-238 is used frequently for RTG's, but has a half life of only 88 years. It might be possible to do some chain stagger of some long-half-life fissile material - a kilowatt times a million years = a gigawatt power station for one year. But will the computer chips running the sustainment system and waking up the frozen brain on time last? Will they accumulate defects too?
Making every part and system last a million years, especially in remote regions of space without solar power, is more than an ordinary technical challenge. One way around it would be to have an everything-on-the-ship factory on the ship, and have robots wake up every 50 years or so, and remake every part on the ship from scratch and replace the new part with the old, word-out one. This doesn't work for the supply of fissile material, naturally.
If the star is a million light years away, I have doubts even of the former. What is more difficult, traveling to a world, terraforming a world, or evolving life adapted to a world in that time? What if the former makes no sense without the latter? If possible, why hasn't life already evolved the capability to do so? Or has it and we are the result? Would any possibility of colonization already be occupied? Why would you chose to produce humans if you could produce factories, assuming factories have some capability of sex and selection? Would we have any interest in seeding distant stars with our ancestors from a million years ago? We view space, time, form, and environment as independent but what if they are closely interrelated?
The Brownlee statement was that we will never "deposit living people on Earth-like planets around other stars." He does not specify there that these living people had to have been born on Earth. Indeed, the (dumb) idea of generation ships also assumes that the first extrasolar colonists would be born far from Earth. What makes them genuine terrestrial colonists rather than some kind of descendant aliens is the continuity of biology and culture that the would have with us. This continuity would be even stronger if we sent people as data (DNA base-pairs) and had assembler-factories build them from the data, as matt6666 suggests.
Sure, but consider the near indefensibility of relativistic weapons. Nearly any single party from the originating start system can stop the factory by timing the impact shortly after the arrival of the factory.
It would seem that interstellar colonization of this manner would require global coordination. Otherwise in the traditional space race the USSR would simply relativistically annihilate any US colonies and vice versa before they get started. Global coordination presents a much more difficult challenge than the physical engineering aspects.
Please state the problem precisely enough for us to poke holes in it!
You want the "same person" at both ends? Sequence the DNA and map the brain. Reconstruct at destination. Even if faithful reconstruction is not available at the start, by the time the information gets there, faithful reconstruction methods can be transmitted by radio.
You only have to get one factory to the destination, and you have a lot of freedom to redesign this factory to make it hard against problems in transit.
If the star is a million light years away, I have doubts even of the former. What is more difficult, traveling to a world, terraforming a world, or evolving life adapted to a world in that time? What if the former makes no sense without the latter? If possible, why hasn't life already evolved the capability to do so? Or has it and we are the result? Would any possibility of colonization already be occupied? Why would you chose to produce humans if you could produce factories, assuming factories have some capability of sex and selection? Would we have any interest in seeding distant stars with our ancestors from a million years ago? We view space, time, form, and environment as independent but what if they are closely interrelated?
If the world is more than a million light years distant we should be skeptical. What is more difficult, traveling a million years, terraforming a world in a million years, or adapting to a world in a million years? What if all are necessary? What if none? We think of space, time, environment, and adaptation as independent but what if they are not? If we could build and transfer factories, why would we build and transfer anything other than factories? Would we have any interest is transferring a progenitor from a million years ago elsewhere?
Assuming em's are possible (not a certainty) it probably would be easier to send an em factory. BUT - it's still insanely hard. We can't design any complex mechanism to last thousands, or even hundred of years without maintenance; plus, an em factory will most likely be an extraordinarily complex one.
Also, the public action limitations are significant too. It's hard to get a bond passed to pay for local school improvements. Just imagine how hard it will be to get some group to spend likely staggering sums so that tens of thousands of years later something *kinda* like people *might* exist on another planet somewhere.
Millions of years is way too long. Even at Voyager's 62 thousand km/h speed reaching the nearest star system would only take 70,000 years. Propulsion technologies that are only a few centuries away could make the trip on the order of millennia. Solid state electronics can easily last for thousands of years with the proper shielding. As can many modern nuclear reactor designs.
It is more than just a problem with biological systems. You need a power source that can also last a million years during interstellar travel, even in a dormant mode. Is there one?
Photovoltaic cells do not last that long, and degrade when bombarded with typical densities of particles in space. Chemical batteries will not last that long. Plutonium-238 is used frequently for RTG's, but has a half life of only 88 years. It might be possible to do some chain stagger of some long-half-life fissile material - a kilowatt times a million years = a gigawatt power station for one year. But will the computer chips running the sustainment system and waking up the frozen brain on time last? Will they accumulate defects too?
Making every part and system last a million years, especially in remote regions of space without solar power, is more than an ordinary technical challenge. One way around it would be to have an everything-on-the-ship factory on the ship, and have robots wake up every 50 years or so, and remake every part on the ship from scratch and replace the new part with the old, word-out one. This doesn't work for the supply of fissile material, naturally.
That is a generic argument against being able to place anything at any distant anywhere; it does not distinguish people from rocks.
None of which, unfortunately, can survive interstellar travel.
If the star is a million light years away, I have doubts even of the former. What is more difficult, traveling to a world, terraforming a world, or evolving life adapted to a world in that time? What if the former makes no sense without the latter? If possible, why hasn't life already evolved the capability to do so? Or has it and we are the result? Would any possibility of colonization already be occupied? Why would you chose to produce humans if you could produce factories, assuming factories have some capability of sex and selection? Would we have any interest in seeding distant stars with our ancestors from a million years ago? We view space, time, form, and environment as independent but what if they are closely interrelated?
Modern factories don't last anywhere near centuries or millennia.
Your post is just an appeal to magical technology.
An AGI will still obey the laws of thermodynamics.
There's three billion factories capable of making a human from a spec file walking around on the Earth right now.
The Brownlee statement was that we will never "deposit living people on Earth-like planets around other stars." He does not specify there that these living people had to have been born on Earth. Indeed, the (dumb) idea of generation ships also assumes that the first extrasolar colonists would be born far from Earth. What makes them genuine terrestrial colonists rather than some kind of descendant aliens is the continuity of biology and culture that the would have with us. This continuity would be even stronger if we sent people as data (DNA base-pairs) and had assembler-factories build them from the data, as matt6666 suggests.
Sure, but consider the near indefensibility of relativistic weapons. Nearly any single party from the originating start system can stop the factory by timing the impact shortly after the arrival of the factory.
It would seem that interstellar colonization of this manner would require global coordination. Otherwise in the traditional space race the USSR would simply relativistically annihilate any US colonies and vice versa before they get started. Global coordination presents a much more difficult challenge than the physical engineering aspects.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...
- A deleted post about "assembling" biological humans, which I realized was made redundant by a matt6666 comment. -
Please state the problem precisely enough for us to poke holes in it!
You want the "same person" at both ends? Sequence the DNA and map the brain. Reconstruct at destination. Even if faithful reconstruction is not available at the start, by the time the information gets there, faithful reconstruction methods can be transmitted by radio.
You only have to get one factory to the destination, and you have a lot of freedom to redesign this factory to make it hard against problems in transit.