Augmented Astronauts Needed for Deep Space Missions

A random reader writes "IEEE is carrying a story about how 'extended space missions' may require a little forced evolution, or BORGIFYING. Humans must have additional abilities via implanted technologies (repair bones, monitor radiation levels). Machines must become more organic (fixing themselves, etc)."

Comments

Not just for space

[ben_of_copenhagen]

Theres some bizarre psychology in this that i just dont get.
What about augmenting people just for general health reasons - not fluffing about in deep space (fascinating as it may sound).

Every day thousand of people die because one of their cardic valves cave in or because they cant react fast enough in traffic. The former should be easy to monitor with a simple implant that might also be able to medicate the patient before dialling 911 and dumping gps data and medical stats to the paramedics. The latter is about enhancing reflexes.

Im sure the common /.'er could come up with a handfull of other augmentations that would be nice - or indeed lifesaving to have.
And i think we will see a lot of those before we see people walking on mars.

Re:Not just for space

[danila]

That's just another illustration. When journalists write about new sub-$1M submarine, they talk about using it to fight terrorism. When they talk about augmentation, they speak about space flight. When they talk about research in anabiosys, they again speak about space flight and ignore other practical uses (cryonics). The reason is that most people are idiots and they can only react to keywords (). So journalists take a new item, think a second about appropriate category and add required keywords.

Personally, of course, I am sure that once the technologies are developed, they will very soon be applied to medicine and entertainment. We will have all that agumentations simply because we want them. The real problem is that because most people do not understand this yet, the funding for R&D is lower than it should be.

This is the wave of the future.

[Musc]

I think that the idea of artificially enhancing ourselves with technology is the right approach, but the BORG technique of implanting high-tech computerized devices seems the wrong approach. Basically, this would open up our very bodies to hackers. By now we should all be aware how very difficult a problem computer security is. Personally I feel that computers and networks can never be made secure, and thus we should stop trying. Just imagine the inevitable result when some black-hat cracker breaks through the encryption protecting your enhanced liver, and proceeds to turn it into 'reverse', whereby it spews toxins into your bloodstream? Compound this with the fact that probably our bodies will be running Microsoft operating systems, and you see why this is the wrong approach.

The correct way to enhance ourselves is the technique outlined by Science Fiction Author Larry Niven. In variou Niven novels and short stories, the characters can live for hundreds of years by means of organ banks. If you lose an arm, use nanotechnology to put on a new arm. Of course, this will require two developments: improved nanotechnology, and the development of organ banks for all body parts. Probably this will lead to the death penalty becoming the standard punishmnent for every minor crime, so as to keep the organ banks full of fresh organs, allowing rich people to live forever at the expense of everybody else.

I hope this happens within my lifetime, as it is a Utopian scenario indeed.

that mostly goes to show that...

[penguin7of9]

IEEE is going downhill. I mean, what a fluff piece.

To the degree that "augmentation" is going to happen, it's going to happen for medical purposes here on earth: drug delivery, joint replacement, osteoporosis treatment, etc.

Re:that mostly goes to show that...

[Anonymous Coward]

As a card carrying member of the IEEE, I hope to all creation that this is just pure hyperbole. It seems redundant to state that an organization of engineers is obsessed with sci-fi. Come on, most people that aren't interested in it are just not true radio men. (a term, well before the PC (not player character, perverse child, or personal computer) revolution.

Android evolution

[Uncle Barnard's Star]

The human body is simply too costly to transport. It requires too much insulation and for the amount of work it does (like listening to the same old mp3s over and over) requires too much fuel. Why not just transport the brain, say by transplanting it into an artificial body that is able to go on a space walk without a space suit. The artificial body becomes the space suit.

I see the perfection of evolution as the encoding of the human brain onto an Nth generation processing and storage system. For sociological and perhaps aesthetic reasons the system could be housed in the familiar human bipedal form but at a much smaller form factor. A two-foot high android with a human's memories and thought processes is exponentially more transportable than placing the same human in deep freeze.