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'Curiosity' Lead Engineer Suggests Printing Humans On Other Planets
Jason Koebler (3528235) writes "Adam Steltzner, the lead engineer on the NASA JPL's Curiosity rover mission, believes that to send humans to distant planets, we may need to do one of two things: look for ways to game space-time—traveling through wormholes and whatnot—or rethink the fundamental idea of 'ourselves.' 'Our best bet for space exploration could be printing humans, organically, on another planet,' said Steltzner."
I'm certain we've mastered space-time enough to "fold around" before the "printing" of humans and incepting them with their old memory again is doable. Seriously.
But not until my $1,200 3d printer can print me a girlfriend.
just start building transporters or find star gates to use
I think there's a case to be made that genetically being human is far less important to being "human" than the shared culture we've developed. Organically laying out a clone of yourself is far less like yourself than raising an adopted child. This kind of program, while inspired, and theoretically plausible, doesn't actually achieve what we want to achieve.
Let's print up 20,000 Sarah Palin's on Orionis IV just for the hell of it.
Table-ized A.I.
Aside from the whole organic-3D-printing-of-entire-humans angle, this isn't a new idea. Arthur C. Clarke's The Songs of Distant Earth features an extraterrestrial colony of humans descended from machine-grown progenitors.
Conforming to einsteinian space-time, it will take more than a present-day human life span to get a printer and your scan to a nice(ish) planet.
Maybe we need to work on the lifespan.
I plant oak seedlings; most do not.
Verbum caro factum est
These are the people we have heading up space exploration? Sounds like he's more suited for making low budget sci-fi movies. Seriously, this kind of tech is so far beyond our capabilities it doesn't even pay to bring it up in a serious conversation.
The Rib he formd and fashond with his hands; /
Under his forming hands a Creature grew,
3D printers print you!
So, start with the magic, then?
I wonder how we go about printing humans on other planets or using wormholes.
Why, if only we had unlimited, non-existent technology, we could do practically anything.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
You don't have to print humans, just synthesize a memorized genome and throw it into an artificial womb. Done to death in SciFi literature and certainly within the means of 21th century technology. It's certainly interesting if a human raised entirely by a computer can really qualify as human.
And why do it ? Just to spread the human disease in the universe ? Why not simply send the artificial intelligence that is necessary anyway to make such a mission a success ?
Print me up a Scarlett Johansson
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Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Like_a_Dinosaur_(The_Outer_Limits)
I wish that people that are very, very smart on one particular subject or discipline would be a little more careful before they speak on matters outside of their area of expertise, especially on stuff as outlandish as what this particular individual has suggested.
I had an interesting conversation with a man that develops re-entry systems and the test-beds used to develop and test them. He was very down-to-earth on the costs associated with launching materiel; basically in his mind it was not practical at this point to enact the scenario that Kim Stanley Robinson created in his Mars trilogy. We don't have the launch payload capacity. We don't have the landing zone accuracy. Even the concept of the kind of machinery needed to create habitable environments on Mars is too great to budget for and the machinery itself is too hard to maintain without a support structure for that maintenance. We won't be operating D9 bulldozers on other planets.
It also came up that our country spent 4% of GDP in getting to the Moon six times. 4% of GDP let twelve men walk on the surface of another body for a few days. Without a nemesis country like the Soviet Union provided for us, there's no interest in committing any real money to getting us even back to the Moon, let alone to other planets.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I'm not sure how sending the "ink" and robots able to install the "printers" would be a better idea than just sending good old humans
Isn't there an episode where Fry downloads Lucy Liu to essentially "print" onto his date-robot?
And speaking of which, why aren't more resources being put into developing sex-bots? It could solve so many problems in this world if we could have robot slave girls to have sex with all the time.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I think we should print another Earth nearby just before we finally destroy this one. We can all hop over to it, then unprint the original.
I had the same exact idea, before the 3G/LTE and highspeed internet, I thought of sending humans via GPRS, but the poor connection might be a problem in actual production. But I was dissapointed to learn that somebody already thought of it but by sending copies of himself via Fax. Unfortunately, I could not find that link.
Now I'm picturing a Russel Crowe hologram waiting for the dot matrix shriek to finish before instructing the newly minted Last Son of Earth on our species' survival.
I can just see it. A billion years from now, on a planet a trillion miles away, the last remaining message from the human race will be displayed in black pixelated letters on a small rectangular display: PC LOAD LETTER.
Build seeding ships.
Literally a factory line of them, printing out ships and implanting them with seeding material.
Point them at any possible life-harboring planet. Or planets that could or may support life by the time it arrives.
Have an AI on board that could determine if the planet is capable of supporting humans, or life in general.
If yes, seed it. If not, leave the ship in orbit as a communication beacon to possible future species.
That also means having an extremely basic bridging language that any reasonably intelligent species would be able to interpret given they are now in space. (let's face it, the requirements to get to space require a very certain number of skills, which will have almost certainly came to fruition and/or evolved)
Just imagine, millions of humans all sat orbiting possibly dead planets, or living planets. They might outlive the entire human race in any form.
Equally if we are speaking so many decades in the future, we might even have the ability to create nanomachines.
We could possibly throw a couple trillion of them on board and actually terraform a dead-ish planet that could support life given the right pushes.
Nanobots infect the planet, they start finding resources they could use to build more of themselves, they replicate.
Then they begin building machines that would create a fusion reactor, use fusion reactor to generate the element ratios that work on our planet as well as power some huge greenhouse effect, or the opposite, to make the planet more stable. These might even be a permanent requirement depending on the planets location, might be too hot where it is, cool it using some cloud generators, bam.
But that just gets messy. So many details you'd need to consider.
One mistake and you could wipe out a whole species because an AI had a blindspot due to our limited knowledge.
3d printing and space flight.
Also, why do you all assume that this exact idea is not where humans on earth came from?
Would explain the missing links in evolution.
I'd hate to be the one who has to change the ink on that printer.
I find that Dr. McCoy's views on the safety of transporters are reasonable and founded in reality.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I don't know if printing is the right word. I think making test tube babies that are then raised by some kind of AI to be more or less human might be the closest we get. There is still a lot of technology that we need for that (artificial womb, an AI that would simulate some kind of social interaction) .
Most people would not go on a journey if they knew they had to spend the rest of their lives and next 500 generations' lives on that same journey.
I have posted this before: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
When the universe reaches maximal entropy everything will be dead. Humans, aliens, stars, everything. Admittedly this will not happen for a very long time but it does seem to be inevitable.
How many bits would it take to describe a human at a molecular level?
love is just extroverted narcissism
Yes, I have read The Songs of Distant Earth too.
I can think of some people I'd like to download, and after printing, upload.
per "How to colonize the galaxy in 8 easy steps."
What you need is two separate launch tracts. The way we launch now is a gentle acceleration until we have the height and momentum to go into free fall around the planet. This is necessary due to the fragility of our body's, passing the 9 to 12 G range things get biologically catastrophic pretty quickly.
For hardware and materials it's a completely different story. For the most part they can be designed or packaged to handle the G stress of a curve up a mountain at high speed allowing launch in to space by velocity gained on a non vertical trajectory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_sled_launch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch
This is the best idea the lead engineer on the NASA JPL's Curiosity rover mission could come up with? Find worm holes or send 3D printers to other planets. Ugh.
Old story from way back; a building has been found on the moon that contains a machine that kills people in many different ways throughout the strange building but always consistently. Almost like a mouse in a maze, the scientists figure out that if they can get through this death trap and map each method of death along the way they should be able to get further each time and eventually manage to travel out the other side. Of course it could take many lives to accomplish this so they devise a method of teleporting a copy of someone from the earth to the moon and taking a "backup" copy that shares memories with their counterpart so that when that doppelganger dies there is still a version left alive earth-side.
The only problem is that the sheer horror of each death causes the surviving copy to be driven insane, the human mind just not able to cope, that is until they find the reckless Al Barker who's courted death all his life. It's only then that the research makes any headway.
But...we must think like a dinosaur and balance the equation!
Computer - Portman, Natalie, naked and petrified, covered in hot grits
Just steer clear of those Sirus Cybernetics 3D printers. OMG.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
n/c
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
the cartridge would run out when it prints my wienus.
Mostly random stuff.
Well as the old internet meme goes, "one does not simply just start building transporters or find star gates to use."
One needs to solve the physics, engineering, and philosophical problems associated with building a transporter or one needs to carry out a large and possibly fruitless search for space time shortcuts.
And in the case of preexisting space time shortcuts, they may not necessarily be located in ideal locations.
Why not rethink the organic part too?
Some of us could probably make do with around 1000
I guess Mr. Steltzner just saw The Fifth Element recently.
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Page to complex
Way Station is a 1963 science fiction novel by Clifford D. Simak
Let's face it. When it comes to interstellar travel, we need to get beyond Newtonian physics. Einstein said space and time are persistent illusions, and we need to shake off that illustion, that's for sure. Perhaps quantum physics provides a clue to faster-than-light "travel", by using a self-same particle which exists in more than one location. I can imagine some pretty cool sci-fi about it already. The first step would be to devise a "quantum cable" by which a serial-chained quantum effect would happen along that cable all at once. Of course that wouldn't work for travel, but it would certainly open up new possibilities.
Sounds like he read Passengers to Sentience from Peter Salisbury
...so, Space Science is currently being defunded faster than the speed of light, the Americans can't even fly themselves to the ISS anymore (and have pissed off their only ride)....so instead of trying, instead of doing what we did in the 60's and finding a way to DO it...we're left with empty science fiction "speculation." Hell he might as well said "let's invent a Warp drive." Engage!
Oh well, when China gets to Mars it will give a whole new meaning to "Made in China."
After reading all comments so far and thinking of the concerns mentioned, printing humans onto another world for colonising purposes is really not a fearful thing to do. I will illustrate the simplicity of it by starting with artificial insemination and sperm donation. There is a sperm pool out of which we draw readymade zoids to fecund with an egg in an ovary, when we determine there is a need to do so. In the end, it all boils down to this bare fact.
Now, many if-s follow.. and we reach a point where if we have a world and if we want to colonise it and it is very close - less than 10ly away - then if we today happen to chose the moment when to 'start' the building of an embryo using readymade zoids and ovaries, can't this moment well enough be when the colony-ship lands on that world? .. the TimeSpan will kill the zoids and ovaries.... but then they are carriers of DNA. So basically, we don't need the ovaries and and the zoids, just a machine/biomachine to know how to imitate an ovary and another machine/biomachine to imitate the zoid. The embryo will contain the supplied DNA fed into the biomachines. Now, the database of the persons of these DNA samples would be no different than the databases of the existing sperm banks mentioned earlier.
If we would ever be capable of doing all this sci-fi, we would also be capable to build in advance a home, why, a village, waiting for the coming ocupants.
Otherwise, it is all well and good too. We just stay home.
... it is called SEX.. he obviously gets none.
When the universe reaches maximal entropy everything will be dead. Humans, aliens, stars, everything. Admittedly this will not happen for a very long time but it does seem to be inevitable.
If maximal entropy eliminates everything, we need to have an entropy tax now, before it's too late.
By Richard K. Morgan..... the whole concept is pushed even further but the basic idea is the same
same story also by Alastair Reynolds: Diamond Dogs
As the subject line indicates. Those humans that are 'created' on this other world would have no choice in their destiny; they would in fact be a slave, without free will to chose another life. Mind you, we are not talking about a child that is raised in the environment with his or her family.
From a technology point, it's completely doable with today's technology. Don't think about a 3D printer creating them there from scratch (we will cover that in a minute), but currently we could establish clones, are artificially conceived people that are shipped to another world, and raised in a incubation chamber at the destination.
As for 3d printing, it may very well be a better option, especially for worlds outside our solar system. The 3d printers could include local dna in the sequencing and could create a human with all the immunities required for that world.
It has long been theorized that aliens have been observing us on our world, and that they are probably constructs (genetically engineered life forms), designed to not get sick by our biosphere, nor to contaminate it, and better at seeing, hearing and remembering details, to learn about us. They would tag us, examine us and return us to our environment, much like we do with animals. And we could do the same on other worlds.
We're probably a lot closer to replacing our bodies with mechanical equivalents than we are to printing a complete person. The biggest challenge is the brain. If you replace everything surrounding the brain with prosthetics, then it may be much more practical to suspend the function of the brain for a long voyage than it would be for a whole body.
Or combine the ideas. Freeze a brain in a cyborg body. When you get a colony set up, print a uterus, implant frozen embryos, and then let the cyborg parent the first off-world generation.
On the one hand, the rational thinker in me says that sending ships to other places, where machinery will make humans, might be the only way that humans ever get out of here. OTOH, I want to see another planet with my own eyes. So, I think this is a good idea, but it makes me sad.
Beyond space exploration, we will need printed humans to fight against the Machines. The biggest problem with fighting AI is that they can reproduce faster than us. With printed humans we will even the odds. Of course, we may end up fighting a two fronts war: AI and printed humans.
the idea of consciousness is the main problem with simply printing humans with a specific memory. if you copy someone with their current memory... the copy is now a new person, with his own actions. the main body and the new body have completely separate life after creation. if the original dies, the new one carries on. the idea of copying someone to teleport them is unsolvable before we figure out how to deal with consciousness, because that isnt 'me' on the other side, that is someone else who looks like me and has my memory.
Send a printer to some uninhabitable planet and print people on there to die.
-AlPhAbEt
needlecast...
First, worry about 3d printing me a new pair of kidneys, THEN worry about printing whole people.
If you have the technology to get a printer to a planet light years away and replicate a full human on arrival, is cyro freezing really that much harder?
Why not send frozen eggs and sperm to the distant planet. Then when you get closer have the eggs and sperm thaw and create the growing embryo. Have a machine teach the children when they are growing up and hope they survive when they get there. Capatcha mutant.
Using the current state of Ink Jet printing costs as a benchmark, I'm sure the cost of the cartridges will *far* surpass the cost of the printer any mission to send them to another planet. It will probably be cheaper to simply buy enough humans to make the trip and keep them in storage to use as-needed.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The Human Printers will actually be fairly inexpensive to create. It's the Human Ink that will cost you an arm and a leg.
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom hasn't come up yet?
Coming to terms with what it might be to actually be human... printing ourselves and transferring a back-up to that body...
what does that mean? will consciousness go with it?
To me, consciousness is probably just an electronic current that holds us to our memory. The terrifying moment, even if I could replicate myself elsewhere, is,"What happens when I sever that connection and transfer over/" will I just die and a perfect copy keeps living on just as I was a moment ago, or do I go with it? *could anyone tell*? It is the stuff not just of the fear of death, but no one ever knowing that makes it a nightmare.
Sorry to post so dark... nice weather, huh?
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Adam Steltzner, the lead engineer on the NASA JPL's Curiosity rover mission, believes that to send humans to distant planets, we may need to do one of two things: look for ways to game space-time—traveling through wormholes and whatnot—or rethink the fundamental idea of 'ourselves
If he's that confident, then he should send himself first. If not, then he should shut the fuck up.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
there were a protein and amino acid (and enough time) for this to work!
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
This isn't We as in any individual with memories, personality, goals, culture, and values. This is We as in our abandoned children, perhaps brought up by an artificial intelligence. This is We as in the rest of our ecological support of plants and animals, fungus, and bacteria.
HP will make you install a plant cartridge just to use the human cartridge even if you never print plants.
Table-ized A.I.
Right now Charles Stross is steepling his fingers like and saying "Excellent...."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I've always said that, if Star Trek transporters were invented tomorrow, I wouldn't take one. The idea of having all of my atoms destroyed so other atoms could be reconstructed on the other side that would hopefully resemble me 100% seems creepy to me. Would the transported-me be the same as me? Would my consciousness move to the new me? Or would I cease to be with new-me taking over? This isn't even getting into the various transporter malfunctions that seemed to happen.
So what's worse than that? "We're going to destroy your atoms and then slowly 3D print you on the other side. We just hope that no 'paper jam' type situation occurs or else you might arrive in pieces. Don't worry, though. After the blinding pain and death, we can try again. And again. And again."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
3D printing is the future of manufacturing star gates.
If we're going to have to send a machine to do it anyway, why not start with a simpler organism? We can design a single-celled extremophile that would be viable on the target planet, then send a probe there to make them. Then all we have to do is wait a billion years or so for evolution to produce an organism that we could communicate with. Wouldn't the result be essentially the same?
Ah, so you subscribe to the homunculus theory of consciousness? That's not going to get you very far.
It it... LETTER?
That would be so hot!
HAND.
You can't even print humans on Earth, how are you going to print them on a distant planet?
First, we need fusion power, though. There's no getting to even Alpha Centauri without it.
Sperm + Egg + Developmental Biology Awesomeness = PERSON What more printing do you need? Just send the gametes.
soylentnews.org
He is a meat popsicle.
I'm not sure why printing would be necessary. If we have the ability to send an organic printer to a nearby star, wouldn't we also be able to send frozen embryos or sperm and eggs?
We can genetically engineer humanoids to survive on mars. They can be big, strong, blue, and have stomachs able to digest roughage, and as long as we don't treat them like slaves they'll never come back and start a war with us....
too obscure? :D
Only print the really hot and sexy ones. And while you are at it, print up a few 100,000 hot babes for me. Oh wait! This is NASA. Nuts And Stupid Arseholes.
Please! Obama killed off space travel. No get rid of this waste of human life known as NASA!
Just because humans can't reach the next planet as fast as they can drive cross-country, doesn't mean it's impractical to do so. People are just spoiled on cheesy sci-fi, where jumping from system to system only takes a few hours.
How long would YOU be willing to live in a space craft, in order to set foot on another planet? Or a planet in another solar system?
Wagon trains filled with settlers typically took 6 months just to travel from the eastern US to the west, at great expense, and they never planned to return. We can get to Mars in less time than that with current technology.
And as speeds improve to significant fractions of the speed of light, with solar sails, fusion, ramjets, and whatnot, it won't be long before interstellar hops only take a few years.
"If a spaceship could average 10 percent of light speed (and decelerate at the destination, for manned missions), this would be enough to reach Proxima Centauri in forty years."
There's lots of young people who are adventurous or have low enough standards to have such a life be an improvement, who would sign-up for such a 40-year trip. From there, a few generations later, another trip can be launched to the next-closest solar system. The cycle repeating ad-nauseum.
"even the 'slow' kind [of interstellar travel] nearly within the reach of Earth technology, would only take from 5 million to 50 million years to colonize the galaxy. This is a relatively small amount of time on a geological scale, let alone a cosmological one."
And when we reach 50% of light-speed, a trip to Proxima Centauri is only a 4 year jaunt. It might be a nice place to live, with the previous settlers having developed the infrastructure needed for comfortable human habitation.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I assume some hardware will be at the destination point. I am fairly sure once we figure out how to transport things over interstellar distances, moving these bags of meat and water won't really be a problem.
I also suspect once we can travel that far, the cosmos will bore us. Rocks tend to look the same everywhere. And perhaps other forms of life don't vary enough to keep our attention for very long. We will probably find more fun in trying to understand reality itself.
We will even don togas as we debate the unknowable.
Printing a human from DNA makes no sense, as sociability is what makes us human. Clones raises isolated from human kind will probably be a big awkward failure.
I think this idea is quite old. It used to be called teleportation as I recall. Anyway, with our present state of physics, this line of thought might be the path to follow. The aliens who are routinely visiting the Earth use supra-luminal vehicles to zip around the Cosmos. In time, we earthlings will have this tech. Some peeps think we already do. There is no doubt we need new unhindered ways of thinking about inter-galactic travel and the idea of printing humans is valuable in that regard. The way we travel now is so 20th Century.
The duplicates are mentally linked. That is the whole point - they need to communicate their findings to the duplicate as they go so that the next clone has all the knowledge.
Note that a similar idea seems to be the plot device for the latest Tom Cruise vehicle.
While you do have a point so does he - after all minature human kidneys are being printed now. It's not an infinite leap from there to printing babies in boxes and raising them with the help of some sort of mostly autonomus robot technology.
Besides, it's a "flying car" way out there sort of thing that is being discussed and not a near future trip to collect stuff from a near earth asteroid. Leeway has to be given for way out suggestions that will look insane in hindsight.
It infringes on many of their patents
There's now a distinct possibility that the eventual extinction of the human race will be caused by cheap third-party ink refills...
Worst. Signature. Ever.
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Spell it out: Teleportation. It is not impossible. Must first find an appropriate ecosystem. Need wormholes for both missions.
A possible wy of doing this is to download selected individual brains, nd send them as files only, without the need of an actual spaceship
aoaance at destination, such brains should occupy several alien individuals, as long as they have mobility and manuality and slowly develop the technology to create human clones with local resources, and , when ready, tranasfer the down loaded human brains. In this way no need to send not only real humans but even an unmanned starship tp colonize other planets. sound weird and politically incorrect?
Watch invasion of the body snatchers . this would be the same operation in reverse
I'm surprised no one has asked this yet:
http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/31146376.jpg
Would it not be pointless? How could the people on planet Earth gain any benefits from putting printable people on other worlds?
I know very few will probably read this but...
There is a curious problem in the physics of star gates. A universe where FTL travel is possible is pretty much incompatible with one where stable long distance worm holes are possible. (Stargate has both)
The basic problem is that while general relativity looks very good at sub-light speeds it becomes complete rubbish at faster speeds. In any sane FTL model space is impossible to fold- except on tiny or quantum scales. An FTL space also requires something called an FTL Simultaneity - but this is incompatible with relativities space time. The solution is to restrict space time to quantum scales (that is my solution). This also means that 'traditional' time travel is impossible because effectively time only exists as a point.
As for FTL travel itself - it may be possible but looks astronomically difficult. The real problem is that with an FTL model we go from knowing 99% of all physics to probably less than half. The current guess work about the nature of mass (real, imaginary, zero, etc) and so on seems to be wrong. For instance it looks like photons have imaginary mass, it also looks like we have to rewrite some rules for antimatter to have a new type with negative mass - which may just also be dark matter. We also get problems with the 'convolution filter' and context which makes simple looking questions like 'the speed of light' a nightmarishly complex issue. If you want to open Pandora's box the first rule is that a speed is a component of a vector.
The real truth though is that the FTL barrier stops looking like a simple impermeable wall and becomes something immensely complex that extends throughout physics. (the wave behaviour of light is an FTL interaction, magnetic fields are (look like) an FTL extension of electric fields, gravity becomes an FTL extension of ?? inertia, etc)
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..