RE: What do you think about aliens?
May 4, 2019 at 11:36 am
(This post was last modified: May 4, 2019 at 11:39 am by Anomalocaris.)
I think it will take us much longer to reach the technological sophistication and economic scale to be able to emigrate and colonize via actual interstellar travel of the colonists than it will take us to reach the level where we master the human biology to the point where we can modify or create human beings arbitrarily.
So I suspect the stage in our development where large number of humans mostly like we who are on the planet earth now emigrate on interstellar journeys much as Europeans and Africans emigrated to American in 15-20th century will never occur.
We will modify our biology and means of reproduction so that those of us on earth will not find emigration the only way out.
To the extent we feel the urge to explore or acquire resource robotic probe, perhaps manufactured with conscious machine intelligence, will take the place of live human explorers.
To the extent we feel the need to spread our wild oats to other star systems to avoid being taken out by any cataclysm afflicting our solar system, our ability to manufacture humans will make it a waste to actually move live humans via emigration. It would be far easier and cheaper to send robotic probes to potential habitable planets that will than manufacture new humans in situ to populate the planets after arrival.
Only forcible escape could motivate some small number to attempt to actually emigrate. Most of our expansion will be done by robotics that would be preprogrammed to manufacture new and customer designed biological or cybernetic human descendants when robots arrive at the new and suitably prepared colonization sites.
So I suspect the stage in our development where large number of humans mostly like we who are on the planet earth now emigrate on interstellar journeys much as Europeans and Africans emigrated to American in 15-20th century will never occur.
We will modify our biology and means of reproduction so that those of us on earth will not find emigration the only way out.
To the extent we feel the urge to explore or acquire resource robotic probe, perhaps manufactured with conscious machine intelligence, will take the place of live human explorers.
To the extent we feel the need to spread our wild oats to other star systems to avoid being taken out by any cataclysm afflicting our solar system, our ability to manufacture humans will make it a waste to actually move live humans via emigration. It would be far easier and cheaper to send robotic probes to potential habitable planets that will than manufacture new humans in situ to populate the planets after arrival.
Only forcible escape could motivate some small number to attempt to actually emigrate. Most of our expansion will be done by robotics that would be preprogrammed to manufacture new and customer designed biological or cybernetic human descendants when robots arrive at the new and suitably prepared colonization sites.
