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Choice of sublight spaceships?
Let's say a fleet of spaceships was about to leave for a nearby star, pehaps Alpha Centauri B. There are many of each type of ship. Would you want to go on a generation ship ( with countrysides and cities ), a sleeper ship, or a digital crew ship? Obviously, the digital crew ship would be the fastest, perhaps a laser sail at 0.5 c ( a two year trip ), the sleeper ships would be perhaps 10% c ( a 45 year trip ) and the generation ships at 5% c ( a 200 year trip ) however you would no longer have a body with the digital crew ship though you may share operating android avatars with others, however you could live in whatever virtual world that you'd like, the cryogenic ship would cycle a few months in suspension, a week out to recover from the genetic damage of cosmic rays but the ship would be more like a shopping mall with an obviously artificial hydroponic park. The generation ship would be with entire cities, country estates, there would even be an ocean ship with private tropical islands and an arctic ship plus you could travel freely between the many such ships in the fleet but you would live out your life on the ship. The difference in speeds means that the sleeper ship passengers could not visit the generation ships during their time off.
The power sources are clean Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors, the laser batteries for the digital crew ships are on the generation ships so the digital crew ships are dependent on the generation ships for propulsion, the sleeper ships are nuclear pulse propulsion ships with Uranium 233 bomblets replenished from the Thorium reactors so everything must be kept in working order so that you would produce enough bomblets to decelerate. The generation ships are nuclear electric with acres of plasma, ion and hall effect drives so they take decades to change speed and are under constant propulsion. With both the sleeper and generation ships, you can be digitally stored after your death and perhaps broadcasted ahead to the digital ships if they have memory space so it's unlikely unless your services are needed, likewise you could enter cryogenic suspension on the generation ships though you would still be on the generation ships, but there would need to be good reason to be allowed to do so.
Which would you choose?
Note: There is no guarantee of a habitable planet at the desination, in all likelihood colonization would be in O'Neill Cylinders, Bernal Spheres and Stanford Torus's built out of asteroids in the new planetary system. Habitats very similar to the generation ships.
Note: I should perhaps add, this is the early days of computer uploads. The digitization is by slicing your brain and photographing each layer so you're killed in the process. Countless copies of you would run in excruciating pain while the interface is worked out and of course terminated. When not needed, you may simply be terminated without saving and just restarted from scratch when needed. There would be no civil rights yet for digital people. Of course, you would be none the wiser of the abuse you may be subjected to, or at least each execution of you would be none the wiser and any that were would be terminated.
Interesting, I'll have to read the Brenda Lynn Jones stories soon. Multiple copies of digital intelligences are something that will happen, indeed once you have one working intelligence perhaps from the neural network of many cadavers, it would only have to be copied and modified to meet any required function so perhaps no one would ever be digitised other than the first composite of cadavers. It may take god like powers to ensure a digital copy is exactly like the living original but we can slice brains and photograph the connections between cells and then hopefully undo or replace the damage of death, the result may not exactly be the original person but it may be able to do what's needed. Despite the promises of eternal life in a technological singularity, I'm not sure one would want to be digitised before living a natural life and I'm not sure there would be the opportunity to be digitised except for the rich simply because digital intelligences can be duplica
4 Answers
- PaulaLv 78 years agoFavorite Answer
Note that at 0.5c a 4.3 light year trip takes 8.6 years, not 2 years.
But that raises another possibility for the trip.
I'd like to go in :
4) a Faster Than Light (FTL) craft
The advantage is that the whole trip would only take 2 years -- or less
5) a Time And Relative Dimensions In Space ship (TARDIS)
That way the the trip can take a negative amount of time
That's going to be an advantage when I go to the Andromeda Galaxy. I'll be able to go there - and back - in no time at all.
I guess that
3) a generation ship is the only realistic way of ever making the trip
And I'd estimate that such a vessel could be built in under 2000 years. So no one alive is going to get a berth.
- ?Lv 68 years ago
In the Brenda Lynn Jones science-fiction stories, digital copies of herself and human colonists are sent from the solar system to M, K, and G type main sequence stars having planets that are either habitable or can be made so without too much trouble by Brenda (who for genetic reasons is a goddess of the Greek/Roman mythology sort). The copies are inert, like computer files, until the spaceship carrying them reaches its destination. Then a computer "wakes up" Brenda, who takes over the decision-making from there.
The original Brenda Jones never leaves the solar system. She just makes copies of herself and puts them on her starships, with copies of such other humans as she deems worthy of propagation (always including a copy of her best-friend-forever Ruby Pierce), plus a selection of most of Earth's plant and animal life, power-generation systems, useful gadgets, hand-tools, building materials, lots of books, and generally everything a colony might need to get started.
(A detail. In space, cosmic rays can sometimes corrupt digital files. Therefore each item carried in digital form by a starship is carried redundantly, with seven copies of each item. After arriving, a computer sorts out the correct pattern for Brenda Jones by comparing every last bit and byte between the several copies, letting the plurality or the majority of them decide what the truth is, then moving on to the next sector or whatever.)
But without somebody like our young Goddess of Light, Guardian of the Life of Earth, Empress of the Solar System, etc., to manage the job of encoding people and things into digital form and figuring out how to re-materialize them therefrom, I'd say that generation ships were the way to go. Most likely they'd be mobile O'Neill cylinders boosted by fusion rockets at the end of a long boom.
- 8 years ago
Digital crew any day. I would upload my brain to a computer first chance I got. The length of the trip hardly matters when you can never die. There's always a backup somewhere. Eventually robotics would become sophisticated enough that an android body would be indistinguishable from the real thing. If you even wanted a frail human body anymore.
- 8 years ago
If digitally downloading your "self" actually worked, I would choose that. Hell, I'd choose that even if I was to stay on Earth. Also, if we are able to download ourselves, then, eventually, we should be able to upload our consciousness into another vessel.
