QUOTE (krugeruwsp @ Feb 20 2010, 05:50 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
Amazingly, fabrication technology is coming along quite well. There is a technology that can actually "build" many things using lasers and a special metal-based resin. The scientists working on it have already made it possible to use in space in order to build spare parts for the ISS on-board. That technology is only going to improve to the point where building large-scale machines en-route could really be a reality. I wish I could find the article about this I recently read, since it was quite fascinating.
Genetic engineering is quite the reality, as well. That fact actually scares me. I fear how close to the world of Gattaca we are venturing. You're absolutely correct in that we will probably learn how to genetically modify humanity to be able to survive in almost any environment. In fact, a low-oxygen environment like Mars might not be an issue for humans in a few decades. The idea of creating augmented humans (and them turning on us as "weaker,") is another sci-fi staple, one that I find is dangerously close to science fact. Genetically pre-screening babies is becoming nearly commonplace, rather frighteningly. I am always reminded of the Twilight Zone where a man is killed because a panel has determined he is "obsolete," and then the head of that panel is killed at the end of the episode because he has been made "obsolete."
We can certainly cut and build with remarkable precision, and no doubt that will only improve. But material science is something that builds upon other advances. If you land on a planet made up of various elements, it'll still take a great deal of chemistry and physics to turn those elements into whatever the newest thing is. Now, maybe with special nanobots, all it would take is a firmware upgrade or something :p.
I don't think we're headed towards Gattaca (laws are already in place to prevent some of those kinds of things happening). I do think we might be headed towards Andromeda (the TV show, not the galaxy :p) or Schlock Mercenary, in terms of genetic tweaking. Heavy-worlders, folks with gills, and "purps" (people who can do photosynthesis) may very well be in our future.
QUOTE (darthkev @ Feb 21 2010, 07:30 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
Then why bother say everything you just said? Because that's exactly what you sound like.
QUOTE (krugeruwsp @ Feb 22 2010, 01:39 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
I do find it somewhat bemusing that you're willing to accuse a person who has worked professionally in the planetarium field, towards an astrophysics degree, and as an astronomical educator of naivety when it comes to astronomical phenomena. However, I'd rather not that this devolve into personal arguments of that nature.
Let's cool it guys...
While I'm sure the concentrations of various elements will vary across the galaxy in terrestrial planets, for the most part, common compounds are found just about everywhere. The building blocks of organic engineering, namely hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus, are found pretty much everywhere. Metals, particularly iron and nickel, are in large abundance. Silicates and carbonates will surely be found anywhere liquid water exists, I suspect. I don't think materials science will change significantly from planet to planet, really. If we can build it here, it should simply be a matter of bringing the infrastructure with us to the next place. Now, that's really the hard part. An oil refinery is a pretty big thing to stick on a spaceship, especially if we don't know for sure that there will be any petroleum on another planet. But, if we have the basic technology to process ores and machine the metal, I think we'll be in good enough shape to build up an infrastructure on another world in a few decades, really. Mining and agriculture are sort of the foundational elements of civilization.
I'm still a bit skitterish when it comes to the idea of genetic engineering. Laws can be changed and broken, and some people will have you believe that they are on a regular basis, particularly by governments. I'm not much of a conspiracy nut, but I'd be foolish to believe that various governments with access to genetic manipulation technology have not attempted to "improve" people. I wouldn't go so far as a Serenity-like level, but I have my suspicions about what goes into our food and water sometimes.
As cool as it would be to not have to eat, but rather chill out in the sunshine for a while and call it lunch, I still think that there would be a superiority issue between augmented humans and "real" ones. Look at the issues over racism we have today. While they are surely not nearly as bad as they were 50 or 60 years ago, there is still significant prejudice over the color of skin and the shape of eyes. There's greater discrimination against people who have different sexual orientations. You start throwing in more obvious things like gills, photosynthetic skin, or extra-heavy bone structures, and what's going to happen then? I really think it's something of a Pandora's Box.
I believe that the resentment would go two ways. "Pure-bred" humans would claim superiority because of a pure, original genome. Augments would claim superiority based on enhanced ability. Whoever happens to be in charge of governments at the time would probably start creating laws against the other. You'd have significant conflict in no time. Do you give people with gills extra rights? Do you charge a photosynthetic man with indecent exposure if he needs to lay out nude in the sun for lunch? Wisconsin just passed a law against great opposition to make it illegal to bother a woman breast-feeding in public, where it used to be considered indecent exposure in some communities. Do you allow a person genetically enhanced to compete in the Olympics, or give them their own? I think it will quickly create a class division as well. Those people who are too poor to afford genetically engineering their children would start a second class than the richer middle to upper class who select based on extra intelligence, or athleticism.
It can be legislated against all day long, but people will still do it if the technology exists. At the risk of bringing up a Trek reference, Dr. Bashir is an example. Genetic engineering was outlawed, but Dr. Bashir's parents couldn't bear to have their son continue to be, well, retarded. So, they illegally modified his genetic structure in an underground lab, and turned him into a genius. How do you legislate against those people? Do you sequester them in some quiet corner of society? Do you allow them to contribute? Clearly, they'll have a significant advantage over "normals." It would be nigh impossible to keep a note of arrogance from their character (unless that can be "programmed" out...) Prodigies today have enough problems fitting in.
Granted, genetic manipulation could be of enormous benefit to civilization as well. It probably could effectively cure cancer, not to mention a great number of diseases. We could end Huntington's Disease, Down Syndrome, cerebral palsy, or a great number of other birth defects. Genetically predisposed to heart disease? No prob. Crank up the LDL inhibitor genes. I happen to suffer from hereditary ulcers. If I could choose not to pass that down to my children, I would be quite happy to do it. And at the same time, I would in a heartbeat give my children the very best genetic advantages. I'd make my son athletically gifted, academically predisposed to success... and that very admission is why I believe that genetic engineering should not be explored for any purpose other than to cure genetic diseases. I'd like to think that I'm not a bad person, or a cheater in the sense of desiring the best for my kids. But the level of competition that children face today is already far too intense. I fear that parents would start competing with each other on even greater levels, using their kids as the chess pieces.
I suppose with all great scientific discoveries, with great knowledge comes great responsibility and great potential for great destruction. Oppenheimer noted when the first nuclear warhead was detonated, "I have become Death, destroyer of worlds." We've made mastery of the atom commonplace today. Now, granted, we've managed 60 odd years without blowing ourselves to hell yet, but fingers have been on the button plenty of times. With these newer discoveries, how much easier would it be for a finger to slip?
When I was in college, I took a class analyzing the literature of playwright Arthur Kopit. I made what at the time seemed like quite a profound philosophical discovery to me. Many of his plays are about the inherent destructive nature of man, particularly when it comes to good intentions. What I can pretentiously call an epiphany was the notion that as man strives to become like God, we in fact become like Satan. Satan was an angel who believed that he could rule the universe better than God could. Now, whether or not you agree with his assessment is a matter of faith, I suppose. At any rate, our belief that we can take ultimate power and somehow divorce ourselves of our greatest weaknesses and become omnipotent with benevolence is what leads us to believe that we can indeed do better than God has done, and reshape reality in the image that we desire. In point of fact, when we do this, we indeed cause mass destruction in our wake, because while we may achieve power approaching the limitless, we do not have the wisdom of omniscience. When I took this course, I was early in my faith, having reaffirmed my belief and trust in Christianity in college after a bout with atheism. I spent days writing and thinking about God, why He allowed humans to do the things we do, why suffering and pain exist. Ultimately, I realized it is because we expect God to be completely benevolent, like humans believe they can be with limitless power. We truly believe, regardless of what we say, that we can make people better. God does not seem to share this philosophy. Perhaps there is greater wisdom there than we realize. In our quest to become god-like, few of us have taken time to find out what God is really like.
Now, I apologize for getting massively, massively off track. I just stress the point that because we can do something should give us pause to question whether or not we should.
This post has been edited by krugeruwsp : 02 March 2010 - 12:13 PM
I cannot believe I read all of that... my eyes hurt...
Anyway, I have to say I agree with krugeruwsp in the area of genetic manipulation. In addition to bringing more strife and argument to a world already filled with it, what about testing? Say we test these things in animals before testing it in Humans. Who's to say we don't create something along the lines of Planet of the Apes? It's a dangerous prospect and, while nothing in this world is completely safe, we should think long and hard about the consequences of genetic manipulation before even considering thinking about doing it. That's right, I said think before thinking before thinking about doing it... or something like that... :unsure:
Perhaps as frightening or even more frightening is what could potentially happen with the current methods of genetic manipulation. We don't have some sort of magic machine that alters DNA. It's done with viruses and bacteria that have been genetically engineered to modify the DNA of another organism. Recently, a virus was used to add a gene to a monkey that allows it to be biophosphorescent (glow-in-the-dark.) While that's quite harmless and a great party trick, what happens if that virus mutates? What happens if that virus deactivates a critical gene that we didn't happen to notice in testing? Depending on virulity, this could be your civilization-ender right there. The very tinkering that may have been designed to enhance humans for survival on another world might bring about their demise.
Obviously, this is another science-fiction staple and has been for quite some time. I recently read an outstanding novel trilogy by Ted Dekker on the subject. It's quite thrilling, and I highly recommend it, but that's neither here nor there. The novel centered around a mutated vaccine that resulted in an airborne, highly infectious, completely lethal virus. In that case, the virus was used as a biological weapon for world domination as one man held the world ransom over an antivirus to counter the plague.
This really goes back to the original topic question. Whether by accident or by malicious intent, the tools for genetic manipulation can easily become the tools for weapons of immense destruction. In fact, these could be not only more deadly, but more powerful than conventional weapons because they leave the infrastructure intact. Simply wipe out all the people, mop up the mess, and start anew with your colonists. As I stated when the topic was first put up for debate, the level of damage that could be done to a civilization would depend on the virulity, latency, and lethality of the disease. If it were highly infectious, airborne, and lethal with a 2-4 week incubation period before symptoms, half the civilization could be infected before anyone would even know about it. Shutting down travel at that point would be useless. It would have spread too far.
Of all the technologies that the misuse of could keep me awake at night, I would have to say that this one ranks pretty high. On a scale of 1 being the concept of the Large Hadron Collider creating an Earth-swallowing black hole (about as likely as me winning the lottery every day for a month and then being elected the first non-Catholic pope,) to 10 being someone purposefully or accidentally activating and detonating an entire arsenal of nuclear warheads, this probably ranks a 9.7ish.
Perhaps it is simply the plausibility of the level of destruction that frightens me the most. CERN setting of an Earth-swallowing black hole is certainly possible, but so unlikely as to be not that scary. We could genetically engineer a devastating bioweapon today, truth be told. In fact, I'd put money that someone, somewhere, is working on one right now. We've recently mapped the human genome. It's only a matter of time before someone starts playing with it, inserting things, taking them out, activating things long dormant, deactivating necessary parts... Once we start messing with human DNA, there is no turning back. There's no undo button on this. Nukes can be dismantled. Viruses cannot be.
QUOTE (krugeruwsp @ Mar 1 2010, 08:43 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
While I'm sure the concentrations of various elements will vary across the galaxy in terrestrial planets, for the most part, common compounds are found just about everywhere. The building blocks of organic engineering, namely hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus, are found pretty much everywhere. Metals, particularly iron and nickel, are in large abundance. Silicates and carbonates will surely be found anywhere liquid water exists, I suspect. I don't think materials science will change significantly from planet to planet, really. If we can build it here, it should simply be a matter of bringing the infrastructure with us to the next place. Now, that's really the hard part. An oil refinery is a pretty big thing to stick on a spaceship, especially if we don't know for sure that there will be any petroleum on another planet. But, if we have the basic technology to process ores and machine the metal, I think we'll be in good enough shape to build up an infrastructure on another world in a few decades, really. Mining and agriculture are sort of the foundational elements of civilization.
Well that's just it, the infrastructure will have to be brought along. And we're not just talking about a refinery, we're talking about needing to bring the stuff needed to get the materials out of the ground, the stuff to bring them to the refinery, and bring the stuff to power the refinery. Really though, my expectation with advances in material science and other technologies is that they will require greater and greater levels of energy as well as purity. You can't just go from having rocks and fire to a nuclear reactor, for example, without a lot of intermediate steps, and presumably the sorts of energy and materials we'll need to set up things like controlled fusion reactions will be tough to lug around on a spaceship. Now, assuming sufficient miniaturization, there will always be newer technologies that have to build off of old ones, and even with all the basic elements needed on a planet, you'll still be stuck with the tools you brought along until you can start building new tools, and those will have to be built in order. Everything we take for granted, if you go back far enough, amounts to somebody digging some rocks out of the ground and making fire. Now imagine the prerequisites to a piece of technology that lets you put together quarks and leptons in whatever way you wish.
QUOTE (krugeruwsp @ Mar 1 2010, 08:43 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
I'm still a bit skitterish when it comes to the idea of genetic engineering. Laws can be changed and broken, and some people will have you believe that they are on a regular basis, particularly by governments. I'm not much of a conspiracy nut, but I'd be foolish to believe that various governments with access to genetic manipulation technology have not attempted to "improve" people. I wouldn't go so far as a Serenity-like level, but I have my suspicions about what goes into our food and water sometimes.
As cool as it would be to not have to eat, but rather chill out in the sunshine for a while and call it lunch, I still think that there would be a superiority issue between augmented humans and "real" ones. Look at the issues over racism we have today. While they are surely not nearly as bad as they were 50 or 60 years ago, there is still significant prejudice over the color of skin and the shape of eyes. There's greater discrimination against people who have different sexual orientations. You start throwing in more obvious things like gills, photosynthetic skin, or extra-heavy bone structures, and what's going to happen then? I really think it's something of a Pandora's Box.
I believe that the resentment would go two ways. "Pure-bred" humans would claim superiority because of a pure, original genome. Augments would claim superiority based on enhanced ability. Whoever happens to be in charge of governments at the time would probably start creating laws against the other. You'd have significant conflict in no time. Do you give people with gills extra rights? Do you charge a photosynthetic man with indecent exposure if he needs to lay out nude in the sun for lunch? Wisconsin just passed a law against great opposition to make it illegal to bother a woman breast-feeding in public, where it used to be considered indecent exposure in some communities. Do you allow a person genetically enhanced to compete in the Olympics, or give them their own? I think it will quickly create a class division as well. Those people who are too poor to afford genetically engineering their children would start a second class than the richer middle to upper class who select based on extra intelligence, or athleticism.
It can be legislated against all day long, but people will still do it if the technology exists. At the risk of bringing up a Trek reference, Dr. Bashir is an example. Genetic engineering was outlawed, but Dr. Bashir's parents couldn't bear to have their son continue to be, well, retarded. So, they illegally modified his genetic structure in an underground lab, and turned him into a genius. How do you legislate against those people? Do you sequester them in some quiet corner of society? Do you allow them to contribute? Clearly, they'll have a significant advantage over "normals." It would be nigh impossible to keep a note of arrogance from their character (unless that can be "programmed" out...) Prodigies today have enough problems fitting in.
Granted, genetic manipulation could be of enormous benefit to civilization as well. It probably could effectively cure cancer, not to mention a great number of diseases. We could end Huntington's Disease, Down Syndrome, cerebral palsy, or a great number of other birth defects. Genetically predisposed to heart disease? No prob. Crank up the LDL inhibitor genes. I happen to suffer from hereditary ulcers. If I could choose not to pass that down to my children, I would be quite happy to do it. And at the same time, I would in a heartbeat give my children the very best genetic advantages. I'd make my son athletically gifted, academically predisposed to success... and that very admission is why I believe that genetic engineering should not be explored for any purpose other than to cure genetic diseases. I'd like to think that I'm not a bad person, or a cheater in the sense of desiring the best for my kids. But the level of competition that children face today is already far too intense. I fear that parents would start competing with each other on even greater levels, using their kids as the chess pieces.
Have you ever watched Andromeda? All kinds of stuff like that plays out.
QUOTE (krugeruwsp @ Mar 1 2010, 08:43 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
I suppose with all great scientific discoveries, with great knowledge comes great responsibility and great potential for great destruction. Oppenheimer noted when the first nuclear warhead was detonated, "I have become Death, destroyer of worlds." We've made mastery of the atom commonplace today. Now, granted, we've managed 60 odd years without blowing ourselves to hell yet, but fingers have been on the button plenty of times. With these newer discoveries, how much easier would it be for a finger to slip?
When I was in college, I took a class analyzing the literature of playwright Arthur Kopit. I made what at the time seemed like quite a profound philosophical discovery to me. Many of his plays are about the inherent destructive nature of man, particularly when it comes to good intentions. What I can pretentiously call an epiphany was the notion that as man strives to become like God, we in fact become like Satan. Satan was an angel who believed that he could rule the universe better than God could. Now, whether or not you agree with his assessment is a matter of faith, I suppose. At any rate, our belief that we can take ultimate power and somehow divorce ourselves of our greatest weaknesses and become omnipotent with benevolence is what leads us to believe that we can indeed do better than God has done, and reshape reality in the image that we desire. In point of fact, when we do this, we indeed cause mass destruction in our wake, because while we may achieve power approaching the limitless, we do not have the wisdom of omniscience. When I took this course, I was early in my faith, having reaffirmed my belief and trust in Christianity in college after a bout with atheism. I spent days writing and thinking about God, why He allowed humans to do the things we do, why suffering and pain exist. Ultimately, I realized it is because we expect God to be completely benevolent, like humans believe they can be with limitless power. We truly believe, regardless of what we say, that we can make people better. God does not seem to share this philosophy. Perhaps there is greater wisdom there than we realize. In our quest to become god-like, few of us have taken time to find out what God is really like.
Now, I apologize for getting massively, massively off track. I just stress the point that because we can do something should give us pause to question whether or not we should.
Well the Uncle Ben Adage notwithstanding, ultimately the most dangerous of technologies and science will be bottled up by folks who know better than to abuse them, and will actively work to restrict them. I don't think a day will come when people will be able to buy pocket nukes at their local grocery store. Perhaps pocket reactors will come to pass, but only with a great deal of safety features built in that makes them essentially tamper-proof. At the very least, humans will have to evolve socially and ethically enough that purposefully setting off a nuclear reactor to go boom, or building a bomb and using it for malice will be out of the realm of possibility, long before those sorts of energies are put in ordinary people's hands. If not, then at least we'll have populated enough worlds and our population will be large enough that somebody setting off a megaton nuclear warhead in a city won't be all that big a deal, from a species survival viewpoint.
Your thoughts on religion are indeed a bit out of the scope of this particular forum, so I'll just say this: I don't think we'll ever reach the point where we think of ourselves as gods, or that our control over nature and the basic particles of the universe will result in the level of arrogance you're proposing. The more we learn about science, the more humble scientists get.
QUOTE (darthkev @ Mar 1 2010, 10:03 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
I cannot believe I read all of that... my eyes hurt...
Anyway, I have to say I agree with krugeruwsp in the area of genetic manipulation. In addition to bringing more strife and argument to a world already filled with it, what about testing? Say we test these things in animals before testing it in Humans. Who's to say we don't create something along the lines of Planet of the Apes? It's a dangerous prospect and, while nothing in this world is completely safe, we should think long and hard about the consequences of genetic manipulation before even considering thinking about doing it. That's right, I said think before thinking before thinking about doing it... or something like that... :unsure:
Have you ever read Schlock Mercenary? Sentient apes and elephants are all over the place.
QUOTE (krugeruwsp @ Mar 2 2010, 01:25 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
This really goes back to the original topic question. Whether by accident or by malicious intent, the tools for genetic manipulation can easily become the tools for weapons of immense destruction. In fact, these could be not only more deadly, but more powerful than conventional weapons because they leave the infrastructure intact. Simply wipe out all the people, mop up the mess, and start anew with your colonists. As I stated when the topic was first put up for debate, the level of damage that could be done to a civilization would depend on the virulity, latency, and lethality of the disease. If it were highly infectious, airborne, and lethal with a 2-4 week incubation period before symptoms, half the civilization could be infected before anyone would even know about it. Shutting down travel at that point would be useless. It would have spread too far.
Of all the technologies that the misuse of could keep me awake at night, I would have to say that this one ranks pretty high. On a scale of 1 being the concept of the Large Hadron Collider creating an Earth-swallowing black hole (about as likely as me winning the lottery every day for a month and then being elected the first non-Catholic pope,) to 10 being someone purposefully or accidentally activating and detonating an entire arsenal of nuclear warheads, this probably ranks a 9.7ish.
Perhaps it is simply the plausibility of the level of destruction that frightens me the most. CERN setting of an Earth-swallowing black hole is certainly possible, but so unlikely as to be not that scary. We could genetically engineer a devastating bioweapon today, truth be told. In fact, I'd put money that someone, somewhere, is working on one right now. We've recently mapped the human genome. It's only a matter of time before someone starts playing with it, inserting things, taking them out, activating things long dormant, deactivating necessary parts... Once we start messing with human DNA, there is no turning back. There's no undo button on this. Nukes can be dismantled. Viruses cannot be.
Have you ever watched Threshold? Aliens try to colonize Earth by genetic manipulation, turning us into them.
Hehe, one thing I hope we can all agree with is that we're not going to create a tiny black hole here on Earth that will swallow the whole planet. It's gravitationally impossible, since it would only have as much mass as we have on hand.
I disagree with you about nukes being dismantled though. That's already out of Pandora's box. Sure, in theory everyone could agree to disarm, and actually do so despite the nagging fear somebody else didn't, but the technology already exists. Really the only thing stopping absolutely everyone from building their own in their garage is the lack of good fissionable materials. You don't need to build a perfect bomb, mind you, the ones we used in World War II exploded with a fraction of the theoretical fission possible with the amount of material used.
You are right, though, that all sorts of nasty biological weapons have undoubtably been created in labs in the last few decades. One merely has to hope for the best, and try to colonize other planets sooner than later so all our eggs aren't in one basket.
I always liked Andromeda but it always felt like it had maybe 10% of the budget is should have had. Also the last season was bad.
As for colonizing new worlds and the resources needed to do so I always felt that Star Trek should have made far more use of replicator technology. We almost always see it used on a small scale to make hot earl grey tea but why not use it to replicate (and dereplicate?) virtually everything. Need a new shovel, or phaser rifle, or transatmospheric flyer, just tell the computer to make you one. Basically there should be no shortages in the Star Trek universe since all you really need to do is drop a building sized replicator and power source on a planet and you can have a have whatever you need materialized from thin air. And of course your shovel, phaser rifle, and flyer would all have their own mini replicators in case you forgot to bring some important item along.
It has been quite some time since I've watched Andromeda, truth be told. It is a good example. It also exemplifies why I give pause to whether or not we should create a race of genetically modified supersoldiers. Same argument goes to sentient machines. Why poke the bear?
Truth be told, it's not the scientists that I fear. With a few notable exceptions, most scientists mean their discoveries for the best, not for malice. I've only met one person who went into science for the pure love of destruction, and he didn't last long in the chemistry department. The ones I fear are the politicians and the leaders of peoples. While there's always going to be the people like the Atomic Bulletin doing what they can to maintain the ethics of science, our collective knowledge is quickly outpacing our ethical development as a species. Yes, that's been said for centuries. As you said, though, we must continue to develop ethically to balance the rate of technological development.
That said, I don't think humanity has progressed ethically in the last several centuries. C.S. Lewis was once challenged on that statement by someone who pointed out that we no longer burn witches at the stake. He countered that it's not a progression of morality, but rather one of knowledge only. We simply understand that witches are not real (at least in the sense of people with supernatural powers granted by pacts with the Devil.) If we truly believed to the best of our knowledge that our neighbor was in league with supreme evil and using that to maliciously destroy us, would that person not deserve capital punishment? Today, instead of witches and burning people at the stake, we do it with bombs and rifles and Islamic fundamentalists. I'll believe we have really progressed as a society when arms have been laid down against each other and we commit the populace of the Earth to peaceful co-existance, eliminate poverty and hunger, and work towards the betterment of all mankind. Right now, it's a pitiful few who are really committed to this.
I was at a presentation in college where a guy from the WHO stated that it would take between 8 and 10 billion dollars as of 2006 to basically end poverty worldwide, provide everyone with adequate food, water, and shelter, and access to basic medical care. Last year, in the United States alone, adult film was a more than 30 billion dollar industry. Illegal drugs are estimated far beyond that. The means exist, but the ethical motivation as a global society just does not. The acquisition of wealth and influence reigns. As I said, it's not the scientists I fear. It's those who would use their discoveries to further their own ends and agendas. I do believe it's quite the sheer miracle that we haven't managed to blow ourselves to hell yet.
You do have a good point on the nukes. They can be easily rebuilt fairly quickly. However, they are more easily slowed than a virus. The resources are more readily available, less restricted. A very small sample of virus can devastate the globe, where a nuke is a bit more noticeable and the devastation much less widespread. Thousands of people died in the 9/11 attacks. A strong virus could make that look like a hand grenade in comparison.
On the note of infrastructure, you're quite right that it would take a while to set up the factories and get them tooled up. I think the two important pieces that a colonist expedition would need to bring are the machines to dig up ores and process them, and the building blocks of agriculture. It would take a good chunk of time to build things up, no question. I think it would take probably between 50 and 100 years to really build the infrastructure to the point where society would catch back up with where they were when they left. The good thing is that because of the knowledge, we know what rocks have what in them, how to process them, how to utilize them, and that would be the big timesaver. Obviously, you wouldn't land on a rock, pull some silicon out of a rock, and have a computer inside of a week. You'd be starting basic, with hatchets and axes and log cabins. But, if you can bring some metal fabrication and processing tools with you, you can speed up the process of moving out of huts. I vaguely remember a series when I was a kid called Earth2 that had something of this concept, I think.
Firefly does a fantastic job of capitalizing on this idea. The earliest colonies on the central planets are rich and flush with the latest technologies. They've been established for a long time, and the worlds in the canon lore were habitable or close to when they got there, so little work on terraforming was needed. The outer rim and border planets needed more terraforming and have had less time to get established. Some backwaters like Jiang Yin and Triumph were at roughly an 1800's Old West level of technology. They were relatively new colonies, and neglected because of their locations on the outer rim. Joss Whedon pointed out in his commentary on the pilot episode, "It makes perfect sense that they would build worlds, but not roads." It would take time to rebuild that infrastructure, but the knowledge on how to do it would speed up how fast it took us in our current history to go from a predominantly agrarian society to an industrialized one, and we did it in realistically about 200, maybe 250 years. I think we could realistically do it in 50-100 on another world.
I think we could even do it in less if we can bring small economical reactors with us. If we are able to create a stable fusion reaction and miniaturize that process, that would certainly be helpful. Take 5-10 of those with you when you head off to the planet, pop them down where you need factories and the like, and go to town. Obviously, right now, the smallest fusion test reactors are quite large and not yet functional. To bring even one with a spaceship would be very difficult. It would probably have to be built in space.
As far as replicators go, if it were possible, it would make life pretty nice. But, as mrxak pointed out, unless you bring one with you, it wouldn't be very easy to make one when you got there. And the energy requirements to take constituent atoms (to say nothing of subatomic particles!) and simply build them in any fashion you wish are absolutely astronomical. Unless you have a very sophisticated reactor (like a matter/antimatter reactor,) it's not going be practical. And to do it on a building-sized scale, it would be incredibly challenging and demanding. It would be much simpler to replicate the constituent parts and assemble them.
This post has been edited by krugeruwsp : 03 March 2010 - 01:56 PM
Well, for right now in physics, matter is matter. You can't take rocks, put them through a replicator, and turn them into a gold brick. You also can't just make things out of a vacuum. You'd need to have raw materials. A "replicator" in the strictest sense of what physics will allow currently would only be basically able to resequence matter according to a specified pattern, which would have to be stored on an atomic level. That's assuming we could realistically develop the technology to rearrange atoms one by one and put them in a specific place. So, you could theoretically use a matter deconstructor to break down iron ore and then make a shovel head out of it, but that's about it.
Now, the whole matter/energy conversion thing is possible, but really, really difficult. It's been done in particle accelerators with gamma rays smashing into each other, producing I think hydrogen. To create specific elements and compounds out of EM radiation would require a gigantic particle accelerator and several months per gram of material. Not very efficient or practical for making a shovel.
Now, if Darth is going where I think he is, Von Neumann machines are NOT a good idea. You want to talk civilization ender? Self-replicating machines are just a bad idea. Sure, we can program them to only replicate so many times and then stop, but all it takes is one of them to accidentally corrupt that command and suddenly, these things start taking over the universe. Nanites could be used to assemble things at a molecular or even atomic level, but again, you'd have to find a way to make enough of them to do any good (hence where the idea of the Von Neumann machines come into play.)
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Now, if Darth is going where I think he is, Von Neumann machines are NOT a good idea. You want to talk civilization ender? Self-replicating machines are just a bad idea. Sure, we can program them to only replicate so many times and then stop, but all it takes is one of them to accidentally corrupt that command and suddenly, these things start taking over the universe. Nanites could be used to assemble things at a molecular or even atomic level, but again, you'd have to find a way to make enough of them to do any good (hence where the idea of the Von Neumann machines come into play.)
But... they're so... useful!
Yeah, useful for ending your life! Going back to science fiction for a moment, they've been used many times as villains who started out simple and eventually outgrew their design specs and started trying to take over the world/galaxy/universe.
Stargate used them as 'the Replicators'. To an extent Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica had them as the Borg and Cylons respectively. The Borg replicate by assimilating other beings and turning them into more drones. The Cylons probably just have a few factories somewhere building more Cylons. Not quite the same thing, but the same concept.
They are useful for a while, but once they malfunction (and they almost always do) they're deadly and a bad idea. Sure, we haven't done it yet in real life, but there's good reason for that as explained above.
The Cylons are really the "AI turns on you" scenario, not a Von Neumann scenario.
Even if you have Von Neumann machines that are not nanotech (I think the A.C. Clarke novel 2010 or 2050 explored this,) exponential growth without limitation is pretty serious. We figured out in AP Bio that if a bacterium that reproduced every 20 minutes were to do so unchecked, in very short order, it could create a layer three feet thick around the entire planet. I think we figured 72 hours? I'd have to go back in my old high school notes to be sure. Now, start doing that with machines that are, say, about the size of your thumb - much more effective and durable. It doesn't take long to have a pretty serious threat on your hands.
Well, you'd just need a self replicating machine that would devour the first self replicating machines. Except then you'll have more grey goo on your hands...
How about making it so the neutralizing machines would only replicate when they consumed one of the trouble machines? That would at least slow down/halt the replicating process of the trouble machines, and stop with a set number of machines altogether.
I largely see this as a design issue.
Design the device in question so that it only self-replicates / performs functions necessary to self-replication while in the presence of a very specific control signal. Something that you know will quickly decay over distance.
Apply an additional control mechanism into the device itself: When the device has begun performing functions relating to self-replication, it double-checks for the presence of the same signal that should have been present to allow the device to self-replicate. If that signal is not present, but the device is beginning / performing self-replication anyway, the control mechanism should activate a self-destruct.
Nothing fancy, just something that will fry parts of the device needed for it to continue function.
Further, design the device so that if other devices are observed self-replicating outside of the area of the control signal, the offending devices are to be dismantled by the observers.
A more safeguarded nanite design may be to exclude self-replication from the nanite devices all-together, relegating the construction of new nanites to a 'Nanite-Core' device, which then coordinates the actions of the nanite-level devices towards macro-scale projects.
This should eliminate entirely the possibility of device mutation over generations, as the devices are not reproducing themselves. Since the Core device is handling the construction of all of the nanites, there is only one generation of nanites, and any nanite it produces will be to exactly the same specifications as any other.
It should also be self-evident that copying the design of the device to subsequent devices should be done exactly and in a provably correct way, so as to prevent the issue of device mutation over subsequent generations. If the design is being correctly transmitted from generation to generation, then there should be no issue of mutation / command corruption.
Digital Data is not the same thing as DNA. If it is being copied exactly and correctly, then it should suffer no more degradation than copying a WAV or ALAC file from one machine to another does.
This post has been edited by Eugene Chin : 16 March 2010 - 09:12 PM
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