How might a drone deliver a viable human colony?

(September 13, 2017 at 8:53 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: How might a drone deliver a viable human colony?

Just because hitherto humans have required natural reproduction, normal growth and socialized education and experience to come into being as a cog in The technological society does not mean this will necessarily remain the case very far into the future.

I personally think the technology required to fabricate a flesh and blood human being with pre-encoded biological firmware for the required skills from raw material and genetic Blue print will be perfected long before the technology to allow a sizeable object to attain substantial fractions of the speed of light.

So One possibility for a drone to deliver a Human colony would is for the drone to carry onboard the machinery needed to fabricate human beings, and database of the genes of a sizeable population.  The drone will arrive, mine and process the raw material needed and then fabricate the humans beings required to populate a colony.

If the drone arrives at a system without suitable planets it would be no big loss as there are no living humans aboard.  The drone could simply not proceed to fabricating the colonists, and there would be no casualties resulting from the unfortunate lack of appropriate condition for colonial development.

(September 13, 2017 at 10:56 pm)Anomalocaris Wrote:

(September 13, 2017 at 8:53 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: How might a drone deliver a viable human colony?

Just because hitherto humans have required natural reproduction, normal growth and socialized education and experience to come into being as a cog in The technological society does not mean this will necessarily remain the case very far into the future.

I personally think the technology required to fabricate a flesh and blood human being with pre-encoded biological firmware for the required skills from raw material and genetic Blue print will be perfected long before the technology to allow a sizeable object to attain substantial fractions of the speed of light.

So One possibility for a drone to deliver a Human colony would is for the drone to carry onboard the machinery needed to fabricate human beings, and database of the genes of a sizeable population.  The drone will arrive, mine and process the raw material needed and then fabricate the humans beings required to populate a colony.

If the drone arrives at a system without suitable planets it would be no big loss as there are no living humans aboard.  The drone could simply not proceed to fabricating the colonists, and there would be no casualties resulting from the unfortunate lack of appropriate condition for colonial development.

The refining alone would be pretty astounding.

(September 13, 2017 at 10:56 pm)Anomalocaris Wrote:

(September 13, 2017 at 8:53 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: How might a drone deliver a viable human colony?

Just because hitherto humans have required natural reproduction, normal growth and socialized education and experience to come into being as a cog in The technological society does not mean this will necessarily remain the case very far into the future.

I personally think the technology required to fabricate a flesh and blood human being with pre-encoded biological firmware for the required skills from raw material and genetic Blue print will be perfected long before the technology to allow a sizeable object to attain substantial fractions of the speed of light.

So One possibility for a drone to deliver a Human colony would is for the drone to carry onboard the machinery needed to fabricate human beings, and database of the genes of a sizeable population.  The drone will arrive, mine and process the raw material needed and then fabricate the humans beings required to populate a colony.

If the drone arrives at a system without suitable planets it would be no big loss as there are no living humans aboard.  The drone could simply not proceed to fabricating the colonists, and there would be no casualties resulting from the unfortunate lack of appropriate condition for colonial development.

And you wind up with feral humans.

(September 13, 2017 at 3:43 pm)vorlon13 Wrote: Orion Nuclear Impulse just doesn't scale down to 'small'.  The efficiency of the concept actually increases with size. Hence a 50,000 person colonization craft massing millions of tons.

But I've seen different sizes (of course I'm talking about smaller unmanned spacecraft that would take photos of outer solar system and perhaps other star)



Also according to George Dyson NASA has contingency to put nuclear pulse technology if some horrible asteroid was to hit Earth and then to divert it away.

For fun, read Footfall. They use the Orion system to blast an Iowa-class battleship into space.

(September 14, 2017 at 8:05 am)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: For fun, read Footfall. They use the Orion system to blast an Iowa-class battleship into space.

Sure, I'm glad someone is. Because if NASA is keeping this on hold in case of deadly asteroid coming, then it would be nice of they worked on it and developed it, because by the time we discover a comet headed our way, mere months would remain to fund, design, build, and launch an interceptor that would save Earth and all its ground-dwelling inhabitants.

(September 13, 2017 at 10:56 pm)Anomalocaris Wrote:

(September 13, 2017 at 8:53 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: How might a drone deliver a viable human colony?

Just because hitherto humans have required natural reproduction, normal growth and socialized education and experience to come into being as a cog in The technological society does not mean this will necessarily remain the case very far into the future.

I personally think the technology required to fabricate a flesh and blood human being with pre-encoded biological firmware for the required skills from raw material and genetic Blue print will be perfected long before the technology to allow a sizeable object to attain substantial fractions of the speed of light.

So One possibility for a drone to deliver a Human colony would is for the drone to carry onboard the machinery needed to fabricate human beings, and database of the genes of a sizeable population.  The drone will arrive, mine and process the raw material needed and then fabricate the humans beings required to populate a colony.

If the drone arrives at a system without suitable planets it would be no big loss as there are no living humans aboard.  The drone could simply not proceed to fabricating the colonists, and there would be no casualties resulting from the unfortunate lack of appropriate condition for colonial development.

That's an interesting concept. Given the rate of advancement in cybernetics and biology vs. the energy equation, yes, I could see that. I think we are more likely to spawn new life in the form of artificial intelligence across interstellar distances but I agree that your scenario is a more likely one than transporting fully-developed humans in gigantic colony ships traveling at a high fraction of the speed of light. In fact, I think you just effectively killed the idea of the colony ship.

Furthermore, I personally think the ability to definitively establish whether or not a suitable planet exists orbiting a particular target star will exist before we develop the technology to act on such knowledge. I doubt we'll be sending anything out blind.

(September 15, 2017 at 3:08 am)AFTT47 Wrote:

(September 13, 2017 at 10:56 pm)Anomalocaris Wrote: Just because hitherto humans have required natural reproduction, normal growth and socialized education and experience to come into being as a cog in The technological society does not mean this will necessarily remain the case very far into the future.

I personally think the technology required to fabricate a flesh and blood human being with pre-encoded biological firmware for the required skills from raw material and genetic Blue print will be perfected long before the technology to allow a sizeable object to attain substantial fractions of the speed of light.

So One possibility for a drone to deliver a Human colony would is for the drone to carry onboard the machinery needed to fabricate human beings, and database of the genes of a sizeable population.  The drone will arrive, mine and process the raw material needed and then fabricate the humans beings required to populate a colony.

If the drone arrives at a system without suitable planets it would be no big loss as there are no living humans aboard.  The drone could simply not proceed to fabricating the colonists, and there would be no casualties resulting from the unfortunate lack of appropriate condition for colonial development.

That's an interesting concept. Given the rate of advancement in cybernetics and biology vs. the energy equation, yes, I could see that. I think we are more likely to spawn new life in the form of artificial intelligence across interstellar distances but I agree that your scenario is a more likely one than transporting fully-developed humans in gigantic colony ships traveling at a high fraction of the speed of light. In fact, I think you just effectively killed the idea of the colony ship.

Furthermore, I personally think the ability to definitively establish whether or not a suitable planet exists orbiting a particular target star will exist before we develop the technology to act on such knowledge. I doubt we'll be sending anything out blind.

The important thing is a drone with a database of human population gene pool, equipment to extract raw material and manufacture humans and support equipment may be quite compact and relatively cheap and therefore can be made ubiquitous, unlike a true colony ship with thousands of laboriously naturally grown humans. So an ambitious colonization Drive may involve sending thousands of these small, relatively low mass, but high information content ships out in massive waves. Since no life would be lost if the target environment is unsuitable, the threshold for ascertaining the suitability of a system for colonization may be quite low.

I think this approach would allow humans to colonize enormous numbers of systems comparatively quickly even when starting out with a relatively modest industrial base and resource access.

(September 15, 2017 at 2:19 am)Fake Messiah Wrote:

(September 14, 2017 at 8:05 am)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: For fun, read Footfall. They use the Orion system to blast an Iowa-class battleship into space.

Sure, I'm glad someone is. Because if NASA is keeping this on hold in case of deadly asteroid coming, then it would be nice of they worked on it and developed it, because by the time we discover a comet headed our way, mere months would remain to fund, design, build, and launch an interceptor that would save Earth and all its ground-dwelling inhabitants.

You know that book is a work of fiction, right? 

Right?