[ExI] Maybe space exploration will be a task for AI humanoids

[Stuart LaForge]

On 2024-06-23 05:50, BillK via extropy-chat wrote:
> What If We’re Stuck Down Here?
> By Barry Petchesky   June 18, 2024
> 
> <https://defector.com/what-if-were-stuck-down-here?>
> Quotes:
> But what if certain challenges are not hurdles but roadblocks, and not
> technological but biological? If the problem is not what we can build,
> but what we are?

But what we are can be changed too, in the long term, through selective 
mating/breeding programs in conjunction with germline genetic 
engineering. You could call it an agoragenics program to distinguish it 
from top down approaches like eugenics. It could be as democratic and 
bottom up as a Tinder app that uses biometric and genomic data to match, 
for example, small radiation-resistant people to other small 
radiation-resistant people until you have a new subspecies of human 
perfectly adapted to living in space habitats.

The obstacle with this idea is much more political than technological 
because, for example, we could probably have genetically-engineered mice 
well-adapted to life in space habitats within a few years, if it was a 
scientific priority.

> We've long known of the deleterious effects spaceflight can have on
> the human body: bone loss, anemia, weakened immune systems, higher
> cancer risks, the list goes on.
> Add to those effects a potentially calamitous one.
> The study, ominously titled "Cosmic Kidney Disease" and published last
> week in Nature Communications, examines the kidney function of 66
> astronauts who spent up to 180 days on the International Space
> Station, which is relatively safe compared to say, a return mission to
> Mars, which would last a couple years and expose astronauts to the
> more intense radiation of deep space.
> ----------------------

While I think that machines are certainly better suited to space 
exploration than humans are, space colonization by humans is of 
paramount importance despite all the risk involved, and by definition 
cannot be done (entirely) by machines. Being an astronaut always has 
been and always will be a dangerous profession, and that is why they are 
heroes. Really, the humans that live and work in space will have a host 
of medical issues and a really high mortality rate probably akin to 
Victorian Era coal miners. But the future they build by taking those 
risks to establish colonies out there to function as offsite backups for 
human civilization will be more impactful than the industrial revolution 
enabled by the courage of the  Victorian coal miners.


> The conclusion is that if humans are stuck on Earth, then we had
> better make sure we don't ruin it.

Even in the entirely unlikely scenario where the world pulls together 
into some global brotherhood of sustainability and we all become 
solar-powered vegans who ride our bikes everywhere, recycle everything, 
and live lives of virtuous austerity, it is still almost certain that 
the Yellowstone supervolcano will blow its top sooner or later and send 
most of us to the boneyard. Beyond that we have asteroid impacts, gamma 
ray bursts, coronal mass ejections, plagues and pandemics, and the sun 
swelling into a red giant to worry about. The hard facts of the matter 
are that 99.9% of all species that ever lived have gone extinct and the 
average lifetime of a species in the fossil record is about a million 
years. Furthermore it was like that long before we showed and skewed the 
odds. In any case, if we stay here on Earth, we are guaranteed to go 
extinct. But if we could colonize off world, the we could survive 
indefinitely. Even if a bunch of brave astronauts have to die die young 
to give their children a future.

Stuart LaForge