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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. :)"
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?
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
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."