[baxtr]

Maybe not humans, what about robots though?

I recently read this in an interview with Juergen Schmidhuber:

> Of course, such life-like hardware won't be confined to our little biosphere. No, variants of it will soon exist on other planets, or between planets, e.g. in the asteroid belt. As I have said many times in recent decades, space is hostile to humans but friendly to suitably designed robots, and it offers many more resources than our thin layer of biosphere, which receives less than a billionth of the energy of the Sun. Through life-like, self-replicating, self-maintaining hardware, the economy of our solar system will become billions of times larger than the current tiny economy of our biosphere. And of course, the coming expansion of the AI sphere won’t be limited to our tiny solar system.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44330850

[rakejake]

Or humans with their consciousness uploaded to a silicon or other substrate.

Of course, this is in the realm of science fiction but so is interstellar travel.

Greg Egan's Diaspora has a fantastic treatment of interstellar travel - it involves sending copies of your consciousness to different spaceships traveling to different destinations. On arrival, a preset program will verify if the planel/galaxy is worth waking up to. If not, the clone is terminated.

If more than 1 clone wakes up in a hospitable environment, then you have a problem of two copies of yourself separated by light years.

[db48x]

In Diaspora that wasn’t considered to be a problem. Merging two individuals was almost automatic once you’d both decided to do it, and everyone participating in the Diaspora had decided ahead of time whether they wanted to sync back up at the end of it and merge. Also, it was fun that different individuals chose different conditions for waking up, and some stayed awake for the whole trip, or even all of them. Good book.

[sdpy]

A similar idea appears in a more recent short story, How It Unfolds (2023) by James S.A. Corey. The premise is using a technology called “slow light,” which can clone people and objects using “enriched light.” The National Space Agency scans a group of 200 people (not only their physical forms, but also their consciousness, memories, and feelings) and transmits several thousand copies of this data package across the galaxy. The hope is that, on arrival, each package can "unfold" into a fully reconstructed version of the original team and habitat on some distant alien world.

[soco]

But why would we bankrupt ourselves sending those robots at all? Although, if AI takes over in a way or another, who knows what they recommend/decide.

[baxtr]

I’m sure if you ask ChatGPT often enough it’ll recommend exactly that!