RE: We can dare to dream of the stars again, if only we can achieve this small thing.
May 17, 2012 at 12:11 pm
(This post was last modified: May 17, 2012 at 1:45 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(May 17, 2012 at 11:18 am)apophenia Wrote:
I had an idea as I was tumbling out of bed this morning. Instead of populating a generation ship with live humans, populate it with either robots, engineered "slave species", cybernetic slave species, or some combination. Then simply put the necessary biological seed material in long term storage. This way, you could simply omit the pesky human psychological element, and the robots and other non-human bio-forms could work in environments that are hazardous to humans both in transit and upon arrival. Once these servant life units created the proper bio-environment, it could be populated with the stored biological materials.
You could say our species does not actually need to physically migrate to another world to survive the death of our world at all.
All that is needed is to establish the capacity to reconstitute our species at another planet.
Build a factory ship to manufacture biological humans through an industrial process, and a database of DNAs, and send the ship somewhere where the manufactured humans can survive and prosper, and it would achieve the same purpose, at much less cost, as any generation ships laboriously moving live humans about the interstellar system.
Our advancements in science necessarily require us to revisit the old concept about what it is to be human and what it is to sire offsprings that were dictated only by the contingent limitations in our understandings of the underlying processes.
I would prefer it if I can personally survive the eventual end of eath's habitability. If I can't, but my direct descendents do, or people possessing considerable genetic similarities do, that would serve.
On the other hand, if my line and the line of everyone alive today were to become extinct as our planet becomes uninhabitable, but we preserve accurate record of our DNA, and use industrial methods to recreate a new population somewhere else with reproductions of these DNA, that really is just as good.
