XPost: alt.astronomy, alt.fan.heinlein

On 6/2/24 04:11, kymhorsell@gmail.com wrote:

It was the first confirmed interstellar visitor.
But was it a rock or was it something else.
Several groups want to find out and are trying to cook up reasonable
ways to get out to the fast-receding 'Oumuamua. But it's close to impossible. It's estimated a very fast probe might catch up with it 150 AU out in several decades.

Man O' Man. It is gone. As in Goners.
Spend money on looking and planning for next one.

I'm reminded of the "Starglider" in James C. Clarke's
book "Fountains of Paradise". It was also an
"interstellar visitor" that was a artificial intelligence
scout, ambassador, announcer and greeter.

Some greedy scientist types realized how advanced it was
and wanted to chase after it to capture it, but wiser heads
prevailed.

from
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2023/12/06/talking-to-starglider/

alking to Starglider
by Paul Gilster | Dec 6, 2023 | Astrobiology and SETI | 30 comments

When we’ve discussed interstellar ‘interlopers’ like ‘Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov, the science fiction-minded among us have now and then noted
Arthur Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama (Gollancz, 1973). Although we’ve
yet to figure out definitively what ‘Oumuamua is (2/I Borisov is
definitely a comet), the Clarke reference is an imaginative nod to the possibility that one day an alien craft might enter our Solar System
during a gravitational assist maneuver and be flung outward on whatever
its mission was (in Rama’s case, out in the direction of the Large
Magellanic Cloud).

Since we’ll never see ‘Oumuamua again, we wait with great anticipation
the work of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which will be
run via the Vera Rubin Telescope (first light in 2025). Estimates vary
widely but the consensus seems to be that with a telescope capable of
imaging the entire visible sky in the southern hemisphere every few
nights, the LSST should produce more than a few interstellar objects,
perhaps ten or more, every year. We probably won’t find a Rama, but who knows?

Meanwhile, I’m reminded of another Clarke novel that rarely gets the attention in this regard that Rendezvous with Rama does. This is 1979’s
The Fountains of Paradise (BCA/Gollancz). Although known primarily for
its exploration of space elevators (and its reality-distorting
geography), the novel includes as a separate theme another entry into
the Solar System, this time by a craft that, unlike Rama, is willing to
take notice of us. Starglider is its name, and it represents a
civilization that is cataloging planetary systems through probes
scattered across a host of nearby stars.

Starglider has a 500 kilometer antenna to communicate with its home star (humans name this Starholme), and in the words of a report on its
activities within the novel, it more or less ‘charges its batteries’
each time it makes a close stellar pass. Having explored the Alpha
Centauri trio, its next destination after the Sun is Tau Ceti. The game
plan is that each stellar encounter will gather data and open
communications with any civilization found there as a precursor to
long-term radio contact and, presumably, entry into some kind of
interstellar information network.

This is rather fascinating. For Starglider is smart enough to have
studied human languages and is able to converse, after a fashion. From
the novel:

It was obvious from its first messages that Starglider understood the
meaning of several thousand basic English and Chinese words, which it
had deduced from an analysis of television, radio, and especially
broadcast video-text services. But what it had picked up during its
approach was a very unrepresentative sample from the whole spectrum of
human culture; it contained little advanced science, still less advanced mathematics, and only a random selection of literature, music, and the
visual arts.

Like any self-taught genius,therefore, Starglider had huge gaps in its education. On the principle that it was better to give too much than too little, as soon as contact was established, Starglider was presented
with the Oxford English Dictionary, the Great Chinese Dictionary
(Mandarin edition), and the Encyclopedia Terrae. Their digital
transmission required little more than fifty minutes, and it was notable
that immediately thereafter Starglider was silent for almost four hours
— its longest period off the air. When it resumed contact, its
vocabulary was immensely enlarged, and more than ninety-nine percent of
the time it could pass the Turing test with ease — that is, there was no
way of telling from the messages received that Starglider was a machine,
and not a highly intelligent human.

Clarke slyly notes the cultural differences between species as opposed
to the commonality of, say, mathematics, saying that Starglider had
little comprehension of lines like this from Keats:

Charm’d casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn…

And it drew a blank on Shakespeare as well:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate…

Well, these are aliens, after all. We have enough trouble with
cross-cultural references here on Earth. Humans broadcast thousands of
hours of music and video drama to Starglider to help it out, but here,
of course, we run into the messaging problem. Just how much do we want
to reveal of ourselves to a culture about which we have all too little information other than that it is markedly more advanced than our own?
You’ll find that aspect of the METI debate explored as a core part of
the Starglider subplot.

Some have panned Starglider’s appearance in the novel because it seems intrusive to the plot (although I suppose I could argue that autonomous
probes cataloging stellar systems almost have to be intrusive to get
their job done). But in the midst of the Starglider passages, we learn
that the chatty aliens, now freely talking to humans via radio, catalog
the civilizations they find on a scale based on their technological accomplishments. Is this Clarke channeling Nikolai Kardashev?

Whatever the case, Clarke as always takes the long view, and the long
view by its very nature always pushes out into mystery. Consider the
scale used by Starglider:

I. Stone Tools

II. Metals, fire

III. Writing, handicrafts, ships

IV. Steam power, basic science

V. Atomic energy, space travel

VI. “…the ability to convert matter completely into energy, and to transmute all elements on an industrial scale.”

On this scale of one through six we can place our species at level 5, as Starglider sees us. But are there further levels? Clarke is wise to
imply their existence without exploring it any further, as this lets the reader’s imagination do the job. He’s expert at this:

“And is there a Category Seven?” Starglider was immediately asked. The reply was a brief “Affirmative.” When pressed for details, the probe explained: “I am not allowed to describe the technology of a
higher-grade culture to a lower one.” There the matter remained, right
up to the moment of the final message, despite all the leading questions designed by the most ingenious legal brains of Earth.

When the University of Chicago’s Department of Philosophy transmits the
whole of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica to Starglider, all hell breaks loose. I turn you to the novel for more.



Image; Hubble took this image on Oct. 12, 2019, when comet 2I/Borisov
was about 418 million kilometers from Earth. The image shows dust
concentrated around the nucleus, but the nucleus itself was too small to
be seen by Hubble. We are on the cusp of a windfall of ‘interstellar interloper’ data as the LSST comes online within a few years. Will we
ever find a Rama, or a Starglider, amidst our observations? Credit:
NASA, ESA and D. Jewitt (UCLA).

As I mentioned, some critics fault The Fountains of Paradise for
Starglider’s very presence, noting that there are essentially two plots
at work here. In fact there are in fact three plots taking place on
different timescales here, one of them dating back several thousand
years, and recall that the voyage of Starglider itself spans millennia,
the mission having began some 60,000 years before the events of the main
part of the novel – construction of the space elevator – take place.
This kind of chronological juggling, allows Clarke to inspire deeper
reflection on humanity’s place in the universe and I find it enormously effective.

Wonders fairly pop out of Clarke’s early novels and much of his later
work. On that score, I likewise refuse to fault him severely because he
cannot achieve complex characterization. A case can be made (James Gunn
makes it strongly) that science fiction of Clarke’s ilk needs to put the wonder first. Rich, strange and complicated characters confronting rich, strange and wondrous events may lead to one richness too many. For we,
the readers, to absorb the mystery, we need to see how a relatively straightforward character reacts. It’s that contrast that Clarke aims to mine.

That’s only one way of doing science fiction, but much science fiction
of the 1950s, which I consider the genre’s true golden age (with a nod
to the late 1930s, as one must) often operated with precisely this
conceit. And that’s okay, because when writers of greater literary style began to emerge – writers like Alfred Bester, say, with his staggering
The Stars My Destination (1956) we were able to see complex characters confronting the deeply strange in ways that simply added depth to the experience. Look at Robert Silverberg in the 1960s as an exemplar of an
almost magical insight into what makes the individual human tick. Once
you’ve begun on that journey, the field is altered forever, but that doesn’t negate its rich past.

In fact, none of this subsequent growth nullifies Clarke’s
accomplishment in the realm of big ideas. Consider him a writer of a
kind of SF that flourished and fed a mighty stream into what has now
become a river of wildly untamed ideas and insights. And sometimes only
Clarke will do. Thus when i read, for the umpteenth time, The City and
the Stars, I’m again dazzled by the very title, and the first few pages
take me back into a realm where there are suns not quite our own casting
a numinous glow over landscapes we learn to navigate through characters
who learn with us. Like Stapledon’s, like Asimov’s, Clarke’s is a voice we’ll celebrate deep into the future.



30 Comments
Alex Tolley on December 6, 2023 at 18:00
It is intriguing to think that 45 years after the publication of TFoP, Clarke’s novel has Earth improving Starglider’s ability to converse by throwing a lot of verbiage at it to digest. This exactly mimics what we currently do to train Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. Of
course, Starglider, being a much more advanced technology, needed far
less data input to reach its comparable level of conversation.

But was it hallucinating that response about the discovery of the origin
of the universe? ;-)

Starglider is a nice alternative view of the universe compared to the
enigmatic Rama, with the ETI at Starholme apparently willing to
communicate with Earth. Is a level 7 civilization more like the
disembodied ETI of many of Clarke’s novels reaching back almost to the beginning and emulating Olaf Stapleton’s views on God-like intelligence
– and ending, in 3001: The Final Odyssey, with the merged entity of
Bowman and HAL9000 helping Frank Poole and Earth from being destroyed?

Reply
henry cordova on December 6, 2023 at 22:04
The ‘Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov encounters have us all excited with the
prospect of extrasolar visitors. The occurrence of natural objects like planetoids or comets is certainly intriguing, but the possibility of
artifacts, ships, probes and so on, is really exciting. What can we
reasonably expect will be the kinematic properties of these objects?

Clarke’s Rama flies through the solar system at a relatively low
velocity, the Earth ship sent to investigate it is able to match
velocities with it and still have enough fuel (reaction mass?) to make
it to base afterwards, so Rama is certainly not traveling at a velocity comparable to the technological level of its builders. The Earth ship (I don’t recall if it was reassigned to explore Rama, or if it was on a
specific mission to “board and search”; either way, Rama was within the performance envelope of the Earth vessel sent to investigate it.

Natural objects traveling within the solar system typically have
velocities on the order of several tens of kilometers per second. Today,
our spacecraft achieve these speeds, sometimes a bit faster, by engaging
in clever gravity assist rendezvous maneuvers. I would expect machines
from other stars would probably be traveling at speeds greater than
typical for objects drifting in the general stream of the solar
neighborhood. This would mean velocities greater than several 10’s of
Km/sec. The Local Standard of Rest (LSR) velocity of the the solar
neighborhood around the galactic center is on the order of several
hundred km/sec, but most of Sol’s neighbors share this general orbital
drift. A look at the radial velocities and proper motions of nearby
stars show velocities relative to Sol of well under a 100 km/sec. I
suspect alien probes would be going faster than the general drift of the
other “islands in the stream”. There are high-velocity stars (and, I presume, high velocity comets and asteroids) intersecting the galactic
disk at several hundred km/sec, but of Sol’s 5 parsec neighbors, only
one exceeds a relative radial velocity of 200 km/sec, Kapteyn’s Star.
The next fastest, Barnard’s star, is about half of that. Proper motion velocities are similarly distributed.

I’m taking a leap of faith here to suggest that natural obects’
velocities would be distributed similarly (except for those coming out
of the Halo), that is, roughly comparable to the speeds exhibited by our
two interstellar visitors.

No one can second-guess alien strategy, but I suspect any object
traveling less than several hundred km/sec is a natural object. Why
would a highly advanced civilization launch a probe if it couldn’t
exceed the LSR drift by at least an order of magnitude? Even higher
speeds could easily be orbital debris originating somewhere in the
Galactic Halo. If an intruder zips through the system at several hundred
km/sec or faster, the odds of it being a probe of some sort are
certainly worth considering! Anything slower than that is probably just
a rock or a snowball.

Reply
Paul Carter on December 7, 2023 at 2:54
As a long time Clarke fan, I enjoy The Fountains of Paradise and read it through several times. But I absolutely love the Starglider sequences
and have listened to them so many times on audio I know them verbatim. I
had no idea critics actually criticised them, and harshly it seems. They
frame the terrestrial story IMHO, and bookend well when the actual
aliens arrive 15 centuries after the Tower is built. I just enjoy the
wonder of the idea, so I guess I won’t be reading what critics have to say.

I feel the same sense of wonder, potentially anyway, regarding the (I
suppose remote) possibility that the Vera Rubin detects something
technological passing through the solar system. To use an obscure quote
from 3001 (another Clarke work i’m supposed to dismiss apparently but
can’t help enjoying), Hope I live to see it!

Reply
Tom Hannen on December 7, 2023 at 8:15
Very interesting as always Paul. Tiny typo (can’t DM otherwise I would
have) “one richness to many”

Reply
Paul Gilster on December 7, 2023 at 12:58
Thanks, Tom! Now fixed.

Reply
tesh on December 7, 2023 at 10:50
Are these objects a way to the expanse?

If an object fits the desired parameters (size vs trajectory vs make up)
could we plant a colony to “go”???

Reply
Alex Tolley on December 7, 2023 at 17:27
Yes : theoretically, in the future.

Currently, no. We don’t have the technology to send a colonization ship
to the required velocity – say 100 km/s. We do not have the ECLSS needed
for long-term survival. We don’t have the fusion energy technology to
make use of the hydrogen isotopes. If hoping to reach another star
system, then it would be trapping a population in deep space with no
hope of escape. It would make even St. Helena in the Atlantic (where
Napoleon was finally exiled) seem like a luxury, and possibly Devil’s
Island a preferable location to live.

If you just want to occupy a suitable resource body in the solar system,
Ceres would be a good bet, and if your colony wanted more privacy, a
Kuiper Belt or even Oort cloud object might fit the bill. All these
options allow for trade and escape back to the inner system. [Of course,
the belters in the S A Corey “The Expanse” books did not live great
lives on Ceres, although life on that future Earth wasn’t great for most
of the population, too.] However, you still need the ECLSS to work, and
on Ceres fusion energy might be optional.

Reply
henry cordova on December 7, 2023 at 22:42
Once again, I would like to remind my fellow Centaurs of a convenient
and frequently updated source of astronomical information of great value
to students of SETI and related topics: The “Observer’s Handbook” of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. This handy pocket almanac is
crammed full of useful astronomical data. Ephemeral tables for solar
system objects are provided, as well as observing lists, stellar and DSO catalogues, the year’s astronomical events such as occultations,
eclipses, oppositions, conjunctions, meteor showers, comets, and objects favorably placed for observation, like asteroids.

Also included are informative articles that are frequently updated. One
of the many items I consult frequently is the “catalog of nearby stars”, listing every stellar system within 5 parsecs, along with every one of
the multiple star members, brown dwarfs, and all major exoplanetary
discoveries up to the time of publication. The list is kept up to date
and is revised every year. It gives a valuable glimpse at our nearest
stellar neighbors and is a useful sampler of our corner of the galaxy. Information such as name, coordinates, spectral class, proper motion,
radial velocity, parallax and so forth are provided for both the nearest
stars as well as the brightest, and observing lists for the special
objects, such as binaries and variables..

This data is all available in the literature, and can be tracked down on
the internet, but its nice to have it all in one compact volume that
easily fits in your observing kit. It is invaluable for amateur
astronomers, but written at a level of technical detail sufficient to
satisfy any professional. Older copies can be given away to your
friends, or kept in the bathroom for emergency reading material!

I logged on to the RASC website last night and ordered the 2024 edition.
Highly recommended, eh?

Reply
Paul Gilster on December 8, 2023 at 5:29
A solid resource! Thanks, Henry. I plan to order mine today.

Reply
Robin Datta on December 8, 2023 at 11:07
If Starglider could connect to and commandeer the Internet, its unknown capabilities may lead to unforeseen consequences.

Reply
Alex Tolley on December 9, 2023 at 12:10
In that YouTube piece, it almost seems that John Michael Godier hasn’t
read Charlie Stross’ 2005 novel “Accelerando”.

“Unintended consequences” are not to be feared, but enjoyed. Our civilization has been built on them. Did those ancient hunter-gatherers
think of the consequences of agriculture? Apart from Jared Diamond
suggesting this may have been a mistake, do we want to return to that hunter-gatherer way of life? While civilizations have upended cultures,
most notably the indigenous cultures of the Americas, do we really
believe that the accomplishments of technological civilization should be
given an even greater extreme Thanos treatment in some attempt to
“correct” this outcome?

Humans have created their own, pre-technological “AIs” – we call them organizations that are built of hive minds, that create rules for
thoughts (e.g. religion) and action (corporations, nations). When the
Soviet Union collapsed, Francis Fukuyama suggested that the era of
Western liberal democracy had conquered all and it was the “end of history“. [A bit premature, as it turned out.]

What Godier is implying, is that humanity should now fear a new enemy,
that of machine intelligence. That is a fear of humans being toppled
from our perch at the top of the social pyramid. I don’t believe it is necessarily worse than the corporate juggernaut that seeks to increase
profits at the expense of our planet’s habitability for most humans,
starting with the populations near the equator and where weather
patterns will deprive many populations of fresh water. We may find their actions make many places look like what is being done in Gaza.

It would be an interesting turnaround if AIs become “benevolent
dictators” ensuring a better world, even if some actions seem as
repressive as those in “Colossus: The Forbin Project” that prevent human self-destruction.

Lastly, there is no reason to believe AIs would force technological civilizations to become solipsist (to explain the Fermi Paradox). Far
more likely it seems to me, that they would attempt to find out what is
out there, both attempting to communicate with other [AI] civilizations
both remotely and physically.

Reply
henry cordova on December 10, 2023 at 22:19
AI is painted as some malevolent supermind that will take over human civilization like some sort of mechanized dictatorship. You’ve hit the
nail squarely. AI is no different in principle from any government,
church, bureaucracy, religion, etc. AI is only the latest in a string of automated soulless bureaucracies that have changed human life
periodically since the Paleolithic. Every new technology has altered us irrevocably; language, fire, stone tools, agriculture, urbanization, metallurgy, writing, gunpowder, printing, steam, electricity, internal combustion, electronics, digital computers. AI is different (maybe) only
in kind, but not in degree.

My fear is not that AI will “take over”/ My fear is that IT will be
taken over for purely commercial purposes. I’m old enough to remember
when television was being introduced, and how it was expected to
revolutionize education and public information. They used it to sell
soap and cigarettes. The internet was supposed to usher in a new age of information freedom and enlightened citizenry. We got porn and fake news instead.

Any new technology has the potential to take us to the stars, IF we
don’t let the business majors hijack it first.

As for “unintended consequences”, they’re all well and good when the world is a vast wilderness dotted with a few scattered city-states. But
have you noticed things are fundamentally different this time? Yes, we
may yet enjoy a brief, brilliant flash of pure civilized glory. But for
now, we’re all locked up behind the city walls, the Spartans are
rampaging through the countryside, a plague has broken out in the Agora,
a tyrant is marching on the Acropolis, and new world-threatening menaces
are arising in the West and North..

Reply
FRED * on December 8, 2023 at 12:39
Comment *Hello,
About a 7th Starglider ladder: I don’t remember if it was Kardhasev who
said that after a certain level of energy mastery, a highly advanced civilization (type IV or higher) would be all-powerful in the universe.
It would then be able to travel close to the speed of light, and thus
find all the materials it needed to manufacture or transmute whatever it wanted, or even better, bend space-time (Alcubiere). It would no longer
need to travel, and would become a universal “spiritual” civilization.
We can then imagine anything we like about a civilization that possesses infinite energy and could explore a black “hole”, or break Planck’s wall :)

I have a radio amateur question: do you know of a website where it is
possible to listen to the frequencies of radio telescopes that are
listening to space? I’ve found this one, http://websdr.camras.nl:8901/
but I’d be more interested in listening to the universe on 1,420.4 MHz,
the hydrogen line.

WebDSR is interesting for visualizing how difficult it is to detect a
signal in the ocean of noise and the multitude of frequencies…just on
earth. So imagine in the univers !

F5CEY 73 QRT Fred

Reply
Paul Gilster on December 8, 2023 at 20:43
Maybe one of the readers can weigh in on this, Fred. There must be a
resource out there somewhere.

Reply
fred on December 13, 2023 at 13:31
I’ve done some research but I haven’t found any possibility of listening
to the universe via webSDR (including the 21cm line). On the sites of
radio astronomy observatories like Parkes, you can find some archive
files, sometimes accessible to non-researchers but not always, but these
files are huge and in a format that isn’t standard for us. On the other
hand, there’s plenty of fun radio tinkering to be done. Here are a few
links:

https://radiojove.gsfc.nasa.gov/gettingstarted/

https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/opendatasearch?project=GBT&file_type=all&ra=&ra_range=&decl=&decl_range=&mjd=&mjd_range=&freq=&freq_range=&target=&perPage=&search=Search

https://lea.hamradio.si/~s53rm/Radio%20Astronomy.htm

by the way, I was wondering if ET couldn’t communicate in binary on the
two states of the hydrogen atom :)

Reply
henry cordova on December 9, 2023 at 18:18
The pressure variations of a human voice can be represented by squiggles
on an oscilloscope screen, but you can stare at those all day long and
not be able to decipher the content of human speech from them. In fact,
unless you have prior knowledge of what they are, you will not be able
to determine any content in them. Some familiarity of the physiologic parameters of human speech and hearing (not to mention a familiarity
with the language being spoken) is required before the raw data can be translated to meaningful context The oscilloscope trace may allow us to preserve and transmit the original signal precisely, but without the
additional ‘metadata’ it will make no sense at all. When you consider
that the original signal will probably be transmitted with some form of formatting to allow redundancy, error correction or to take advantage of engineering requirements and limitations (such as peculiarities of the transmitters or the expected receivers), it is unlikely any information
will be extracted from the signal, except possibly that it is not of
natural origin.

The aliens may be eavesdropping on old episodes of “The Honeymooners”,
or “I Love Lucy”, but I doubt they’ll be even able to identify them as audio/visual data, much less than that they are artificially stylized representations of the domestic lives of the transmitting species. The
best sense they’ll probably be able to make of them is that they are not
of some astrophysical origin.

An analog signal (say, old style TV) will be made up of alternating
lines of an image, flickering at 60 Hz (determined by the frequency of alternating current and the ability of the human eye to stop motion)
with the pixel brightness represented by a signal strength, as opposed
to a binary number. There is no way some alien will be able to
unscramble that mess and make sense of it. They may be able to interpret
its artificial origin by noting no natural process creates that signal,
but that’s about it.

Reply
Alex Tolley on December 9, 2023 at 21:11
The pressure variations of a human voice can be represented by squiggles
on an oscilloscope screen, but you can stare at those all day long and
not be able to decipher the content of human speech from them.

And it was precisely the recognition of those squiggles that was an
important clue in this week’s episode of Dr. Who “The Giggle”. ;-)

Reply
Benjamin R Stockton on December 10, 2023 at 14:16
Slow Boat to Centauri
Being older than most of you, I read many of the iconic Science Fiction
works of the masters beginning in 1955 (when I cut my foot and had to
take a week off school). As much as I love this stuff, our modern
imaginations are too small. I won’t recant what you all know, I’ll jump right to my point. Humans won’t travel interstellar unless we use a generational ship. Going anywhere just takes too long. If you get real,
there won’t be any “suspended animation”, there aren’t any “wormholes”,
there is no “hyperspace”, and going into a black hole will both crush
you and not let you out. Because of everything you know already, the
distances, the radiation, the limits of power/mass ratios, the limited
life spans, and all the rest, prevent practical “ships” as we conceive
them from being built.

What we need is nothing less than a plantetoid. We need enough mass to
provide functional gravity (humans wither without gravity). We need
large amounts of water which functions both as radiation shield and
fuel. We need a large population in order to avoid deterioration of our genomes, and we need to be able to grow many generations of large crops
to feed them. We also need animal protein in order to thrive. In order
to travel far, we need to be able to write books, school children, make
movies, create songs and stories, and go out to a bar in the evenings.
In short, we need a cultural life to sustain us along the way.

In order to travel to another solar system, we essentially need a small
planet and a lot of patience. Once you have all that capability pulled together, why go anywhere? Just take up an orbit around our current
star. Within a few tens of cycles, collecting water and mineral bearing asteroids and comets as we go, perhaps we could sling shot around the
sun and head off on a 300 year journey.

I don’t worry about the fuel and the propulsion – those are technical things. Instead, I worry about the human animal and whether we will ever develop the culture that would generate such a project, and I worry
about whether that same animal can sustain a functional society and
culture over those long generations.

Reply
Robin Datta on December 10, 2023 at 19:16
BRStockton: Yes indeed – while flesh holds many possibilities for
evolution, it falls short when stressed in ways to which it was not
adapted through biological evolution. Hence a provision of the necessary resources to cover those shortcomings would be mandatory. And the
consequences of the breeding program for humans can only be guessed.

Reply
Alex Tolley on December 10, 2023 at 20:38
Biological humans as crew probably won’t go without technologies we
don’t know about yet, and may never have. But we don’t need them.

A robotic ship does not need the life support of a biological crew to
make the journeys.

If a future human society wants to seed the stars with human beings,
then we will send seed ships instead, with machines to nurture human
life until it is ready to colonize another, suitable world. The morality
to allow this will be very different from today, but well within what
has been done historically.

How small could such ships be? It depends on how much self-assembly is possible. Ships that can acquire resources at a target star system to
build out the needed equipment to gestate the human eggs/embryos and the machines to take care of the first few generations until the human
population can take care of itself. This might be quite small, and
certainly much smaller and more efficient than moving planets.

No planets are needed to make the journey.

Reply
Benjamin R Stockton on December 12, 2023 at 6:58
Alex,
I’m all in for robotic exploration! Another weird thing is that, due to communications delays, the sponsoring organization may never know the
outcome of its “seeding” operation. Sigh..


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