[ExI] Monkeys in Space

[Ben Zaiboc]

On Wednesday, 1 April 2026 at 07:18, Stuart LaForge <avant at sollegro.com> wrote:

> On 2026-03-30 02:33, Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat wrote:
> 
> > Yes, I think that habitats in orbit make more sense than colonies on
> > planets. That would certainly solve the gravity problem, but it still
> > leaves radiation shielding (there are ways to generate artificial
> > magnetospheres, but you still need to replicate the effect of a couple
> > of hundred miles of atmosphere, for shielding against high-energy
> > neutral particles), which means a lot of extra mass, and the simple
> > fact that we need a hell of a lot of oxygen, water, and food, as well
> > as all the myriad other requirements of biological organisms, which
> > contrasts very starkly with the probable requirements of uploads.
> --------
> 
> NASA is already working on that. They have tested radiotrophic fungi
> aboard the ISS and got good results. You could use the space between
> inner and outer hulls and bulk heads to store water and culture
> radiotrophic fungi (c.f. Cladosporium sphaerospermum) to act as a form
> of living radiation shield, allowing it to convert ionizing radiation
> into biomass that can then be processed into food or chemical fuel for
> the people in the colony. Turning radiation from a hazard into an energy
> source. Turning obstacles into opportunities is exactly how humanity
> will colonize space.
> -------
> >
> > In practice, I think that if biological humans ever do live in space in
> > any numbers, it will have to be preceded by upload colonisation and the
> > creation of a lot of infrastructure, and the question remains: would it
> > be worth the bother and expense? Especially when an uploading solution
> > exists. You'd also have to haul tons and tons of fragile flesh up our
> > steep gravity well, which is very expensive no matter how it's done,
> > vs. a few watts of electricity to transmit some data. more I think
> > about it, the less I think that 'monkeys in space' is a viable
> > scenario.
> ------------
> 
> I think there will be be people in space before uploads become a viable
> technology. The difficulty lies in a large set engineering problems
> encompassing various disciplines. But the problems are finite and
> solvable. For example, we already roughly sketched out a viable
> Interplanetary Transport Network and these routes could be calculated
> and optimized on the fly by computers. We are close to developing fusion
> rocket engines that  use Helium-3 as fuel. Helium-3 is abundant on the
> moon and lunar helium mining could become a space-based industry.
> 
> I, for one, have high hopes humanity's future in space.



I too have (very) high hopes for humanity's future in space, I just don't think those humans will be biological, or at least not most of them.

We already have humans in space, and have had for over 50 years, but I'm not talking about a few individuals, I'm talking about a substantial population, millions of individuals at least, able to do useful things (as well as happily and comfortably (and safely!) live), all over the solar system.

Consider for example, asteroid mining. Just about all of the useful asteroids are at least twice as far from the Earth as Mars is. Biological asteroid miners would need to carry with them a huge amount of stuff, go in a large spacecraft with a rotating section producing more than 0.6g (I think it was 0.8g) for them to spend most of their time in, lots of radiation shielding, a way for them to grow and recycle food and oxygen for a long time, be restricted in its acceleration and keep them sane and functional for how long? I don't know, certainly months and maybe years. All these problems are indeed solvable in theory, but I don't know if they would be in practice, or scalable to a useful degree.

Compare this with uploaded asteroid miners.
They'd need reliable power, some radiation shielding (although probably less than biological people would need), they could reduce their clock speed during long boring voyages to make them go by quicker, take large libraries of entertainment and virtual environments with them, withstand much higher accelerations, not need to be kept at physiological temperatures, not need food or oxygen or waste recycling, and their spacecraft could be orders of magnitude smaller. Many more of them could be built and launched much more cheaply and quickly.

You could also pack many more uploads into your spacecraft. Considering the distances, and the possibility for uploads to run at many times the thinking speed of biologicals, you'd probably want a much larger collection of people in your expedition, maybe equivalent to a town or even city, and the spacecraft would be their home, as opposed to a small team of biological people on a hazardous trip millions of miles away from their home, friends and family for a limited (but long) time, in less-than-ideal conditions, both physically and psychologically.

The issue of actually mining an asteroid once you're there would probably be fairly similar in both cases, except for the need for biological humans to wear spacesuits in order to work outside (but maybe remotely-operated robots would work fine for this).

The problems of each scenario are finite and solvable, but it seems to me that solving the relatively small set of problems involved in creating human uploads is closer to becoming reality than the much larger set of problems involved in supporting biological humans indefinitely in space. Just the single constraint of needing to be in a substantial gravity field for most of the time is a huge problem. That might be solvable with drugs of some kind at some future point, but that's just speculation, we have no real idea what might be involved in avoiding this problem. For uploads, zero-gravity will be an asset, not a problem, and we already know how to build computers and transmit radio signals. We don't yet know how to build large rotating habitats and launch large numbers of biological humans safely into orbit.

Another factor is what happens when things go wrong. For biological humans, almost anything going wrong in space a couple of hundred million miles from earth would mean certain death. Permanent death,  most likely.
For uploads, if anything goes wrong (that doesn't result in the destruction of the spacecraft, at least), they could as a last resort, just shut down and wait to be rescued. It wouldn't matter how long the rescue took.
But apart from this, there would simply be much less /to/ go wrong. Depressurisation, running out of air, water or food, wouldn't be problems, medical problems wouldn't exist, physical damage would be to robotic manipulators, not flesh-and-blood limbs, etc.

About the only real problems would be physical destruction of the spacecraft and massive doses of radiation from a solar storm or something equivalent (and seeing as it would be just sensible for everyone to have their minds backed-up in robust media, or even in a remote location, even these things would be survivable).

You see what I mean when I say "the more I think about it..."?

Large-scale space colonisation is not going to happen quickly (or perhaps at all) with biological humans, but with uploads, it could happen in a much shorter time. We're probably talking about months or years vs. decades or centuries.

---
Ben