[echelon]

I've always felt people with these ideas are doing pie in the sky thinking and missing the other trends that would beat this concept out.

Humans aren't suited for these environments. We evolved to fit this planet. These gasses, radiation levels, terrestrial foods, etc.

The economics of going to Mars, Venus, etc. are iffy, and humans probably won't enjoy being there. It's McMurdo times about 1000. Getting back is hard.

It's probably another hundred years before this is plausible with our technology and willpower.

You know what will do great in these environments? Robots that don't have biological weakness. That don't need cellular respiration or biochemical inputs.

We'll probably have gotten really far with robotics and AGI in those same 100 years.

Basically, space will be inherited by our successors. Artificial intelligences. Humans just aren't fit for these environments. Robots and AIs are perfectly adaptable, though.

Sci-fi sold us a fanciful picture of humans in space, because that's a fiction that is pertinent to our experience and is relatable. That isn't guaranteed.

[xg15]

Still having a soft spot for some cyber/biopunk future where we'll just eventually become the machines - or be able to bioengineer bodies which will be capable of overcoming those limitations :)

[veb]

I have a cochlear implant so I'm already half cyborg!

Still - I am surprised people aren't building on top of CI research/engineering to do _more_. When my processor is upgraded and I get bluetooth which I'd be able to not have to use headphones anymore during calls and such - I kinda wanna make a "hack" as in have an app on my phone that does some beep beep beep kinda thing when I'm facing north, less beeps south etc and see if my brain starts to know north or south without any aid.

I think I read something similar of someone who made a vibrating belt on hackaday that did the direction thingie and apparently it did work.

Fun times!

[ranched]

Check out “Livewired” by David Eagleman. It talks about the brain’s adaptability to various inputs and using technology to create new “senses”. I think I remember the directional thing being covered and it working to improve peoples sense of direction.

[smegger001]

I often wonder what will happen when artificial since organs are better that natural if we will see people getting replacement. I would love to have Bluetooth enabled hearing, or camera base eye prosthetics that see into other spectrum or have zoom function, or a overlay a heads up display.

[bobthepanda]

I played a very interesting scifi game that solved the “how do humans travel millions of light years” problem with “well, they’re actually clones produced at the destination planet.” I’d list the title but it is a pretty major spoiler.

[shagie]

I can't remember the name of the story, but I'm pretty sure that it was the last one in True Names and Other Dangers. It was told from the standpoint of an intelligent rocket ship that was launched because of an impending calamity. That ship (and many others) were long shot "lets see if we can find a life supporting world in the target solar system."

(late edit) - found it - "Long Shot" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collected_Stories_of_Verno...

> Description of a voyage from Earth to Alpha Centauri by an automated, AI controlled colony ship. The ship is launched as a "long shot" to preserve the human race because the Earth is going to be destroyed by a rapidly expanding sun. Ilse, the AI, carries human zygotes on a ten thousand year trip to search for a suitable planet around Alpha Centauri. Despite deteriorating hardware which causes her to "forget" the entire purpose of the mission, she is able to make inferences and use her remaining functional components to complete the mission. Vinge states his interest in writing a sequel depicting the lives of the humans born on this world.

Locations where it has appeared - https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?51200

It can be borrowed from archive.org:

https://archive.org/details/collectedstories0000ving/mode/2u...

https://archive.org/details/truenamesotherda00ving/page/n5/m...

[the_af]

Sounds very interesting, could you share the title anyway?

I once had an idea to write a collection of scifi stories with this premise, where every "seed" pod reaches a different planet and each society of clones evolves differently, providing a bunch of different stories related by a "framing" story.

[danbolt]

I think it’s Mighty Kaiju Deimos.

[bobthepanda]

That is a name of a piece of media in the game.

It's 13 Sentinels Aegis Rim. It is like 90% visual novel and 10% RTS.

[the_af]

> It is like 90% visual novel and 10% RTS

Ah! That's a pity. Visual novels infuriate me. But the idea was cool :)

[bobthepanda]

I don’t know that I’d call it a traditional visual novel. Or at least not the kind with really trite stories.

The way the story is structured, you unlock scenes where you just read the text, and occasionally make branching choices. But the scenes are not very long.

It’s also interesting in that it borrows from modern TV non-linear storytelling; you do not see the story in chronological order, nothing is as it seems, etc. If you’ve seen Netflix’s Dark, it is pretty similar in vibe.

[danbolt]

You need to keep taking your medicine if you want to get better, Juro.

[blamestross]

If we go anywhere it will be spun-up asteroids. O'Neill cylinders make more sense for a living platform than even earth does. Once we actually have orbital infrastructure, Planets are a horribly unsafe high-cost-of-travel backwater to live on.

[jtrip]

>Basically, space will be inherited by our successors. Artificial intelligences.

Ha ha, I love this. The sentiment has been there for a while now in the zeitgeist but had been overshadowed and outperformed by the lesser idea of 'Robots, and then AI, are coming and they are going to get us!' Finally, I don't know what section of human psychology is permitting it now, we are slowly and slowly coming to the understanding that AI will be humanity's child and will inherit the stars.

I wonder if we'll, as in individual us humans, come along for the ride or if we'll be laid to rest. Peter F. Hamilton and his contemporaries like Neal Asher sure have interesting thoughts on it.

[kbenson]

As long as the AI we create treat us with the love and respect we treat our pets with, we'll colonize everywhere, even if they have to clone us on site.

Oh, the breeds we'll see... or be.

[SuoDuanDao]

colonizing Venus with extremophiles that currently live in Terran ocean vents might be a good humanitarian (vivarian?) project. Life finds a way and all that, it'd be neat to offset the current great extinction with a new cambrian explosion on our sister planet.

[AtlasBarfed]

Cyborg convergence is basically a guarantee barring destruction of the species, I'd think. Especially once the billionaires get a taste for cybernetic life extension.