[ExI] Maybe space exploration will be a task for AI humanoids
Stuart LaForge
avant at sollegro.com
Fri Jun 28 04:16:28 UTC 2024
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
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