Comment by jackcosgrove
19 days ago
It's far more practical to adapt life to space and other planets, than it is to adapt space and other planets to human life. The problem with writing a story about artificial life exploring the universe is that it's unrelatable without humans in it.
I think humans are stuck on earth permanently because there are no other environments in the solar system we can live in as easily as earth. Traditional sci-fi explained this away using overpopulation pressures, but overpopulation is fading as a reality and plausible narrative device. And forget about interstellar travel, it's too dangerous and takes too long.
If intelligent DNA-based life is still around on earth when it starts getting too hot because of the sun's expansion and it all needs to flee, it will have continued to evolve such that it will be unrecognizable and unrelatable to us. And by then I expect artificial life to have spread to such an extent that biological life on earth is basically a historical footnote.
I actually think life in the broadest sense will spread from earth to other places in the galaxy, but it will be completely alien compared to human life.
I always appreciated the Mobile Suit Gundam approach (U.C. timeline, to be specific): humans in space largely live in O'Neill Cylinder-style space colonies arranged in constellations at Earth-Moon Lagrange points, allowing them to a) be built from materials gathered from space and b) once built, manufacture things from those materials without having to land them on Earth first. There are large settlements on the Moon, and while they are important manufacturing and research centers, they're not the primary population centers in space. Mars is, to the best of my knowledge, uninhabited. As far as the outer solar system goes, only Jupiter has a permanent human presence as the primary source of humanity's helium-3 (Gundam predates the proposal of mining the Moon for helium-3 instead).
I like this approach. It's plausible based on the assumptions made by the story, lets people in space have the benefits of mostly-normal gravity and radiation exposure (as compared to, say Mars), and keeping things local to the Earth means you don't need to be too concerned with the distances involved. Where they really lose the plot, though, is with population; Gundam claims that, in less than 100 years, billions of people--in fact, the large majority of humanity--have moved to space. I can't even begin to fathom what kind of effort would be needed to build that many space colonies, and then shuttle the people up there to populate them.
> practical to adapt life to space
This is not practical in terms of microgravity environments. You just have to read the space shuttle manual to learn how to correct a broken toilet before you understand how poorly equipped we are to handle this challenge. If you can't fix it you're back to the Apollo style bags. The toilet has a 21 day lifetime anyways. Reading the manual further shows why. Turns out lots of holes between the inside and outside are so terrible you'd rather hold onto your waste than build a convenience. Even so turds at suborbital velocities are a terrifying thought on every level.
Any loose item in the ship is an _immediate_ choking hazard. There's no gravity. Surface tension does strange things. Even to your throat. You have to trust that every person on board is going to reliably capture and contain all debris at all times. God help you if you have to fire the engines for a short period because suddenly there's "gravity" again. You can rotate a space station but you can't go anywhere really.
Medically you can't do any imaging other than weak ultrasound. No X-Rays even. Surgery is effectively impossible without gravity anyways. Not that you'll ever get that close to the effort. It's absurd how brightly we paint this dim picture in our culture and our military style propaganda.
Until we have artificial gravity I personally think we have no business in space as a civilian effort and we're not going to get particularly far from Earth because of it.
I was using life expansively to refer to artificial, robotic life.
Our trajectory is to meld ourselves with machines. Fleshy humans may he stuck on earth but our machines have no such restrictions and can be engineered for all kinds of extremes.
We will eventually figure out how to imprint our consciousness into a chip. Maybe not for another thousand years but weve been building machines our entire existence to conquer nature. We will figure it out.
If there's not a constant stream of consciousness throughout the entire process, I'm just assuming that's gonna be nothing more than a copy. What else could it be? When "you" wake up, it'll be 100% convincing either way, so I assume you can only prove it going in. I'm not great at philosophy though.
Edit: biology is pretty efficient though. We might as well just start growing new bodies/parts for people, enhancing it over time. There are already functionally immortal species on Earth.
What is a continuous stream. I was knocked unconscious for a few minutes in 2007 when I came off a bike. Am I the same person today as I was in 2005?
On the other hand dementia eats away at memories and personality. My grandmother doesn’t remember having children (who are now in their late 70s), a husband (she had two), but does remember (mostly) life as a child. She wasnt unconscious though.
(It’s basically the inevitable same end game as the rom com “50 first dates”)
As you say it’s philosophical - a bit like Triggers Broom. Or 1 minute Time Machine in a way.
I like the answer to ship of Theseus (define the ship by the keel or whatever), If you were to replace every cell in your body are you still the same person? That happens multiple times over your life. What if you were to replace some cells with non human parts - a false leg, a pig heart. When do you stop being “you”
If you replace every neuron in your brain with a synthetic neuron, one at a time, a there a point you no longer exist. Is it a continuous reduction. What if those neurons are put together elsewhere, which is you. Both? Neither? A fraction of each?
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It won't be a chip, as higher densities are required.
Then the heat must be removed.
Then, stacking has to happen.
Do we reach a synthetic neuron?
I don't think we'll ever populate a planet beyond the solar system, but I think at some point we'll leave Earth. The sun has an expiration date, after all. Maybe the space-flotilla species was the most accurate outcome after all, Mass Effect!
Warhammer 40,000 did it earlier with the Aeldari Craftworlds, and Battlestar Galactica did it before that.
I’m sure someone did it back in the 1800s too