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. :)"

Comments

an interesting calculation

[dollargonzo]

i saw once, was to show that it is indeed impossible to save the entire human population. basically, the amount of people we can take off the planet every day is nowhere near the level of population growth. so, even if you can get a few million off the planet, 99% of the people currently on earth will be still living on earth, and any large scale disaster will still wipe out almost the entire human race if we do not prevent it. sure, maybe the human race itself will survive, but it will most likely not be sufficient to maintain itself, and will just die out anyway.

Re:Save humanity from the Singularity?

[Galvatron]

Huh, I'm not sure it's a GOOD thing. Isn't the idea that it's an unpredictable thing? As I understand it, the theory is that beyond the technological singularity, human society (if it even exists) will be radically transformed. So, as a person born before the singularity, I probably wouldn't like it. Just as many of our grandparents, raised in a time when homosexuality was considered morally equivalent to incest or bestiality, are sickened by the Gay Pride parades, many of us would probably be sickened, frightened, or at least strongly morally opposed to the social norms that arise on the far side of the singularity. Be it cybernetics, cloning, genetic engineering, AI, vat grown fetuses for stem cell harvesting, or God only knows what, there's almost certain to be a technology we will one day use that makes you uncomfortable.

I'm not sure running away is the right answer, but I would be cautious in calling the technological singularity a "good thing." Those who are a product of it will likely consider it one, but those of us who precipitate it likely will not, and will long for the "good old days" from before the singularity.

Anyway, the guy in the article isn't afraid of the singularity, as such, he's afraid of the dangers that might arise (accidentally or through terrorism): grey goo from nanotech, killer diseases from bioengineering, Terminators from AI, and so forth. The singularity will simply accelerate development of these technologies (and hopefully, ones to counter the dangers, too).

`Fiiiii-bre!' -or - `When elevators come down'

[leonbrooks]

If you have a space elevator [...] and the ground point of the elevator becomes un-teathered (e.g. no longer attached to earth) what happens?

Not much, unless the design deliberately called for it to be under tension. The things are in orbit, after all. Some designs call for the `tower' base to be mobile (a ship). It's not really a tower, it's really a bridge anchored on nothing (from the middle out).

Breaking it in the middle would be a bit more disastrous. The bottom half would whiplash around the planet (or maybe the bottom tenth, quite a lot would burn up and/or shatter as it re-entered), and what happened to the other half would be highly dependednt on stuff like where the Moon was at the time.

Terrorist attacks would not be easy to carry off; the elevator would be a very thin low-visibility target to hit, and air defense would be relatively simple. Some quite small computer-co-ordinated guns on the travellers would prove quite lethal to aircraft and missiles alike, and I imagine that provision would be made for directing and focussing the lift laser against larger and/or slower targets. The designs that I've seen would be immune to meteor strikes up to quite sizeable impacts (they're curved - like a tape measure - so even a side-on strike would get at most half of the fibres).

Terrorist attacks against space colonies would be much more of a problem. From orbit, a rocket the size of two soft-drink cans could loft a couple of kilos of small ball-bearings into a widely dispersed cloud on a collision course with a colony. This would be very difficult to even detect, let alone parry or dodge.

Terrorist attacks on ground targets from orbit would also be a worry. `We have many rocks, Man.'

Hmmph

[malachid69]

I was an active member of Oceania, and still believe in the principles... However, I am not so sure about joining any project run by Eric. Though he seemed like a nice guy, he flaked off without telling anyone what was happening or where their money was going.

I love this quote, in relation to the fact he hasn't replied to anything Oceania in YEARS:
"Eric Klien, founder of Colossus, Inc., a web hosting company since 1995 and founder of The Atlantis Project, an ambition made obsolete by current events."

He may be on the up-and-up, but from past experience with Oceania, I have to personally assume that it is a scam.

Malachi