Interstellar Travel
Offline I think the overpopulation topic is becoming a bit absurd, so let’s talk about the other issue touched upon in that thread, interstellar travel. The process of doing this would be quite tricky and tremendously expensive. If given enough resources, it would probably be feasible. The trouble comes with the following:
We will be referring to this diagram a lot. On the y-axis is the gamma factor, also called the Lorentz factor. It is defined in the following way:
γ =[1-v2c-2]-0.5
For a spaceship moving away from Earth in an arbitrary vertice of direction when we refer to gamma henceforth, we will be discussing gamma of the spaceship as recorded in the Earth’s frame. There are several key assumptions which we need to consider here. The first and most important is that the destination star system does not move relative to the Earth. This is roughly true.
The trick with travel to faraway systems is that we must get the spaceship gamma in the Earth frame as high as possible because that way the length contraction measured by the spaceship in comparison to the Earth observers will be as high as possible and consequently, as far as the spaceship is concerned, the time taken to travel to the destination will be much less than that recorded by the Earth. However, since we are considering two reference frames, we must be precise about this. If the spaceship travels to a distant planet/star system, then the spaceship is measuring the proper time between the events because as far as the spaceship is concerned, the events “leaving Earth” and “arriving at the new planet” occur at the same point in space. As per the first postulate of special relativity, no inertial frame is more valid than any other and consequently, if the Earth observer states that the spaceship moves away at velocity v, relative to Earth, the spaceship observer is just as correct to say that Earth hurtles away from them at velocity v and the destination travels toward them at velocity v and they themselves have not moved. This is the tricky part not just about Relativity, but mechanics in general. Absolute space is completely meaningless. When we talk about “velocity” all we are saying is that an observer is measuring a certain object in his local coordinate system as changing coordinates over time. In special relativity, it becomes just as meaningless to assert that if the time between events A and B takes time t in reference frame A then it will in reference frame B. The same must consequently hold true for the rod-like distance between points in space. When we say “Betelgeuse is 780 light years away” what we really mean is that if an Earth observer had a giant ruler which started at Earth and ended at Betelgeuse, the Earth observers would state that the distance between the ends was 780 light years. The Earth measures proper length. This cannot be the case for any observer which is moving relative to the Earth frame since that would violate the second principle of special relativity. Consequently when we talk about stellar distances we will be making frame distinguishing from now on.
The reason this is important is because if we could get a spaceship to travel at 0.999c (exactly 0.999c, this is very important since gamma tends to infinity as v tends to c), then the gamma factor will be 22.4. This could be a good thing. If we wanted to travel to a planet that was 500 light years away in the Earth frame, then at 0.999c in the Earth frame, it would take 500.5 years in the Earth frame. However, in the spaceship frame, the destination planet (which is travelling toward them at 0.999c) is not 500 light years away, because the Lorentz factor contracts the rod like distance in their frame (this is important, it is meaningless to talk about space-like separation without reference to frame), as far as the planet is only (500/22.4)=22.3 light years away. Consequently, they state that the journey takes just over 22.3 years. The other way to look at this is from the Earth frame. The spaceship measures proper time, so the Earth measures dilated time. Since we have just stated the proper time interval to be 22.3 years, it follows that the dilated interval is 500.5 years since the Lorentz factor is the transform for both quantities.
So, this would appear to be no problem. If we found a close terrestrial planet at 20 light years away then at 0.999c in the Earth frame, a spaceship could get there in about 10 months as far as they were concerned. This would be good because then we would have to stock fewer provisions on the spaceship and consequently it would be less massive.
This is sort of important because this is where the major limitation comes in. As a consequence of the mass energy equivalence, the gamma factor dilates mass of an object relative to the rest frame of THAT object. The total energy of an object in an arbitrary frame is therefore the sum of the rest energy (intrinsic quantity of the object under discussion) and the kinetic energy (depends on the frame):
Et=Ek+Erest
Where:
Erest=m0c2
Here, m0 is the rest mass. From above, we have mframe= γm0 where gamma is as recorded for that object in the frame under discussion
The total energy recorded in an arbitrary frame of reference in which the speed of the object is recorded to be v is therefore:
Et= γ m0c2
Thus:
Ek=( γ-1) m0c2
This is where it gets a little tricky. We have a trade off here. We must have a high gamma factor so that the time taken to travel to a distant star is short in the spaceship frame of reference. This in turn implies fewer provisions need to be stocked. But it also implies that the m in the Earth frame is larger and consequently more fuel is required. In non-relativistic analysis, we would start with the rocket equation which is given as follows:
Vrocket (Earth frame) = vexhaust (rocket frame) [ln(mtotal/mempty rocket]
The quantity mempty rocket is the total mass of the rocket when it is unfuelled. It is assumed that all the fuel is used to accelerate the rocket to the maximum velocity (we would obviously have to take into account the fact that the rocket has to decelerate when it reaches the destination). This works because once the rocket reaches a maximum velocity, it no longer needs fuel to continue travelling through frictionless space at this constant velocity, as per Newton’s first law. This still holds in special relativity (not in General, though since objects follow the geosidics of warped space-time). However, every instance of m must be dilated by a factor of gamma in this case. We need to accelerate the rocket to this maximum velocity and it is this acceleration that requires the fuel. This is the hard part. It is very, very difficult to get a rocket accelerated to that close to c because a high gamma factor implies a higher mass in the Earth frame and consequently more energy required to accelerate the rocket. There are several prerequisites which would have to be in place to achieve something like this. First (obviously) the rocket would have to be assembled far above Earth in orbit. No project would be feasible without this. It’s hard enough to accelerate a rocket to 0.999c let alone with escape velocity of a gravitational potential well to cope with.
Also, if we were travelling to very distant stars then once the initial colonizers had travelled sufficiently far they would be more or less isolated entirely. A beginning student of Relativity would say something like “by the time the rocket reaches the new planet, everyone on board has aged very little even if everyone on Earth is dead”. This is in fact completely meaningless. We cannot compare the time coordinate of two events in two frames of reference in Relativity. The start of the sentence above, "by the time" is meaningful only in the reference frame of the spaceship. If the people on Earth sent a light signal back to Earth to say that they had arrived, then even though as far as the observers on the ship were concerned, this journey only took 20 years for a 500 light year (in the Earth frame) journey, the Earth observers will receive the signal 1000 years (in their frame) after they recorded the spaceship leave.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
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"Oh shit...this previously intelligent discourse has automatically been tanked"
No wait, please! With actual scientists on hand, I do have a couple of questions.
Like:
How in Hades are biological organisms supposed to travel interstellar distances, in whatever state, unharmed by Galactic and cosmic radiations that will be encountered between stellar systems, for prolonged periods of time. Like centuries, or milennia?
Magic.
Seriously, I've raised this issue, along with many other practical logistical, physical, and psychological problems with deep space travel, and the consensus answer among the Sci-Fi set is always magical "in the future" technologies.
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I think rotational centripetal force is sufficient for long-term habitation. I can't see any reasons why not. If you've got the propulsion tech to move around the solar system, then setting up a little spin in your biosphere seems like a piece of cake.
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Actually, I was talking about the arrival of Luminon into the thread.
They won't be travelling for centuries or milennia in their frame and actually we were just discussing time lengths like 20-50 years in the earth frame. Remember, this is Relativity. You must be frame-specific. I guess you're talking about the Earth frame, since they measure proper length. But the spaceship measures proper time. With the gamma factor above being employed, their distance to a nearby star would be several light months.
That's the just the physics of it. Radiation shielding is engineering which I don't know enough about to talk about.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
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I recall recently (as in the last couple years) of a great amount of work being done to solve the problem of radiation and other forces using electro-magnetic "shields", ie: Star Trek, which are not at all fictional or impossible. I don't remember if they addressed the problem completely though.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
Fair enough, but I think that would be a different thread. This thread is assuming that we already want to do interstellar travel.
Actually, plans are necessary to muster political will. By presenting a vision of what's possible, you can inspire people to get interested in pursuing the goal.
As it stands, most people on Earth don't have a real concept of what is possible, either in terms of solar system colonization or in terms of interstellar travel. Part of the reason I've developed the scenario I'm defending is that I want to provide a proof of concept, a vision, which can inspire people.
When I talk to people about space, the most common response is, "Who cares? I've got enough problems down here to worry about." For those who are more scientifically inclined, it might be, "You watch too much Star Trek. Don't you know that interstellar travel is not really possible, and even if it were, it would be too expensive?"
But what could be more inspiring than a long term vision of what is possible for our human race? I'm not talking Star Trek, here, I'm talking real practical possibility. This kind of vision is what personally motivates me.
So many people I meet are fatalistic. They see any action as hopeless, because, "Well, hey, the corporations and governments are just going to keep us all oppressed forever." They don't see any possible good future, and so they resign themselves to fate. They become apathetic and cynical.
But if we can show them a possible future that is interesting and exciting, then that can spark a new optimism and activism within them. They may then see the need to reform our society here on Earth, so that we may one day achieve this great wonder of colonizing space.
Even Martin Luther King Jr. said, "I have a dream!"
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Radiation comes mainly from stars. There's much less radiation in interstellar travel than in solar-system travel. If we colonize the solar-system, we will be forced to develop good radiation shielding. Sending an interstellar space spore will simply be a matter of using the best shielding we have and sending it along for the ride.
If you are sending single cells, embryos, then you can pretty easily encase them in lead, or water, or whatever material is best.
Next, you can rely on redundancy. If the odds of an embryo surviving the journey are 1 in a million, just send 500 million embryos, and you're likely to have 500 viable embryos at the end. If there's a danger of the entire ship being damaged by radiation, just send multiple ships. It's a simple matter of statistics and redundancy.
Finally, if you absolutely *cannot* ensure the viability of DNA on such a voyage, then instead send a DNA sequencer and reconstitute the DNA on arrival. We already have automated DNA sequencing, and we have existing cloning technology, which will eventually have its kinks worked out, and be automated.
All you need are two things: An intact cell, and intact DNA. The cells should be easier to protect from radiation than the fragile DNA, but the DNA can be sent as technology/information instead. Technology can be made arbitrarily redundant.
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I suppose they don't have to be "alive" during travel. A state of suspended animation would be best. The cold of space would definitely be a benefit in that case. It would, in my opinion, be better to have trained adults doing the colonization of star systems rather than infants. I don't think we could depend on test tube babies to be up to the challenge. How do we go about training them on site with out any intelligent interaction. I would prefer that the passengers that reach the target star be mentally competent.
After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.
The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.
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It would be a near requirement to incorporate some form of education. Otherwise we'd just be colonizing space with primitives that had no idea what the hell was going on. Some would figure enough out in time, as we're presuming to have done, but it would seem likely that most would fail.
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I wanted to avoid introducing a tech which has no proof of concept. We have proof of concept for artificial wombs, didactic software, and care-taking robots. We don't have a proof of concept for cryosleep. If cryosleep were possible, then sure. But if it's not, we still have the option of embryos.
As for education, we can supply them with more-or-less unlimited information. The trick is to present it to them in an educational manner. We already have software designed for education. We already have recordings which present information a teacher would normally be required to recite. We already have interactive software intelligence, such as seen in video games, medical diagnostic software, etc. We already have basic robotic autonomy.
Put it all together, and you get automated didactic computers and care-taking robots. Of course, it will take several decades before they are capable of raising kids from embryos, but at least we have proof of concept.
Also, there's another reason to prefer not sending living people in cryosleep, which is the risk of death during the journey. There's no guarantee that the mission will be successful. Imagine there's only a 10% chance of success. With the embryo proposal, you just send 10-20 ships, and one of them is likely to make it. However, if you need human volunteers, 90% of them are going to die. Why make such a sacrifice? With the embryos you only start growing them when you're sure the journey has already been successful and the biosphere has already been successfully built and prepared. If something goes wrong, you just 'abort' the mission (sorry for the pun there). Nobody dies.
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I agree with this. I find it much easier to envision the possibility of cryosleep than the possibility of somehow raising mentally competent and psychologically stable individuals from birth without the presence of adult humans.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
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Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
DG, I realize you might be talking about an extremely remote possibility versus a virtual impossibility here, but do you think that there's a reasonable chance that something like cryosleep could maintain a brain in a functional state, retaining memories and all the other experiential data, for extended periods of time? I mean, everything I've ever read by neuroscientists seems to indicate that pretty much the instant organized motion in the brain stops completely, it's over. The task of initiating the same set of organized motion would, if I comprehend accurately, require astronomical amounts of almost impossibly accurate data. The apparent conclusion, then, is that we cannot hope to revive a dead brain -- all we can hope to do is slow life functions to near death. But if we do that, we have to counteract the inevitable brain damage that occurs when the brain is deprived of sufficient oxygen.
I'm rambling a little bit. What I'm asking is this: Can you imagine a reasonably approachable technology that is implied from our current understanding which could overcome these problems (assuming I state the problems accurately)?
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
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All that money spent on cryo and all those frozen corpses too....
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
If you mean to argue that because people are spending lots of money on it, it must be possible, I'll point you to the Army's enormous expenditure on "remote viewing."
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
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No man, I'm just commenting on the extraordinary waste.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
Ah. Yeah, I think it would be fun if we could live long enough to take a pool on how long it takes before somebody decides it's time to throw the bodies away.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
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There is the water bear...
After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.
The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.
MySpace
LOL. Nice. I suspect, however that water bears aren't quite so concerned as humans about retaining their sense of self upon rehydration. But, they do have a lobed brain, so maybe you have a point.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
Well, if you're allowing for tech like cryosleep, then personally I see machine consciousness as the more obvious solution. Don't send biological humans, send technological ones. Then there's no chance of death. You just copy an existing mind and flip on the power once the ship arrives.
Colonization could proceed much more rapidly, as well. And radiation is suddenly a non-issue.
However, I'm sticking with the minimal tech scenario as my baseline. Kids are very resilient and can deal with all sorts of weird childhoods. If we allow for a moderately long period of solar system colonization, then advanced educational technology is going to develop automatically as part of that process. And finally, constant streaming of culture from Sol will keep the kids from veering too far off into Lord of the Flies territory.
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Disclaimer: I am not presently a proponent for the feasibility of 'cryogenic' technology (which is inaccurately named). I simply know, roughly, what the general speculations revolve around.
The principle technology that would require major breakthroughs for cryogenic stasis is nano-robotic technology, followed closely by artificial intelligence. Essentially, a candidate for undergoing suspended animation would be injected with microscopic robots that would undergo maintenance of their host while he/she hibernated, actively preventing/repairing muscle atrophy and brain cell deterioration. As the theory goes, no massive tissue repair of any kind - much less the rebuilding of a dead brain - would be required, as the robots would keep everything in working condition.
Now, there are large and obvious problems that one could point out, but equivocating speculation of what we might get to look forward to in the future with appealing to 'magic' is unfair. A futurist hypothesizing that one might be able to eventually use sufficiently miniaturized machines to perform medical procedures radically different from those done today is different from a wiccan suggesting that a quartz crystal can make bad spirits go away because the latter individual has absolutely no basis for their statement, while the futurist is simply observing an already substantiated branch of engineering a trying to predict what applications it might yield in the future.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
By the way, Kevin, are you satisfied with the answer I gave to your question on the first page?
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
Quite.
(Well, sort-of, anyway. I still find the general concept of relativity - especially as it relates to what we perceive vs what actually happens - very difficult to grasp, but that's just my own brain's limitation)
As I said, I'm rather doubtful that any future we might have in outer space will involve practical relativistic space flight applications (an ever-evolving series of 'probes' seems more likely to me), but yourself and others have certainly given enough proof of concept ideas related to it that I certainly entertain the idea that we may send-out a few manned missions at such velocities just for the challenge/entertainment value of doing so one/if the associated cost is minimal.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
...Just as a bit of an append to my prior post, Da Vinci was (as well as a painter) a bit of a futurist in his own time.
Here's proof of concept sketch he made for a helicopter:
Now, obviously, Da Vinci's machine would not have flown if he had built it because there are so many things fundamentally wrong with it - however, he was certainly on the right track with the basic observations that inspired the design and it was not that he was flatly incorrect simply because making helicopters is impossible; we now know that it's quite possible. It was only a matter of lacking in certain areas of knowledge with regards to aviation.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
Well, in theory, planetary accretion disks that result in the formation of small & rocky inner planets are not likely to yield planets with wildly varying mass (and thereby gravitational influence) from that of Earth, Mars, Mercury or Venus.
Gravity appears to favor symmetry:
So we're (again, in theory) not terribly likely to have to 'restrict' ourselves to planets of our own size... because, well, that's probably most of what's out there as far as small & rocky inner worlds go (Kepler should be able to tell us more.
)
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
Not only do they survive lack of water but a lack of heat energy as well.
After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.
The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.
MySpace
I see the adult cryo-stasis scenario as more likely than the embryo scenario, and both are vastly more likely than thinking and learning AI. The problem I see is, how are you going to teach them language? Without language you'd be hard pressed to teach them anything else. I think cryo-stasis is the minimal tech solution.
After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.
The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.
MySpace
Play them videos of people talking. Kids absorb language like a sponge. There will of course be other kids around to practice with, and there will be didactic computers which will teach them language with specific lessons and feedback for each individual kid. We already have speech recognition and synthesis. It shouldn't be too hard to put together a bunch of automated lessons which tell kids things like: "Can you say "Hello!"?" And the kid says 'wajabada', and the computer parses that and says, "That was close. Try it again, say "Helll ooooo"" and the kids says 'aawooah', and the software recognizes an improvement and says, "Very good!"
You can have videos of people from Sol speaking baby talk to them in their cribs. The care-taking robots can say simple things like "Time for food", etc.
Really, this is not rocket science. They way we teach kids today is vary labour intensive, and we already have all kinds of different ways of automating it.
I think the only real major problem would be ensuring the kids get sufficient emotional interaction, which when they are babies can be done with recordings of humans and physical interaction with care-taking robots (stroking, cleaning, simple playing, etc.)
Ever see the Rhesus monkeys brought up with fake mothers? Some had a wire mesh with a monkey-doll-head and a nipple that dispensed milk. Others had the same wire mesh, but it had a soft fur covering. Well, they both were emotionally damaged, but the ones with the fur mother were *less* damaged than the ones with just the wire mesh. Little things, attention to detail, can alleviate the absence of a real mother. We can supply far more care and interaction than these fake mothers. Consider that this will be at least a couple of hundred years in the future. Look at robots today, compared to 50 years ago, where they were just a dream. Even if they lack emotion they can simulate it well-enough to raise one generation of kids.
For one thing, they will have other kids to play with, so they will not be completely isolated. They will just have a slightly impoverished childhood. After the first generation, the new children will be cared for the natural way.
All the while, there will be support from a) didactic computers, b) care-taking robots c) existing culture from Sol and d) constant streaming culture from Sol, including feedback at a 5 year delay.
Consider also that the people of Sol will have an intense interest in these kids. They will be sending them constant messages. They will be getting constant recordings of the kids' interactions on the ship. You'll be able to watch the kids play, learn, sleep, eat, whatever, and then send them a video message back, saying things like "Hi, Joey, it's Bob from Earth! Happy 11th birthday! I was watching a video of you as a baby at 1 years old. You were just learning to walk. See, here's the video."
And so on. In fact, they can be receiving messages from Sol from the day they are born. When they are 5 years old, people in Sol will finally be able to see them as newborns. When they are 10, people will see them as they were 5. The kids will be receiving a constant stream of attention and feedback from Sol from 10 years back.
They will also have recordings teaching them important things they need to know, such as how to do things they need to do, how to resolve conflicts between themselves, how to cooperate and organize to get things done, basic Kindergarten stuff. It can all be presented in an entertaining way so the kids will watch it automatically. Imagine Sesame Street on steroids.
Then the didactic computers can give them individual feedback on specific lessons and skills. And finally, the care-taking robots can take care of day to day stuff like cleaning, medical, simple play, etc.
There will of course need to be a lot of testing and sophistication put into the system, but it will not require anything fundamentally new, such as cryosleep or machine consciousness would.
====
As for machine consciousness vs. cryosleep. As one who works in software and has researched AI and various forms of adaptive software, it seems clear to me that machine consciousness is orders of magnitude closer to reality than cryosleep. Neuroscience is benefiting from exponential advances in brain scanning resolution. We will soon be able to see individual neurons firing in real-time. Understanding biological consciousness is around the technological corner. We already have new forms of AI that are based on more advanced understanding of neural architecture (google Jeff Hawkins, author of On Intelligence). Hardware more or less continues on an exponential trend of increase in power. Distributed and parallel computing is getting more sophisticated. And that's not even mentioning quantum computing.
On the other hand, a freezer is still a freezer. You end up with ice crystals that shred the cells from the inside out. And *then* there's the issue of revival. Technology here is not improving nearly so fast as information technology. Nanotech is the only possible hope for cryosleep. And we've barely even scratched the surface there. At least with computers and software, we have a huge market and industry working on constant improvements. Cryosleep has maybe a couple scientists in a lab somewhere.
My wager is firmly on machine consciousness. Neuroscience, hardware, and software have a huge headstart on nanotech.
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Uh ... actually, it's way worse than rocket science. We've been known to point rockets at things and have them land there. We've never made a half-way intelligent robot, much less one that could chase around a child, changing its diapers, cuddling it and imparting a moral sense.
I'm not sure where the optimism is coming from on the computer science side. Any other programmers out there who have worked on AI systems here? Cuz damn. I'm not talking about "HAL" or "Terminator" intelligence. We're barely past chess.
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fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
OK, why do we need a large acceleration?
Sure, 1g might sound modest but the distance we would be traveling is also quite large. At 1g, a ship would only have to travel about a half light year to get to 0.75c. After a trip of 1.25 light years, a ship could reach 0.9c. Even taking time dilation into account, such a ship is going to spend more time getting anywhere than it is going to spend getting up to speed.
Some arbitrarily larger acceleration will get your ship up to a desired speed faster but that will partially be offset by having some extra distance to travel at any given speed. You could build a ship that can accelerate at say, 100g but then it is going to be a robotic mission.
Just for grins, the mission profile is accelerate to the mid-point, flip the ship over and decelerate to the destination. Don't worry about how to power such a ship. We are firmly in Clarke's third law territory as it is. We are going to send a crewed ship at 1g and a robotic ship at 100g both to a star 10 light years away. Here are the numbers that I am coming up with:
The live crew will arrive in about 4,300 days (Earth time). The robotic ship will arrive in 3650 days (Earth time). So the crewed ship will have over 8 years of work building the colony done before we on earth get the initial reports back from the robotic ship that arrived slightly earlier despite the enormous difference in acceleration. Tell me how that actually helped?
=
I'm not so sure about that. I've heard about at least 2 or 3 distinct self learning A.I.'s. I don't know all of the specifics, but from what I recall at least one of them is capable of picking up languages. That's significantly further along than chess; which has a distinctly finite number of actions and circumstances to deal with. If I'm wrong, feel free to correct me. I've been trying to keep something of an eye on AI development.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
Vastet, yes, there are learning computers, but don't let the language fool you. It's not as neat as it sounds. The problem -- well, one out of a lot of problems -- is that chess is a relatively simple set of algorithms. It's not too difficult to develop a relatively simple heuristic algorithm that will allow a chess playing computer to "learn to play chess better."
What we can't do is build a computer that can take what it's learned about chess and apply it to checkers. Checkers is a simpler game than chess, and any human who can become a grand master at chess can easily grasp the concepts in checkers. That's because we can think laterally. We can take general principles and apply them to similar situations and essentially invent or learn whole new systems. A learning chess computer only learns chess.
Getting a computer to do that is far, far, far in the future. I know people in AI, and to a man, they all say the same thing. We're just barely beginning to grasp how the human mind integrates data, and the computers we're teaching to "learn" now are only similar in a very technical sense of the word. What they're doing isn't remotely like human learning on a lot of levels.
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Yeah, I know that computer learning and human learning are vastly different. I guess I was just confused by the reference to chess that Will used. Referring to lateral thinking clears things up.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
Actually, chess is not a very good measure of smarts. People like to use computer chess as an example because only a very few people can play chess on the grand master level. Really, it is a game that is fairly easy to model and horrendously difficult to model well enough to beat a grand master.
The computer that beat Gary Kasparov only did so because it had enough raw power to model the entire board eight moves ahead. Kasparov was taken aback by the computer “sacrificing” a pawn but realistically, it was a machine that could process more information than the human opponent.
Vastet, since you are following AI, let me ask you a question. I have asked this on several forums and have never received an answer that I like. As background, several years ago, Scientific American had an article about a computer that runs a custom program. Basically, it was a SPICE electronic prototyping program coupled with a genetic algorithm. What it did was pretty much combine electronic components in different ways and see what happened. Useful circuits are a genetic plus and nothing circuits are a genetic minus.
Well, this program almost immediately found pretty much every standard circuit that is already known. However, along the way, it also managed to develop several circuits that were previously undiscovered. In retrospect, they were fairly obvious but somehow nobody had thought of them before. The authors of the article believed that they were potentially patentable ideas.
Here is my question:
Who should get credit for those circuits? The guy who assembled the hardware had no connection at all to the output. The guy who did the programming had at best a tenuous connection to the output. The computer did the work. When a patent application is filed, what name should go on the documents?
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Supply logistics. Hitting the same bullet with 7 BB's. Starting at my house in Tennessee, the first one hits at Memphis, the second at Albuquerque, the next one at Midway Island, and... my calculator hates me. lol.
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My answer is necessarily biased due to my view that capitalism is nearly as outdated as religion. In the socialist democracy I would love to see happen, the names of everyone who had a part in the design of the system as well as the computer it functioned upon and the serial numbers of all the parts within would be on the "declaration of discovery", for lack of a better term.
In todays capitalist nation, I'd say the serial number of the computer, except that then the computer would have to apply for a patent, and the computer isn't...aware? of the concept, let alone the proceedings, or the consequences; and certainly doesn't have the capability to patent anything. Therefore I'd have to say whoever got to the office first would be the one to be rightfully awarded the patent.
I really don't like patents. At least in part because of questions like this. I can't really view anything in tech or science as an invention. It's all discovery, not creation. The universe is as it is. Art is about the only thing I can defend the patenting of. And even it is merely a restructuring of materials that already exist.
You probably haven't liked my answer any better than anyone elses. lol.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
Incidentally, now that I've been thinking about it for a few minutes, I do recall reading about that awhile back.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
I actually almost agree with you on that. However, I wasn't so much talking about the technical difficulty as the relative ease of understanding and foreseeing solutions to the problem.
Technically, automated raising of embryos to adults is more difficult than rocketry. I'll grant you that.
But you or I could not build a rocket if we tried. We simply don't have the training to imagine how to do it. On the other hand, coming up with potential solutions to the child rearing problem is not so difficult. It will be solved by psychologists and software/hardware people who have much less formal training than the corresponding people who solve the problem of interstellar flight. That's what I meant by that phrase. It's more along the lines of "It doesn't take a genius to see potential solutions to this problem."
The robots don't need to chase kids around. The kids will be in a controlled environment the whole time. There won't be any trips to shopping malls, for instance. Changing diapers is a pretty mechanical task. If we have robots that can assemble complex parts in a factory, changing diapers is not that much different. Most of the difficulty will be getting a robot that can do it with sufficient gentleness. The 'cuddling' would be mostly mechanical and scripted. It will be more controlled by the kid than by the robot. And I never said anything about imparting a moral sense. Kids naturally have moral instincts and they will have lessons on it, plus a constant stream of culture from Sol with embedded moral lessons. The robots themselves do not need to have their own moral sense.
Google Jeff Hawkins, author of On Intelligence. His is only one project that has made recent advances in neurlogically inspired AI architectures. I know of at least one other, something to do with hierarchical neural network systems.
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Your objections ignore the part I mentioned where we learn the neurological basis of consciousness through brain scanning and neuroscience. 'Pure' AI efforts have not gotten us as far as was previously hoped. But neurologically inspired AI has made recent progress that is hard to deny. When we get to the brain scanning resolution to the point where we can watch individual neurons fire and change in response to other neurons, then we will be able to explain in mechanical terms how the brain generates intelligence, and, eventually, consciousness. We are already well on the way.
Taking that mechanical knowledge and building a hardware and/or software implementation of it will be comparatively easy, compared to our more-or-less blind stabs in the dark we've tried so far.
Building technological brains is probably the fastest way to machine consciousness. There are simply principles that brain evolution has discovered that we have not yet re-discovered in our short 50-60 year attempt at AI. Once we find out what those principles are through neuroscience, the doors will be opened.
There was a time when we didn't understand how inheritance worked, as well. We finally got the biochemistry tools to unlock DNA, and voila, 50 years later, we unlock the human genome.
The brain is considerably more complex than DNA evolution and protein synthesis. Give us some time. Consider the nature and scope of the problem.
We *have* made progress, it just hasn't been as fast as the optimistic estimates predicted. But the progress was more than non-existent. Considerably more progress, I might add, than that for cryosleep.
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Exactly what do you mean by attention? You seem like a smart guy so I think it's probably safe to assume you don't mean actual dialog. That is unless someone wants to wait 5 years between sentences.
I am curious as to the content that would be transmitted and how it could contain any sort of relevance after 5 years. What do you say to an infant who will be 10 when they get the message?
Thanks for the search query. It was good reading.
It occurred to me that I may be placing unnecessary constraints on the research. I knew the tech was progressing, but I didn't know the doubling times were so short.
A few thoughts though. What would be the result of an extended loss of power? Would it amount to "brain death" as it were? How do you know sentient machines will want to aid us or even conform to our sense of morality?
This is not true of some life. There are some members of Animalia kingdom that can survive at near absolute zero temperatures (with multilobed brains and ventral nervous system I might add
). They spring back to life as soon as conditions are favorable and don't seem to have missed a beat. Nanotech need not be involved at all. I don't think it's such a stretch that human cells could be genetically altered to enter one or more states of cryptobiosis. We already have glow in the dark pigs. I know it's not quite as simple as making people glow, but early experimentation could actually be very rapid. The cells could be tested after only a few generations. We wouldn't have to carry a life to term to get proof of concept. I think the main thing to consider is the sheer lack of water you can get away with while freezing. Water may be required for life to be active, but in some life, very little is required to preserve it.
The Tardigrade (aka water bear) genome is already being sequenced. It is capable of entering every state of cryptobiosis. There's been work in aiding suspended animation in dogs and pigs by replacing blood with chilled saline. There has also been some work done in using sugar solutions to induce suspended animation in viruses. A combination of the techniques could result in reversible cryptobiosis for what could arguably be called humans.
I am aware that this testing raises many ethical concerns.
After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.
The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.
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Are any of those mammals though Spike? The only one I know of is a frog. Amphibians and Mammals are far enough removed evolutionary that it may be impossible for a mammal to utilize such features.
Disclaimer: As I'm not a biologist, I'm just speculating.
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The water bear if I remember correctly is related to the arthropods, so it wouldn't be a mammal. But I think the DNA slice used to alter the pigs was taken from a jellyfish, so who's to say what will turn out useful.
Edit:
The water bear is not even in the same sub kingdom as us.
After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.
The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.
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Well, two things:
A) 'Cryogenic' (God, I hate that term) stasis hypotheses do not typically involve any kind of freezing at all. Stasis is achieved strictly through robotic and chemical technology.
B) I think suspended animation is likely a speculative branch we can just plain write-off. Assuming the development of the necessary microscopic robots, suspended animation would be a joke of an application. Such machines would arguably be better put to use creating new planetoids (assuming they were self-replicating), giving humans arbitrarily long lifespans, providing entertainment & training by creating simulation environments, etc.
Sufficiently advanced nano-robotic technology would immediately elevate a civilization to the third tier on the Kardashev scale; you'd be Gods among insects. Suspended animation wouldn't remotely bea consideration at such a stage.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
OK, nanobots are machines. Machines produce heat. I may be busting DG's nuts in this thread but I think that he will agree with me this far.
Just for shits and giggles, let me suggest that a single nanobot produces a nanowatt of heat. So ten kilograms of nanobots are going to produce ten kilowatts of heat. That is quite a bit of heat and a fairly small percentage of the weight of an adult human.
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I want you to know upfront that I don't actually think this is the best way to go about interstellar colonization, only that it is practically plausible. As such, I don't see an imperfect solution as a non-viable solution. The first generation of kids will undoubtedly have less-than-optimal parental care, and may likely have long term emotional problems because of that. But they will certainly not be uncultured feral humans, as we've seen in cases of severe isolation and lack of care and culture.
Any solution I propose here will of course be imperfect. It is the concept that is important. Is it plausible that a continued trend in existing science and technology will eventually 'work out the kinks'? I say Yes, it is plausible, given current technology trends.
Imagine you're a kid, and you're born on this ship. What would be required for you to grow up fairly healthy and cultured?
Well, food, and water. Robots can handle that. Check.
We know kids need physical stimulus as infants. Robots can handle that. Check.
Exposure to language. Videos from Sol, of people talking. Movies, TV shows, etc. The robots can have recorded/synthesized speech for simple things. The didactic computers can use recordings and synthesized speech to attract kids to learning stations, and teach them specific language skills. Check.
Medical attention. The kids would naturally come to their source of food and comfort for injuries and sickness, and so these robots could have specialized diagnostic and treatment capabilities. We already have diagnostic AIs (expert systems), and many treatments can be made routine and mechanical. Check.
Individual feedback and instruction. We already have facial and bioinformatic recognition. We already have examples of games and learning programs that can keep track of who's using them and respond appropriately. We already have interfaces that can provide visual and verbal recognition of kids and their acheivements. Getting a didactic computer to say, "Okay, Johnny, today we're going to learn about arithmetic. Are you ready? Great! Let's start. Try 2+2. 4! Great!" etc. doesn't seem at all far fetched. Check.
So, you are asking about 'Exactly what do you mean by attention?'
Well, imagine you're a kid on this ship. You get a video message from woman. What should that message say that might encourage you, so you don't feel disconnected from Sol, and so you feel loved by someone other than the other kids around you?
How about, "Hi Johnny, it's Sarah from Earth. We are all so excited that today's your birthday. Happy birthday! Here's a present from me (a video, or game, or whatever, some aspect of culture that a person can send to a kid from a planet far away; the ship's auto-factory could even manufacture a toy with designs specified and transmitted from Earth). I love you so much."
Sutff like that. The kinds of things one writes in letters, emails, video blogs, etc. Sure, it's one way, but it's more than nothing. It would be something the kid would value, and would feel an attachment to. After a while, they will come to expect messages, and eventually the messages will be in response to the kid's previous childhood experiences.
Eventually, the kid will be able to send messages to people on Earth. Actually, he'll be able to send them as soon as he can talk. And eventually, he'll get responses to these messages. While it's with an overall 10 year delay, it is true feedback, true 'attention'. The children will come to value this feedback as they grow older and get more experience with it.
Of course, in the mean time, the kid will have about 150 other kids to interact with and develop more immediate and close relationships.
It's not a perfect solution, but it's hardly unimaginable. And I'm sure there will be a much more sophisticated science and tech of childhood psychology and mental health. My examples here will seem like 'child's play' compared to the state of the art in 150+ year's time.
Any machine consciousness worth living would provide regular backups and maintenance. This is trivial as far as information technology is concerned.
As far as sentient machines sharing our morality. Two things: First, I'm not just talking about sentient machines, I'm talking about machines based on human cognition. They would be 'human' for all intents and purposes except they inhabit a technological body rather than a biological one.
Second, how do we ensure they share our morality? We engineer them that way. They will have all the basic features humans have, including a moral intuition. We can even test this in simulations. Simulate a bunch of these minds in a virtual world with the capability of violence and ensure that they cooperate rather than engage in violence. Scrap the designs that lead to violence, reproduce with tweaks (mutations) the designs that lead to cooperation, and repeat.
There's another issue which I think is important to address. How do we know our morality today is so great? We get our morality from our innate moral intuition plus we learn specific details through culture. We know our intuition is not perfect. It's flawed. It can probably be improved through the method I just explained about running simulations and tweaking the design to seek greater cooperation and less conflict.
However, that doesn't answer the culture part of it. These machine minds will learn culture much as we do. How do we ensure that they have a good moral culture to learn from? Well, number one, I don't think we have such a culture today. We are plagued with what I call Consumptionism, which is the overall idea that we need more and more and more without end. As one YouTube guy puts it, we are 'bacteria with brains'. At our core, we act to consume until all resources are depleted. Very few of us overcome this tendency, and we often (through political inaction) enable those who remain Consumptionists.
This is the core problem of what I call God the Machine. I believe we already have 'machine intelligence', it is just that part of this 'machine' is implemented on these wacky information processors called 'human brains'. Things like churches, corporations, governments, and basically any other group that has observable cohesion and behaviour as a group, qualify as examples of God the Machine. This Machine is intelligent, but not yet conscious. When we develop truly conscious machines, then we will have essentially embodied this 'God' in a conscious body. (NB: This usage of 'God' is both physicalistic and facetious, certainly not something to worship.)
The question is, will this 'God' be a moral god, as you are asking, or will it be a monster, an incarnation of Consumptionism, composed of the Yahwehs, and the Allahs, and the Capitalisms, and Tyrannies of today?
Essentially, we'll be creating the closest physical thing you could get to 'God', as conceived by so many people (i.e. a conscious 'higher power'), and we want to ensure that this God doesn't simply become 'bacteria with a microprocessor'.
It would totally suck, for instance, if this 'God' reproduced uncontrollably like we currently do, so it completely destroys the biological environment that we are just now realizing is so precious. Then, for sure, all biological humans would go extinct, along with nearly all other life.
So, solving the problem of God the Machine is not a trivial thing. I don't have a complete answer for you. But I do know that Consumptionism is probably the biggest danger, which is why I gave it a name with a capital C. The solution is Sustainability. We don't have a Sustainable culture yet.
A big part of the reason I'm developing my philosophies of wonderism and foundationism are to address this exact problem. And I do believe it's a real problem that needs to be solved. Eventually we will achieve machine consciousness, the Singularity as Ray Kurzweil calls it, and we will either have solved this problem, or biological humans will go extinct, along with most life on the planet.
It's a cultural problem, and it requires a cultural solution. We must have a culture which eliminates, or holds at bay, the tendency of Consumption. Religion is a big contributor to this problem, and fighting religion is a pre-requisite to solving the problem.
Can you imagine the devastation if this transhuman machine consciousness was a religious fanatic with a doomsday fantasy and a religious compulsion to 'be fruitful and multiply'? Yikes!
Interesting. Possible. I won't rule it out.
I will say that a proof of concept for me would be some small mammal, such as a mouse, learning a few tricks, being frozen at a very low temperature for more than, say, a month (heck, maybe even a week), and being revived, and then re-performing the same tricks it learned (such as solving a particular maze, or something). Anti-freeze in the blood won't cut it (squirrel hibernation). I'm talking frozen solid.
Until then, I'll be skeptical. Revival with memory is key.
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This to me is problematic. One of the nice things about sending frozen embryos is that they are really frozen. There is zero need for life support, besides protecting them from radiation.
Instead of maintaining a constant temperature, which requires mechanical parts that must work for hundreds of years, making them more complex to develop, you can send your payload 'cold'. The only parts you would have to engineer to last hundreds of years would be the propulsion. Everything else can be completely shut-down.
In interstellar space, there's very little out there. Not like in our solar system, which is littered with little particles of debris and crap. Interstellar space is really really empty comparatively.
That means if you send a machine that's completely shut down, it will experience almost no degradation in thousands of years, except from whatever background cosmic radiation there is. Even that will only damage very delicate things, like DNA, possibly.
But as soon as you add some piece that must do something continuously for hundreds of years, that's an engineering challenge, even if it is as simple as maintaining a temperature.
I'm not saying it can't be done. But just getting the propulsion to work for a long time will be challenge enough. Why add an additional part that can break down in transit?
Anyway, it could be done, possibly. But wouldn't deep freeze cryosleep be a better solution to a long interstellar flight?
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Yes, my understanding is that this is one of the primary problems with the technology at present (the other being, "How can we mass manufacture machinery of this scale?"
, though apparently solutions are in the works (I believe one of the most common proposed solutions is to simply have the machine input net zero heat pollution by by taking some heat from it's surroundings for power and produce some of it's own heat. I have no idea how far-fetched or not that is; again, I'm not myself a proponent of crogenic sleep or nano-robotics).
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
I just don't see the heat problem as a real problem for nanotech. Sure, it rules out some of the more 'magical' applications that have been proposed, but think about it. Living cells are basically nano factories. Nano-scale DNA produces nano-scale RNA, produces nano-scale proteins, and out of it all pops a human or a tree, or pennicilin, or whatever.
People just need to get over the lame sci-fi nano-magic idea. Anything a biological being could conceivably do, a nanobot could do it, and probably better, given enough time to develop the technology. If you can imagine aliens that grow a diamond coating of armour exoskeleton, probably a nanobot could do it. If an alien could grow a house from sludge, probably a nanobot could do it. They're not going to give off massive heat for such basic applications.
For deep-freeze cryo, nanobots could ensure that the freezing human does not form damaging sharp-edged ice crystals, and they could aid the cells getting jump started on revival. You could just freeze the nanobots in with the human. No heat required during the trip.
(Off topic: The real problem with nanobots is their potential destructive power. The 'Grey Goo' problem being the equivalent of the nuclear holocaust of nanotech. Another example of Consumptionism, by the way.)
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Grey Goo: It's not the nanobots' problem, natural. It's yours.
Because only you can prevent Grey Goo.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
On the more serious side:
Well, frankly, a hypothetically advanced enough nano-robot industry is, essentially, as close to 'magic' as one can get. This is an area where the term 'super industrial' would live up to it's name: self-replicating machines able to refine and manufacture materials at the molecular level could do, essentially, anything. Enough assemblers could theoretically construct entire cities overnight, terraform planets in a matter of weeks or construct entirely new planets from space debris.
This, of course, is all in the realm of very distant technologcial achievement (at best).
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940