Starship and a Human city on Mars

[Comrade 86]

7 minutes ago, Stive Pesley said:

Christ - I skipped through that, he's a terrible public speaker, and clearly deranged 😂

 

I was just waiting for him to full on k-hole and fall off the stage 😵 

Think back to the early days of him launching the Tesla range and how lucid and charismatic he was. He's like some rambling old pisshead these days. It's nice that he'd like to meet an alien though, though not the illegal type, obviously! 

[Ram-Alf]

Wow that's some distance away, 1 light year is 6 trillion miles.

The explosion was detected by telescopes in October 2022. It came from a distant galaxy 2.4 billion light-years away, 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68787534

[Carl Sagan]

Been in America for a few days, including a bit of work at the Carl Sagan Institute - even got to sit at the desk in his Cornell University office. They're searching for Earth-like worlds beyond the solar system, which we might one day travel to. The hardest step is this first one, becoming a multiplanetary species, building a self-sustaining civilization on Mars. Once we've done that it will have led to so many new technologies, especially around automation, life support and terraforming, that the next steps become far easier.

[TigerTedd]

1 hour ago, Carl Sagan said:

Been in America for a few days, including a bit of work at the Carl Sagan Institute - even got to sit at the desk in his Cornell University office. They're searching for Earth-like worlds beyond the solar system, which we might one day travel to. The hardest step is this first one, becoming a multiplanetary species, building a self-sustaining civilization on Mars. Once we've done that it will have led to so many new technologies, especially around automation, life support and terraforming, that the next steps become far easier.

I know FTL travel is pure sci fi, but I guess with enough progress in automation tech, would it be possible to shoot off an unmanned ship full of frozen embryos and hundreds of years later have that ship populate a new colony light years away.

i wonder what the ethics would be in that. 

[Carl Sagan]

22 minutes ago, TigerTedd said:

I know FTL travel is pure sci fi, but I guess with enough progress in automation tech, would it be possible to shoot off an unmanned ship full of frozen embryos and hundreds of years later have that ship populate a new colony light years away.

i wonder what the ethics would be in that. 

Fascinating stuff, isn't it? I'd say FTL (faster than light for those who don't know it) is probably scifi, but there's a chance. Failing that, there's time dilation from relativity, so you can make the journey by travelling *very* fast, even if thousands of years would pass on Earth. I guess your question about the ethics of sending embryos is related to the ethics of generational ships, but my thought is none of us choose the circumstances of our births. 

Coming back from America I rewatched Interstellar on the plane, which of course ends with Anne Hathaway's Dr Brant beginning the process of developing the embryos at the end. Which is a lovely twist, with Humans branching to form different civilizations across space.

I'm also publishing a book on brain preservation at the moment and, while not discussed in the book, the author and I have talked separately about the applicability of it for long-duration spaceflight. It could well be an "ethical" method to seed the stars in the future. 

[TigerTedd]

19 minutes ago, Carl Sagan said:

Fascinating stuff, isn't it? I'd say FTL (faster than light for those who don't know it) is probably scifi, but there's a chance. Failing that, there's time dilation from relativity, so you can make the journey by travelling *very* fast, even if thousands of years would pass on Earth. I guess your question about the ethics of sending embryos is related to the ethics of generational ships, but my thought is none of us choose the circumstances of our births. 

Coming back from America I rewatched Interstellar on the plane, which of course ends with Anne Hathaway's Dr Brant beginning the process of developing the embryos at the end. Which is a lovely twist, with Humans branching to form different civilizations across space.

I'm also publishing a book on brain preservation at the moment and, while not discussed in the book, the author and I have talked separately about the applicability of it for long-duration spaceflight. It could well be an "ethical" method to seed the stars in the future. 

I’m just thinking if you don’t have a friendly Anne Hathaway because there is no option other than to send the space ship on a red dwarf style journey spanning thousands of years (unless you had like one generational family of in bred caretakers on the ship), then you’d need to work out a way of automatically raising embryos into a civilisation of children, without it descending into lord of the flies. That’s going to be a pretty shitty childhood at best. And with absolutely no way for us sending the ship to know how it would turn out. Seems like it would be theoretically possible, but it all seems a bit unethical. Stupid ethics getting in the way of a good bit of science. If nothing else I’ve come up with the plot of a decent sci fi book. If anyone needs me, I’ll be in my study. 

[Carl Sagan]

2 hours ago, TigerTedd said:

I’m just thinking if you don’t have a friendly Anne Hathaway because there is no option other than to send the space ship on a red dwarf style journey spanning thousands of years (unless you had like one generational family of in bred caretakers on the ship), then you’d need to work out a way of automatically raising embryos into a civilisation of children, without it descending into lord of the flies. That’s going to be a pretty shitty childhood at best. And with absolutely no way for us sending the ship to know how it would turn out. Seems like it would be theoretically possible, but it all seems a bit unethical. Stupid ethics getting in the way of a good bit of science. If nothing else I’ve come up with the plot of a decent sci fi book. If anyone needs me, I’ll be in my study. 

I think this underestimates AI and how it will advance. Soon it will be able to bring up children here, so in decades/centuries it would be far more capable of doing this for a new space colony. If Human and machine minds work together, we'll be able to start spreading across the Galaxy (and beyond according to some work).

[And, on one weird evening, a very friendly Anne Hathaway pulled me out of the audience in her one-woman New York Theatre play (she was playing a remote drone pilot in the USAF) and we had simulated sex before she went on to be pregnant and then had our baby! Very happy to oblige 😂😂 Maybe there'll always be a friendly Anne Hathaway to bring up children?]