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An Interstellar Lifeboat for Humanity
cravey writes "From the people who brought you the Oceania project so many years ago comes the Lifeboat project. An attempt to create a spaceship for the purposes of saving the human race from the singularity predicted by Vernor Vinge. Lots of talk about nanotech accidents and biological accidents wiping out civilization, but it has a neat picture of the ship. :)"
By not exploiting the fears of man. This is the kond of project that will get you some funding. Or at least collaborating with Ben & Jerry to make some better dried Icream flavors.
that this got posted the same day "create a new life" stirred up tons of flames? From all the flames posted on /. today on both sides of the argument, one might think humans really don't have a clue about anything.
hmmm, a somewhat extreme suggestion, careful or you might just secure yourself a place on board.
Just a second... to save the race from the Singularity? The Singularity is a good thing. If you read Vinge's essay, or any of the other essays on the subject, you'll find that people look forward to this event and are actively trying to move the date forward. One fellow says that the definition of morally good is that which makes the Singularity happen sooner.
(There's a lot of interesting things at the Singularity Institute by the way.)
So either the poster is on crack, or ve represents a new and radically different perspective on the Singularity than I have ever seen in print. Which is it?
What would we do after we "evacuate" earth? Do we find a new planet to populate? I can't see anybody lasting long enough to get to a planet that is compatible with our biology.
Good idea, but this is about 500 years early. I don't think, even with an unlimited supply of money, humans could put a "station" into space, keep it in orbit longer then ~20 years, and have it GROW food to sustain an existing population, let alone new children. And also include a way to get back to Earth once the "disaster" is over. And somehow have enough energy for the needs of the crew, for many generations... etc etc. I think it would be easier to build a base on Mars -at least it's got something to build ON, and it's not going to crash back into Earth because they "ran out of fuel".
Am I the only one that thought "CULT!" when I read the title, and even moreso after reading the article? I mean, how often is this the staple of a cult? Well, suicide aside...
Danish != nationality
...said the man to Christopher Columbus.
Because it seems to be just as natural.
;-)
Its been that way throughout human history (throughout life's history?) -- when things got too crowded, too violent, too oppressive, too competitive, too boring, etc. some (usually the very rich and the very poor) moved on to look for new places with better opportunities.
And in general, it seems to pay off -- intelligence, and skill don't make people successful, getting there first with lots of friends does. It just makes sense, the competition is less, so what's needed for success is less.
But just like bacteria in a pitri dish, when we run out of room, we will die off. Sure there's too many people, but who's gonna volunteer to fall on the sword first? You? Stop breeding? You? For everyone who says "yes" all you will have done is take yourself out of the running, life doesn't seem to favor the self-eliminating.
But nature has the answer: We call them War, Famine, Pestilence, and Natural Causes. We still fear them as much as we ever did. There's a reason we call them the four horsemen of the apocolypse: Because they are nature's answer to "surplus inventory." There's also a reason why "celibacy" and "suicide" aren't included -- they don't have what it takes for mass population control -- if they did, nature would have promoted them by now.
So while your advice might be the rational answer, it doesn't seem to be the instinctive one, and whether we want to admit it or not, instinct and habit drive us much more than reason.
"A person is smart, people are dumb, panicy dangerous animals, and you know it." -- MIB
We've known it ever since we became self-aware. And its the arrogance of our self-awareness that makes us think we can change any of it.
So, go ahead change it I mean the question is so simple: "How does one change life into something its not?" We already know the answer -- its what we spend our "lives" trying to avoid.
We are agents of the free
The possible flaw is that by the time they get the technology necessary to live in space sustainably long-term, mature nanotechnology will be available. So at best, they will have a few short years in which to get ahead start. But more importantly, the speed in which they will be able to travel will more than likely be substantially less than c. And once the singularity happens all bets are off, but chances are nanobot probes will be heading off in all directions at close to the speed of light, which means their ship will more than likely get infected, unless this singularity is benign. But if it is Benign, then there is no reason for their escape in the first place. I do wish them the best of luck.
Planet P - Liberation with Technology.
www.enthea.org
Spaceship really not large enough. You might save the population of Christmas Island, and of course politics will rear its ugly head at this point.
Also, they're pushing security and escape. One idiot on the wrong trajectory, perhaps assisted by a bucketful of gravel, would put paid to their marvellous toy - hereinafter referred to as `the basket'. Better to build space elevators and have many baskets.
Better still, of course, to not bugger up our planet in the first place.
There are many grand schemes for bringing that about, but all of the make the same basic mistake (one way or another). They either assume that they're working with altruists (in which case any system would work and these idealists are already redundant), or that their subjects are all idiots (so they build idiot-compatible one-size-fits-all systems, which of course fail).
The only way that this can work is by changing basic human nature. And of course, we just left the sphere of materialism, welcome to religion, we hope you enjoy the life.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
What kind of small minded demon of impotence are you? If I really believed that we would never get off this planet, I would probably have to kill myself. Mankind's destiny is in the stars, and if it takes a hundred years or a hundred thousand, we will make it there.
If for no other reason, one day, Sol will die. I, or my intellectual heirs, plan to leave by then. You are welcome to stay.
We have a 5 billion year reprieve on that, so I am not too worried about that today, but I do think about it from time to time. And as a "real" scientist (as opposed to SF), I like to think I am doing a bit to get us to that point.
In the mean time, we still owe it to ourselves to work out the space travel thing (which I have no doubt we will). The universe a giant playground, and it seems kind of booring to spend our whole lives on one planet.
Okay, I apologize in advance if this is ill-informed (the site was already slashdotted), or redundant by the time I post this, but say for the sake of argument that we have a lifeboat. Where are we going to go with it? Are we to assume we've already terraformed countless other planets with suns similar to our own?
moto411.com
I don't know who said that first, but I read it here on Slashdot.
I like Vinge's fiction, but the Singularity thing strikes me as an apocalyptic/transcendent/eschatological scenario for people who can't stomach the Book of Revelation.
Face it: the real underpinnings of the "Singularity" are not any kind of hard science, but human yearning for redemption and transformation. All this talk about the growth of AI is a joke -- in fact most of the field of AI is a joke, since no one can even define what natural intelligence is, much less the artificial kind. And technological trends like Moore's Law are not in any way bound to continue, yet geeks treat them like scientifically proven laws of nature, and then extrapolate the emergence of an Ubermind.
The impulses behind religion -- a desire for collective change and a future utopia -- need not be manifested in traditionally religious ways. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, ostensibly anti- or non-religious people believed in a faith called Marxism, that promised an all-cleansing revolution and a workers' paradise. The "Singularity" nuts are just the latest iteration of this.
There's a term for the movement of people who want to cyborgize themselves, which escapes me at the moment (exomorphs? something like that). But I imagine there's a lot of overlap between them and the "Singularists."
Look, meat puppets, you are PART OF THIS ECOSYSTEM, you are stuck here in the mud with the rest of us.
Bull! We currently have the technology (assuming big bucks) to send multi-generational colonies to other star systems. Are you saying some "ancient spirit" will reach out and grab our asses back to Earth if we try? Been smokin' too much hemp perhaps.
Given what I call the "Moores Law of Terrorism" [1], eventually it will be possible to for a small group of people to wipe out the entire human species (via nukes, biokillers, nanokillers, etc.)
Why risk that when we can save at least *some* of our asses so that humans as a species survive rather than allow all 100% to die. (Note: It probably will not be me in the tin can.)
[1] The number of people who a small group of terrorists can kill doubles every X years.
Table-ized A.I.
Don't be ridiculous. What is more important RIGHT NOW - getting off the planet because it will be engulfed by The Sun in 5 billion years or saving vast tracts of the population from starvation when we already have more than enough food to feed them all!
Sure we may want to leave at some point, but if you are talking about saving humanity, there is an awful lot of humanity that needs saving right here first.
You call someone a "small minded demon of impotence" because you would rather save your own ancestors than the millions who will die this year alone due to intransigence on the part of rich nations? Well gee I guess the selfish gene is alive and well in your pool.
<fnord>OBEY</fnord>
Just one thing, an exponential curve doesn't have
a vertical part, it keeps getting more vertical for ever, but never form a vertical asymtote. To
get a true signularity the curve will have to be
of the form 1/(x-a)^q. Another words if progress
remains exponential we never get a singularity.
Sci-fi's are often uncannily accurate at predicting the future.
Uhm. Jules Verne, yes, he did predict things that did happen - well, submarines, and we did go to the moon. We didn't go to the center of the earth. I don't care about Googling for his other books right now.
Then we get to HG Wells... Wars with aliens, time machines, anti gravity, ...
Since then... None of the 20th century SF seems to have gotten the world around the year 2000 right. Cell phones are everywhere, personal computing is cheap and used for games, there's the Internet, and maybe we'll even finish the current space station in ten years. There is some cloning and biotech and we use it for medicine. There have been a few terrorist attacks, and now the whole world is obsessed with them.
Now what did SF tell us... Rockets! Space colonies! World War Three! One World Government! Aliens! FTL travel! And of course, flying cars.
My first guess is that SF has been performing less (at predicting the future) than you would expect of pure chance. But there have been great books :-)
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Why do you care about your heirs (or the heirs of mankind) 5 billion years from now? Even if they exist, they don't care about you...
If all there is to your life is "getting off the planet" for some distant descendant, then God help you; your life is meaningless.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
The goldern path is the idea that if you limit humanity to a closed system at least one path will lead to extinction. For instance if you take a long view of histroy we can safely say the humanity will go extinct... when the sun burns up Earth. Not much of a worry really but we can say it with absolut certanty. From this absolute we can argue the specifics.
We have to get off this fucking rock. We should honestly have no greater priority, except maybe not doing ireperable harm before we go.
Somehow the lifeboat seems um... a little small and isolated. I want the Niven's Ringworld / Bank's Culture Orbitals. No Halo Please I don't want the people who thought up Durandal making my habitat. I want billions of people per habitat. The only way to do that is spheres, nano or biological manufacturing, and a large source or raw materials. That and some balls. Oh yeah and a SHIT load of money.
-F34nor