Interstellar Travel by Medicine rather than Propulsion

[Jonfliesgoats]

There are surprising advances being made in locating and controlling the genetic factors behind human aging, cancer, etc..  If, in the future we see human lifespans range up to 200 year, it is entirely possible that fifty to one hundred year journeys at .1 to .2c become a possibility.  Freeze-drying or hibernating a crew becomes less important than having a room full of plants and animals, a room full of music and shag carpet, etc.  An interstellar, multi-decade flight to a nearby star with a long-lived waking crew may require the skills of great architects and artists as much as engineers and aviators.  My ideas are recycled from others, of course.  the point is the future is odd and we rarely predict things accurately. 

Next time we are drinking scotch and discussing flight, space flight and the near-religious commitment we have to these things, let's shift our attention away from propulsion for a night.  Some of the sillier ideas for soaceflight may be closer to fruition than "serious" spaceflight ideas.

Also, snacks.

[kerbiloid]

(First thought it's about hippies...)

[p1t1o]

Honestly the Kerbals have it great. Imagine if humans were only 3 feet tall. Less mass straight off the bat, combined with less mass required for habitation space, supplies, waste storage and management, less power required (for waste processing, light/heat and other environmental factors etc) less radiation shielding needed, hell, a smaller body intercepts less radiation anyway. All things which are problems gets smaller.

Its possible that we may be able to reduce the size of humans by simple selective breeding without any fancy genetic tinkering.

[Jonfliesgoats]

Whoa!  I like the idea of ancient, space dwarves!  All my lawn gnomes (I have fifty!) are monuments to our future, interstellar pioneers?!

[cantab]

It's a fair point. Physicists and engineers typically dream up space missions based on current human needs and limits, but it's wrong to assume those needs and limits will always be the same. I've previously raised a similar issue regarding the supposed difficulty of radiation shielding on interplanetary travel - if cancer becomes an easily treatable disease then modest amounts of radiation are no big deal.

[kerbiloid]

A hivemind would easily solve the ethical problems of modification and selection.
Any body would be just a non-individual cell of the multi-body. Biological lifespan would not limit the mind lifespan. Casualties would not be a tragedy, but just a weight loss.

Of course, they can implement a hivemind with dwarves, why not.

[KAL 9000]

17 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

A hivemind would easily solve the ethical problems of modification and selection.
Any body would be just a non-individual cell of the multi-body. Biological lifespan would not limit the mind lifespan. Casualties would not be a tragedy, but just a weight loss.

Of course, they can implement a hivemind with dwarves, why not.

But if we create a hivemind of human beings, everyone would lose their individuality and free will... Do we want that?

Edited November 2, 2016 by Red Iron Crown

[kerbiloid]

3 minutes ago, KAL 9000 said:

But if we create a hivemind of human beings, everyone would lose their individuality and free will... Do we want that?

We have mass culture and internet for that. A half century later you will be able to predict everyone thoughts as your own. A century later you will just not realise any difference between your bodies.

[Red Iron Crown]

Tidied up the thread a bit, surely we don't need to get into eugenics and totalitarian regimes from WW2.

[Bill Phil]

On ‎11‎/‎1‎/‎2016 at 1:24 PM, KAL 9000 said:

But if we create a hivemind of human beings, everyone would lose their individuality and free will... Do we want that?

Does that actually necessitate a lack of individuality? One could argue we already have a hive mind, in the form of mass media. Yet we still have individuality. Also, one could argue that free will doesn't exist regardless. One could argue the opposite, of course.

[KAL 9000]

18 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

Does that actually necessitate a lack of individuality? One could argue we already have a hive mind, in the form of mass media. Yet we still have individuality. Also, one could argue that free will doesn't exist regardless. One could argue the opposite, of course.

I believe that free will exists. The human brain is so complex and has such raw processing power that it is probably capable of consciously altering its own quantum state, which counts as free will.

[Vanamonde]

Sciencey-type discussion moved to the Science sub-forum. 

[magnemoe]

On 1.11.2016 at 3:54 AM, kerbiloid said:

(First thought it's about hippies...)

LOL, becoming so high you go interstellar, first step would be to wake up on the ISS:) This should secure more funding. 

More realistic its lots of research now into life extension, makes sense as nobody like to grow old and die. 
On the other hand say we managed to stop aging totally, think Tolkien elves. You would still be stuck with the technical problem with generation ships for slow travel, you would have solved most of the social ones as long as you avoid cabin fever for the crew. 

Edited November 4, 2016 by magnemoe

[Jonfliesgoats]

You know I was thinking about the Tolkien elves specifically.  Reproduction would be checked with contraceptives and changing sexual habits.  I think a bigger issue is the perception of time.

I think, as we age, time seems to pass more quickly because each hour and day is a progressively smaller fraction of our lives.  So, a long-lived crew may view a journey of decades like we view a deployment of years.  On the other hand, if at some point our perception of time stops adjusting, cabin fever can become an even greater threat.  From personal experience, extended deployments become struggles not just in monotony but in seeing the same people day in and day out.  Something similar to a cruise ship in space may be necessary rather than luxurious.

With long lives, we may see a paradigm shift.  Perhaps our interstellar travelers will view themselves as citizens of their ships and visitors to new worlds?  That identification of the ship as home may offset some frustration.  I don't view myself as a citizen or member of my home town.  Maybe some similar indoctrination would be useful?

[Nuke]

short hop colonization is probibly the way to go, with travel distances < 10ly. at 0.1c that puts travel time < 100 years real time (ship time significantly shorter). if successful and you end up with a thriving colony, a few hundred years later they might very well send out another short hop colony. you might see one or two generations with some of the original voyagers alive when the ship reaches its destination. thats probibly your best bet for propagating the human race throughout the galaxy. long haul trips taking hundreds or thousands of years start leaning towards nonviable, because you cant be sure that subsequent generations will want to continue the mad quest that they originally started out, of course by that time the option to return home is likely long sense expired.

[Stargate525]

Assuming we'll keep our bodies at all.

It's entirely possible we'll be able to upload a map of our consciousness for the journey, make the trip either in standby or playing War Thunder, and then get downloaded into a freshly-grown tank child during the last fifteen years of the trip.

Forget the space dwarves; a zygote is much, much smaller.

[DBowman]

I don't know that long life helps with the biggest problem, if people need more mass to make it bearable then it would even be counter productive.

0.1c is 1,200 x faster than Juno, our current record holder (with gravity assists so we cannot even claim all of it). Kinetic energy = (m*v²)/2 so a kg at 0.1c has 1,440,000 * the energy of Juno. 'there is your problem' even if we knew how to do it it's 'more than a million times harder' than the thing we've only half done for a 1,500 kg.

Maybe there is scope for making us smaller - biology is awesome and mind blowing but is also the result of 4.5 billion years of kludges, leftovers, and broken copies of stuff that turned out to be useful for something else. Hawks see much better than us in part because we grow our blood supply between the incoming light and the light detectors - oops. There could be all sort of opportunities to to re-engineer and shrink the brain, even without understanding how it does what it does.

Seven halvings of human dimensions, say a 1.5 cm human rather than 1.85m  would bring the kinetic energy per person down by a factor of a couple million.

[Jonfliesgoats]

There was another thread regarding midget astronauts somewhere too.  I am not opposed to selecting jockeys for space travel.  It is also conceivable that we could reverse certain aspects of the growth process to shrink prospective astronauts.

[kerbiloid]

And make them square-shaped. like Kerbals.

P.S.
Height of a sitting Kerbals with a seat is more or less the same as of standing Kerbal.
And if presume 1.875 is 2.1 m (Soyuz, Gemini), while 2.5 is 2.9 m (VA TKS, MOL), a sitting Kerbal ideally fits the spaceman place if you put the Kerbal screenshot onto a, say, Gemini blueprint.

Edited November 4, 2016 by kerbiloid

[KAL 9000]

7 hours ago, Stargate525 said:

Assuming we'll keep our bodies at all.

It's entirely possible we'll be able to upload a map of our consciousness for the journey, make the trip either in standby or playing War Thunder, and then get downloaded into a freshly-grown tank child during the last fifteen years of the trip.

Forget the space dwarves; a zygote is much, much smaller.

No, we'll be playing KSP!

[todofwar]

12 hours ago, Jonfliesgoats said:

You know I was thinking about the Tolkien elves specifically.  Reproduction would be checked with contraceptives and changing sexual habits.  I think a bigger issue is the perception of time.

I think, as we age, time seems to pass more quickly because each hour and day is a progressively smaller fraction of our lives.  So, a long-lived crew may view a journey of decades like we view a deployment of years.  On the other hand, if at some point our perception of time stops adjusting, cabin fever can become an even greater threat.  From personal experience, extended deployments become struggles not just in monotony but in seeing the same people day in and day out.  Something similar to a cruise ship in space may be necessary rather than luxurious.

With long lives, we may see a paradigm shift.  Perhaps our interstellar travelers will view themselves as citizens of their ships and visitors to new worlds?  That identification of the ship as home may offset some frustration.  I don't view myself as a citizen or member of my home town.  Maybe some similar indoctrination would be useful?

I always figured we have limited memory space, which is why as we age it gets harder and harder to remember things. It might be necessary, unless we figure out how to shove terrabyte hard drives into our heads, to start purging memories as we age to avoid problems. And this purging would mean you only ever have about 60 to 70 years worth of memories as you think of them now, with the rest being only accessible the way you access photo albums of a stranger. In that situation, time would only pass as quickly as it does for someone in their 60s. 

9 hours ago, Stargate525 said:

Assuming we'll keep our bodies at all.

It's entirely possible we'll be able to upload a map of our consciousness for the journey, make the trip either in standby or playing War Thunder, and then get downloaded into a freshly-grown tank child during the last fifteen years of the trip.

Forget the space dwarves; a zygote is much, much smaller.

This gets into what is consciousness though. Are we sending a robot that thinks like us, or sending a continued consciousness? If the former, it's no better than a fancy probe and we might as well focus and developing really awesome androids to send. If the latter than we will be able to travel back and forth at will, the ship travels at 0.2C and we can go back home at 1C and back to the ship at 1C. Though, the limited bandwidth involved would probably make such transfers perilous. 

[Jonfliesgoats]

Consciousness and space travel, many people suggest uploading our consciousness into a computer or clone.  The nature of consciousness is confusnig, however.  If we look at teleportation devices, we think Captain Kirk steps into a device, is converted to energy and rematerializes somewhere else.  What is his experience?  Does his consciousness move with him or is there a last, terrible joke?  Is the transporter a suicide machine, pure and simple with a cheap replica of Captain Kirk materializing elsewhere with all of his memories and personality traits?  The experience of someone entering the transporter could just be one of a surprising and agonizing death, and we would be none the wiser.

A similar consideration exists with putting your consciousness into a hard drive.  One consciousness would experience emerging into a new reality.  Another you would simply experience putting a thumb drive into a machine.

My point is that extending our memory with extra SD cards for our skull is no big deal.  Transferring our consciousness would really get at some fundamental physics that we don't understand yet.  And, yes, it's physics and math.

I really enjoy where y'all have gone with this discussion!

Imagine you are in the losing end of a consciousness transfer device,. You think transferring your mind to a robot will allow you to see universe.  You do this and you lose a roll of the cosmic dice and you only experience plugging some wires into a device.  That's it.  Another version of you experiences the universe and comes back much more interesting, wise and astute than you ever can hope to be confined to your terrestrial life.  He is, for all purposes, you.  Your wife leaves you for you, which isn't cheating.  Your kids love you better than you.  You can see, in this conundrum the birth of malevolent doppelgängers.

 

 

[YNM]

Thought at first this was about whacking the mind off to think such things

On 11/1/2016 at 7:47 AM, Jonfliesgoats said:

...  it is entirely possible that fifty to one hundred year journeys at .1 to .2c become a possibility. ...

TBH now it's not even really that feasible. So probably propulsion + biological advances needed from today's condition.

Or, we can just send a probe and let the operator do a VR on it ?

[shynung]

3 hours ago, YNM said:

Or, we can just send a probe and let the operator do a VR on it ?

Lightspeed lag, if we're talking an earthbound operator. Horrible ping times.

[Nuke]

On 11/3/2016 at 9:54 PM, DBowman said:

I don't know that long life helps with the biggest problem, if people need more mass to make it bearable then it would even be counter productive.

0.1c is 1,200 x faster than Juno, our current record holder (with gravity assists so we cannot even claim all of it). Kinetic energy = (m*v²)/2 so a kg at 0.1c has 1,440,000 * the energy of Juno. 'there is your problem' even if we knew how to do it it's 'more than a million times harder' than the thing we've only half done for a 1,500 kg.

Maybe there is scope for making us smaller - biology is awesome and mind blowing but is also the result of 4.5 billion years of kludges, leftovers, and broken copies of stuff that turned out to be useful for something else. Hawks see much better than us in part because we grow our blood supply between the incoming light and the light detectors - oops. There could be all sort of opportunities to to re-engineer and shrink the brain, even without understanding how it does what it does.

Seven halvings of human dimensions, say a 1.5 cm human rather than 1.85m  would bring the kinetic energy per person down by a factor of a couple million.

if you are going to go through the trouble of tweaking the brain, you might as well implement the machinery to backup and restore the state of the neurons. like give every neuron a state marker that can be indexed and read by a laser. a chemical introduced to the body activates the backup system, stores the most recent state, and shortly there after scan it to retrieve the state. a different chemical would prime the system for data injection. and a fresh state is scanned in and finally the whole thing is activated. then we get into the realm of the ship really just being a hard drive, a freezer full of embryos, and an automated clone lab. keep an entire colony on hand, and a few well trained individuals you can call up on whenever you need a certain skill. or dispense with the ship entirely and just beam minds across space into pre-seeded clone ships.

Edited November 5, 2016 by Nuke