Alien Intelligence

[tomBitonti]

I'd like to take this in a different direction.

If humans *cannot* go to these places, why bother spending the resources to develop, build, and launch such a sophisticated machine?

Humans may be unsuitable for the crossing, but maybe can be created on the far side. If we can send an artificial womb, and if we can send data across that much time and space, and if a human raised by hybrid intelligence could acquire our accumulated knowledge, then the journey could still be worthwhile.

If sophisticated machines could be sent, they might be able to send back information, and that might make the journey worthwhile.

We might also eventually create capable cyborgs which would be adequate to the crossing, and while the crossing might not be worth our doing, it might be worth theirs.

Thx!

TomB

 

[Umbran]

Humans may be unsuitable for the crossing, but maybe can be created on the far side.

I think this still qualifies as humans making the crossing. You have humans at either end, so unless they teleported, they must have crossed the intervening space.

Same goes for cyborgs.

If sophisticated machines could be sent, they might be able to send back information, and that might make the journey worthwhile.

This is the one that I question. We are talking efforts to create a machine that are, quite frankly, akin to reaching the technological singularity. The cost would be... astronomical (pun intended). The time to get payoff on that investment would be long compared to the lifetimes of nations. The information would have to be ... stellar in order to make the expenditure worthwhile, especially given that much of the information would turn up to be academic, without any practical application for humans.

And I'm saying this as a person who *loves* science.

 

[Umbran]

Wouldn't it be nice to know that we'll get there someday?

I, personally, take no comfort in such a Pyrrhic achievement. "We slung a machine here, but died out anyway," isn't much of an epitaph.

Otherwise, what's the point of all that science. We might as well just go back to being hunter gatherers.

As I noted, the point of "all that science" is that we don't generally know which bits of it will turn out useful. I am positing a scenario when we have better knowledge of what is or isn't useful.

But, you do raise a good point. There have been those who have questioned - if we cannot make it to the stars, if the Universe really is too hostile for us to spread at least through our own galaxy, maybe giving it all up and becoming hunter-gatherers isn't such a bad idea.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I'd like to take this in a different direction.

If humans *cannot* go to these places, why bother spending the resources to develop, build, and launch such a sophisticated machine?

Scientific exploration for the sake of exploration is actually based on the idea that you can never tell what piece of information will be useful. However, if we are admitting that humans are forever trapped in this one solar system, we are also admitting that much of the information gained will be moot, as we won't ever be interacting with any system other than our own. We might be as well or better off just using what remote data-gathering systems we can (telescopes, and such), and otherwise saving the resources to directly understand the system we have and have a chance of interacting with.

I don't think we will ever be in a position where we can categorally say that we will not get any information that will be useful to us. Maybe we need some robots to look more closely at a particular stellar object, say a black hole, to solve a theoretical question on which we can base another project that will help humanity. Say, if the data supports theory A, we can start working on a giant, century long project that will cost us most of the resources we can acccess, but when done, we reach a significant milestone. But if we're wrong, doing the project would mean our predictable demise because we just blew all our resources.


One of the "fun" aspects of a generation ship that has to work for centuries or millennia is that we aren't even sure that the "generation ship" we're on will work that long for us. Will our society break down? Will we ruin the ecosphere beyond the ability to sustain us?