The world’s richest man declared that the new company would “extend the light of consciousness to the stars”.
Because of distances and time, it is unlikely that humans will populate the galaxy with biological offspring (barring some technical breakthroughs that we have no line of sight on).
AI, on the other hand, could theoretically populate the galaxy and beyond, carrying the human intelligence and consciousness story into the future.
I'm more pessimistic about the politics than the tech. While there's huge issues going from e.g. current nuclear arsenal to a working Orion drive, that's at least plausible; the idea humans can be in a tin can for a century without ending up with enough people who think "'the outside is a deadly vacuum' is just a conspiracy" for one of them to cut a hole in the wall, is where I think there's no line of sight to a real solution.
We had a pandemic for just a few years and people were treating boring minimal PPE used by every dentist and surgeon for decades as some secret ploy for control.
We, as a species, are not yet ready for large-scale life off Earth; not even within our own system.
The world’s richest man declared that the new company would “extend the light of consciousness to the stars”.
Because of distances and time, it is unlikely that humans will populate the galaxy with biological offspring (barring some technical breakthroughs that we have no line of sight on).
AI, on the other hand, could theoretically populate the galaxy and beyond, carrying the human intelligence and consciousness story into the future.
If your goal is to spread life around the galaxy, humans are terrible species to try to do it with.
Wouldn't it be much easier to just create extremophile/tardigrade factories that just constantly produce them and chuck them in random directions?
Perhaps some wise aliens already did so, and we are the offspring.
I like that idea. Maybe if we implant them with AI-coprocessors?
I'm more pessimistic about the politics than the tech. While there's huge issues going from e.g. current nuclear arsenal to a working Orion drive, that's at least plausible; the idea humans can be in a tin can for a century without ending up with enough people who think "'the outside is a deadly vacuum' is just a conspiracy" for one of them to cut a hole in the wall, is where I think there's no line of sight to a real solution.
We had a pandemic for just a few years and people were treating boring minimal PPE used by every dentist and surgeon for decades as some secret ploy for control.
We, as a species, are not yet ready for large-scale life off Earth; not even within our own system.
[dead]