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Old 13th July 2018, 03:25 AM   #1
Scorpion
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How to colonise space

I could not sleep last night and while laying awake I thought up the following idea for seeding the stars with the human race.

First you build an atomic powered space ship that need no fuel. Possibly powered by an ion drive. Then you create an army of artificially intelligent worker robots to run it.

The key to the idea is quite simple. You have no living humans on the ship. So you need no oxygen, food or water. The human cargo is stored as eggs and sperm in frozen tanks. You would also freeze the eggs of farmyard animals and send crop seeds.

When the ship found an inhabitable planet the robots would land and create farms bringing the frozen animal eggs to life. Lastly they would bring human baby's to life and raise them and teach them.

The mother ships computer would contain all human knowledge in its data banks. The stores would contain lots of practical things like saucepans and tools, as there would be no metal industry until the colony grew up and created it.

I think this idea is viable and can almost be done with existing technology.

Tell me why it can't.
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Old 13th July 2018, 03:49 AM   #2
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Tell me why we should.
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Old 13th July 2018, 03:55 AM   #3
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Originally Posted by Sideroxylon View Post
Tell me why we should.
What do you mean why should we? for one thing this planet is over populated and in melt down. (Literally, the ice caps are melting) In any case sooner or later this planet will be destroyed by our own sun reaching the end of its life.
This would mean the end of the human race, unless we have gone to the stars.
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Old 13th July 2018, 04:03 AM   #4
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Originally Posted by Scorpion View Post
What do you mean why should we? for one thing this planet is over populated and in melt down. (Literally, the ice caps are melting) In any case sooner or later this planet will be destroyed by our own sun reaching the end of its life.
This would mean the end of the human race, unless we have gone to the stars.
The universe itself will come to an end (we hear) in what's known as 'heat death'. Who cares about desperately spinning out humankind's existence to the maximum possible extent?

However, your plan looks great. There are a few technicalities that need sorting out (growing the embryos to viability, them growing up weird for lack of parental contact, and so on) but those are just detail. I'd guess the biggest hurdle might be that any planet that will happily support the humans and their animals is very likely to have its own life forms. They might object to the plan.
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Old 13th July 2018, 04:05 AM   #5
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Originally Posted by Scorpion View Post

First you build an atomic powered space ship that need no fuel. Possibly powered by an ion drive.
If it's "atomic powered", then it has fuel. I'm guessing you're planning to use nuclear fission rather than fusion, but either way you need fuel. So maybe uranium?

Your ion drive also requires, well, ions. While they will have a much higher exhaust velocity than traditional chemical rockets, and thus you can get away with a lower mass, you still need some, and you're still subject to the rocket equation.


Quote:
Then you create an army of artificially intelligent worker robots to run it.
Cool. Later you say you think we can almost do this with current technology. This is one of the places where we can't. While I'm optimisitic about the speed of development of both artificial intelligence and robotics, we're no where near to close to this yet. Whether exponential development will mean that we'll make enormous progress in these areas in a short time (as I think) or that progress will take a hundred years, is not something we know with certainty at the moment.



Quote:
The key to the idea is quite simple. You have no living humans on the ship. So you need no oxygen, food or water. The human cargo is stored as eggs and sperm in frozen tanks. You would also freeze the eggs of farmyard animals and send crop seeds.
It's an old idea and a good one. There are still plenty of issues. Sure, you save on life support, etc. but that doesn't solve all of your problems. You seem to be talking about an interstellar craft. The energy required to reach interstellar distances in any reasonable time are immense. If you're willing to take unreasonable times (my prefered solution) you're going to have to worry about your AI robots breaking down on the trip, and even stocking them with replacement parts can be a problem as those can break down during the trip even when they are waiting on the shelf.

Quote:
When the ship found an inhabitable planet the robots would land and create farms bringing the frozen animal eggs to life. Lastly they would bring human baby's to life and raise them and teach them.
Again, depending on the time scale we also have to worry about the degredation of DNA over the course of the trip, even if frozen if we're talking about tens of thousands of years this might be a problem. If we're talking decades or centuries you should be okay.

"Finding a habitable planet" may also be difficult. A planet with an atmosphere with a pressure somewhat like ours and with liquid water might be common enough that we could find one (I'd rather find it first with telescopes and then send the ship rather than sending the ship to investigate). But that doesn't mean that you'll be able to just start farms like on earth. I'd expect you'll still be looking at greenhouses and domes, though the domes may be optional depending on the atmosphere.

Quote:
The mother ships computer would contain all human knowledge in its data banks. The stores would contain lots of practical things like saucepans and tools, as there would be no metal industry until the colony grew up and created it.
I think you will have to carry some things, but it's better to build as much on location as possible.

My vision resembles yours in some ways but is more extreme. Even the robots themselves will more closely resemble biology than modern robotics. Rather than bringing robots that can construct farms we bring "robots" that can grow/build (some combination of the two words may be more applicable than either one) new robots from local resources that will then go on to build the infrastructure of your colony.

Quote:
I think this idea is viable and can almost be done with existing technology.

Tell me why it can't.
As I said the robotics and AI are not there yet and neither are they "just around the corner", there are fundamental problems to be solved in both areas that no one yet knows how to solve before they will be ready to do what you want them to. We will solve them, but the timeframe is uncertain.

Furthermore there's a resource/economics problem. Yes, we may have the technology to build an interstellar craft with infinite funds, but we don't have infinite funds. What sort of mass are you expecting for this spacecraft? What is your timeframe for arrival? Those questions will impact how viable it is, but even with a very low mass and a very long timeframe it's still an extremely expensive project that perhaps no government has the budget to fund, even if they had the will to do so.
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Last edited by Roboramma; 13th July 2018 at 04:59 AM. Reason: correct a couple of typos
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Old 13th July 2018, 04:14 AM   #6
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Originally Posted by GlennB View Post
The universe itself will come to an end (we hear) in what's known as 'heat death'. Who cares about desperately spinning out humankind's existence to the maximum possible extent?

However, your plan looks great. There are a few technicalities that need sorting out (growing the embryos to viability, them growing up weird for lack of parental contact, and so on) but those are just detail. I'd guess the biggest hurdle might be that any planet that will happily support the humans and their animals is very likely to have its own life forms. They might object to the plan.
Spinning out human existence on other star systems could mean billions of years more of life for the human race.

As for there already being life on other worlds its probable that there are many less evolved worlds, and we would be less likely to find other civilisations.
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Even in the valley of the shadow of death two and two do not make six.
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Old 13th July 2018, 04:25 AM   #7
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Originally Posted by Scorpion View Post
What do you mean why should we? for one thing this planet is over populated and in melt down. (Literally, the ice caps are melting) In any case sooner or later this planet will be destroyed by our own sun reaching the end of its life.
This would mean the end of the human race, unless we have gone to the stars.
Why is it important for the human race to not end?
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Old 13th July 2018, 04:27 AM   #8
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Originally Posted by Scorpion View Post
space ship that need no fuel.
You still need reaction mass.



This is also the background to Clarke's 'Songs of Distant Earth'
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Old 13th July 2018, 04:35 AM   #9
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This is quite a good idea. We should aim for a habitable planet within, say, 10 light-years, so we could get a signal back within our lifetime telling us the colony is successful. If our technology develops in the meantime, and we could get a viable near-lightspeed drive, then a 10 year journey might be possible so we could visit our children.
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Old 13th July 2018, 04:51 AM   #10
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Originally Posted by Scorpion View Post
I think this idea is viable and can almost be done with existing technology.

Tell me why it can't.
Space is big. Very big. You may think it's a long way to the corner chemist, but that's peanuts compared to space.

If you actually do the math, you will find that those roboships are travelling for hundreds of years before finding a suitable home. Eggs and sperm aren't perfectly preserved, even when frozen, for that period of time. In a living organism, DNA gets refreshed and repaired, but sitting in cryostorage there will be some damage.

Meanwhile, keeping those ship's systems going for hundreds of years is a challenge.


Oh.....and there's no such thing as an artificial womb, and there's no real path to making one. The developing animal and human fetuses, and then babies, are going to have to have at least some organic material to grow, which means somehow it has to be kept alive and ready to use. This is the one area where your plan is not only not doable with today's technology, but it may never be doable with tomorrow's technology.


On top of that, can robo-nannies raise children in such a way that they turn into real, sociable, adults? Capable of speech and able to read the stored instructions in the ship's computers?



Still, the above objections really only apply to the "today's technology" part of your idea. The core concept is sound. It's a heck of a lot easier to keep inert matter going for a long time than to keep humans and other organisms alive and breeding all that time. If you can get around the artificial womb problem, everything else is foreseeable, and makes sense, although if you do the math, you'll still see that that is one big, complex, ship that needs a lot of fuel.


It's interesting to me that I've never seen a science fiction story with that premise. Of course, modern science fiction/science fantasy just wishes the problem away with "hyperspace" or "warp drive", but at least once upon a time there were "hard science" sci-fi types imagining things that might some day be, but I never heard of this one. I guess when I was reading this stuff, some of the ideas were too far out even for those authors.


Do authors still write that sort of fiction? Am I just out of the loop? I suppose it's still out there, and I just don't look for that sort of thing anymore.
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Old 13th July 2018, 04:52 AM   #11
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Originally Posted by Sideroxylon View Post
Why is it important for the human race to not end?
This. Especially since you have stated on many occasions that you believe in spirits and reincarnation. If all human bodies die, the spirits either live on, or can reincarnate as some other intelligent creature elsewhere.

If you don't want to discuss this aspect, or think it's too far off topic for this thread, that's fine by me. I don't want to derail the thread.
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Old 13th July 2018, 04:53 AM   #12
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Originally Posted by Diablo View Post
This is quite a good idea. We should aim for a habitable planet within, say, 10 light-years, so we could get a signal back within our lifetime telling us the colony is successful. If our technology develops in the meantime, and we could get a viable near-lightspeed drive, then a 10 year journey might be possible so we could visit our children.
What do you mean by "near" in "near lightspeed"? 0.9c? Never going to happen.
0.1c is more plausible but the challenges involved are still incredibly difficult.

Just take a look at the rocket equation and you'll see some of the issues. But there are issues not just with getting up to that speed but also with being at that speed with relation to the interstellar medium. And of course the fact that you have to slow down at the end increases the fuel requirements exponentially.
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Old 13th July 2018, 04:59 AM   #13
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Originally Posted by Diablo View Post
This is quite a good idea. We should aim for a habitable planet within, say, 10 light-years, so we could get a signal back within our lifetime telling us the colony is successful. If our technology develops in the meantime, and we could get a viable near-lightspeed drive, then a 10 year journey might be possible so we could visit our children.
Our lifetime? Those who send such a ship stand no chance of hearing of its fate. The journey will take many generations.
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Old 13th July 2018, 05:04 AM   #14
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Originally Posted by Meadmaker View Post
It's interesting to me that I've never seen a science fiction story with that premise.
Ahem...

Originally Posted by 3point14 View Post
This is also the background to Clarke's 'Songs of Distant Earth'


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Old 13th July 2018, 05:33 AM   #15
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Originally Posted by Roboramma View Post
What do you mean by "near" in "near lightspeed"? 0.9c? Never going to happen.
0.1c is more plausible but the challenges involved are still incredibly difficult.

Just take a look at the rocket equation and you'll see some of the issues. But there are issues not just with getting up to that speed but also with being at that speed with relation to the interstellar medium. And of course the fact that you have to slow down at the end increases the fuel requirements exponentially.
You don't know that. Technology is developing all the time. A fusion-powered machine accelerating at 2G would work.
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Old 13th July 2018, 05:34 AM   #16
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Originally Posted by GlennB View Post
Our lifetime? Those who send such a ship stand no chance of hearing of its fate. The journey will take many generations.
See reply above.
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Old 13th July 2018, 05:36 AM   #17
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Originally Posted by Diablo View Post
You don't know that. Technology is developing all the time. A fusion-powered machine accelerating at 2G would work.
Could you expand on "Fusion powered".

What is it that the fusion is powering?
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Old 13th July 2018, 05:37 AM   #18
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Originally Posted by Diablo View Post
You don't know that. Technology is developing all the time. A fusion-powered machine accelerating at 2G would work.
How much fuel would your fusion powered machine need to get to it's payload to .9c (and what is the mass of the payload)?
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Old 13th July 2018, 05:57 AM   #19
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Originally Posted by Scorpion View Post
What do you mean why should we? for one thing this planet is over populated ...

This would mean the end of the human race, unless we have gone to the stars.
Your plan in no way addresses the overpopulation problem, except that it seeks new space to populate into. The plan evacuates no one and leaves our planet as crowded as before.

As someone mentioned, it is unlikely in the extreme that anyone involved in lobbying for, funding, developing and running this plan will ever see the end of it, so who would you expect to expend the cost and effort to realize such an endeavour? I think that is the first mortal threat to your project - lack of motivation.
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Old 13th July 2018, 06:07 AM   #20
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Getting a stable, self sufficient, genetically diverse population off planet is the best, indeed by definition only, hope our species has for very long term survivor.

On a long enough timeline all species either become spacefaring or go extinct. The only difference between us and the dinosaurs is telescopes and a space program.
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Old 13th July 2018, 06:15 AM   #21
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Originally Posted by Meadmaker View Post
Space is big. Very big. You may think it's a long way to the corner chemist, but that's peanuts compared to space.

If you actually do the math, you will find that those roboships are travelling for hundreds of years before finding a suitable home. Eggs and sperm aren't perfectly preserved, even when frozen, for that period of time. In a living organism, DNA gets refreshed and repaired, but sitting in cryostorage there will be some damage.

Meanwhile, keeping those ship's systems going for hundreds of years is a challenge.


Oh.....and there's no such thing as an artificial womb, and there's no real path to making one. The developing animal and human fetuses, and then babies, are going to have to have at least some organic material to grow, which means somehow it has to be kept alive and ready to use. This is the one area where your plan is not only not doable with today's technology, but it may never be doable with tomorrow's technology.


On top of that, can robo-nannies raise children in such a way that they turn into real, sociable, adults? Capable of speech and able to read the stored instructions in the ship's computers?



Still, the above objections really only apply to the "today's technology" part of your idea. The core concept is sound. It's a heck of a lot easier to keep inert matter going for a long time than to keep humans and other organisms alive and breeding all that time. If you can get around the artificial womb problem, everything else is foreseeable, and makes sense, although if you do the math, you'll still see that that is one big, complex, ship that needs a lot of fuel.


It's interesting to me that I've never seen a science fiction story with that premise. Of course, modern science fiction/science fantasy just wishes the problem away with "hyperspace" or "warp drive", but at least once upon a time there were "hard science" sci-fi types imagining things that might some day be, but I never heard of this one. I guess when I was reading this stuff, some of the ideas were too far out even for those authors.


Do authors still write that sort of fiction? Am I just out of the loop? I suppose it's still out there, and I just don't look for that sort of thing anymore.
Thanks, you are right, we don't have the technology to create artificial wombs, and even if we develop it the resources required would be inhibiting.
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Old 13th July 2018, 06:27 AM   #22
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And I'd say if we could build such robots as you describe we have pretty much recreated humans but using different materials, so why do we need the "biological" stage any longer?

ala Charles Stross's novels such as Saturn's Children
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Old 13th July 2018, 06:40 AM   #23
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Originally Posted by Sideroxylon View Post
Why is it important for the human race to not end?
That does not seem to me to be a very adventuress view. If Columbus had stayed at home, we would never have colonised America. Its part of Human tradition to explore and colonise. Space is the only place left we can go. Why would we sit around waiting to die off if there are new frontiers ?
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Old 13th July 2018, 06:45 AM   #24
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Originally Posted by Sideroxylon View Post
Why is it important for the human race to not end?
Because my selfish genes drive me to value my genetic inheritance. If I can't get my descendants or descendants of my relations to colonize another planet, then eventually my genes will disappear from the universe.
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Old 13th July 2018, 06:46 AM   #25
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Also, the AI needed to raise children is not even close to what we would need.
Think on how much social ques children pick up from interacting with their families and later schools and sport clubs.
How much is learned by mimicking older generations.
The first generations born in such a system would miss that, and I strongly suspect that will not be a good thing.
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Old 13th July 2018, 06:48 AM   #26
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Originally Posted by Diablo View Post
This is quite a good idea. We should aim for a habitable planet within, say, 10 light-years, so we could get a signal back within our lifetime telling us the colony is successful. If our technology develops in the meantime, and we could get a viable near-lightspeed drive, then a 10 year journey might be possible so we could visit our children.
If its only a ten year journey we could first send an entirely robot ship, complete with The eggs of animals (or cryogenically frozen adult animals) and the seeds to grow crops. Leaving out the human embryos, and just have the robots create viable farms.

Then when the robots signal us the planet is ready we could send adult humans to the new world. A ten year journey would require lots of supplies, but its not unfeasible.
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Even in the valley of the shadow of death two and two do not make six.
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Old 13th July 2018, 06:52 AM   #27
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Originally Posted by ahhell View Post
Because my selfish genes drive me to value my genetic inheritance. If I can't get my descendants or descendants of my relations to colonize another planet, then eventually my genes will disappear from the universe.
Best not to send mine as they dont seem to aspire to interstellar seeding nor going on adventure.
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Old 13th July 2018, 06:52 AM   #28
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Originally Posted by JoeMorgue View Post
On a long enough timeline all species either become spacefaring or go extinct.
ftfy. We're doomed in the end, so the only question is how long we aim to survive.
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Old 13th July 2018, 06:54 AM   #29
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Originally Posted by Lukraak_Sisser View Post
Also, the AI needed to raise children is not even close to what we would need.
Think on how much social ques children pick up from interacting with their families and later schools and sport clubs.
How much is learned by mimicking older generations.
The first generations born in such a system would miss that, and I strongly suspect that will not be a good thing.
We would definitely need advanced forms of AI robots to interact successfully with babies and rear them. A lot could rely on the mothership computer which could contain all human knowledge and expert systems such as medical.
The battery powered robots could have specialised plug in memory packs so they would not need such memory capacity. Their batteries could be recharged by the ships nuclear reactor.
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Even in the valley of the shadow of death two and two do not make six.
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Old 13th July 2018, 06:56 AM   #30
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Originally Posted by Lukraak_Sisser View Post
Also, the AI needed to raise children is not even close to what we would need.
Think on how much social ques children pick up from interacting with their families and later schools and sport clubs.
How much is learned by mimicking older generations.
The first generations born in such a system would miss that, and I strongly suspect that will not be a good thing.
Right, most by far of who we are is our social inherentance. A few terrabytes of TV and film would be a better start than any current tech AI.
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Old 13th July 2018, 07:00 AM   #31
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Originally Posted by Darat View Post
And I'd say if we could build such robots as you describe we have pretty much recreated humans but using different materials, so why do we need the "biological" stage any longer?

ala Charles Stross's novels such as Saturn's Children
For myself I don't foresee robots replacing humans. I think they would still be machines, and lack our human characteristics.
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Even in the valley of the shadow of death two and two do not make six.
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Old 13th July 2018, 07:05 AM   #32
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Originally Posted by Sideroxylon View Post
Right, most by far of who we are is our social inherentance. A few terrabytes of TV and film would be a better start than any current tech AI.
The mothership computer could have huge memory banks containing countless books, and a picture and film and music library. But I for one, would leave out the Bible and the Quran.
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Even in the valley of the shadow of death two and two do not make six.
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Old 13th July 2018, 07:08 AM   #33
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Originally Posted by Scorpion View Post
We would definitely need advanced forms of AI robots to interact successfully with babies and rear them. A lot could rely on the mothership computer which could contain all human knowledge and expert systems such as medical.
The battery powered robots could have specialised plug in memory packs so they would not need such memory capacity. Their batteries could be recharged by the ships nuclear reactor.
If it were actually possible to build machines that could properly produce, raise and care for humans without any help from humans on distant planets, then it is quite obvious that humans are not needed on these distant planets.

Therefore, it would be better if the machines were the colonists on these distant planets as opposed to somehow using machines to establish human colonies on these distant planets.
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Old 13th July 2018, 07:08 AM   #34
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Originally Posted by Scorpion View Post
The mothership computer could have huge memory banks containing countless books, and a picture and film and music library. But I for one, would leave out the Bible and the Quran.
So what faith fetish of yours would you leave in?
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Old 13th July 2018, 07:10 AM   #35
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Well that took less than a page.

If you don't think mankind should colonize space why do you care what books they take with them?
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Old 13th July 2018, 07:17 AM   #36
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Originally Posted by Sideroxylon View Post
So what faith fetish of yours would you leave in?
I would send philosophy books that discussed religions without promoting one.

If I did sent the Bible and Quran I would file them under mythology.
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Even in the valley of the shadow of death two and two do not make six.
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Old 13th July 2018, 07:17 AM   #37
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Originally Posted by JoeMorgue View Post
Well that took less than a page.

If you don't think mankind should colonize space why do you care what books they take with them?
My questioning the OP’s fancies is no indication of care on my part.
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Old 13th July 2018, 07:24 AM   #38
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Originally Posted by Sideroxylon View Post
My questioning the OP’s fancies is no indication of care on my part.
Sure it is. It sets a floor on how little you care - clearly you care enough to post your questions.
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Old 13th July 2018, 07:28 AM   #39
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Originally Posted by theprestige View Post
Sure it is. It sets a floor on how little you care - clearly you care enough to post your questions.
Of care what holy books that the OP might care for.
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Old 13th July 2018, 07:29 AM   #40
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Originally Posted by Scorpion View Post
If Columbus had stayed at home, we would never have colonised America. Its part of Human tradition to explore and colonise.
Colonizing America produced advantages for all concerned, people in Europe could leave if they so wished and expand into the new territory, people left behind (and in particular those directly or indirectly funding or contributing to it) benefited from incoming goods and materials from the new lands. Self interest is a much more powerful motivator than the future of humanity... Sadly.
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