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What if you can non-destructively copy someone's mind, from the point of view of the copy a transfer has occurred, as he remembers being the original since he has his memories, from the point of view of the surviving original, the copy is just a copy. If I copy my mind to a computer, and the copy thinks it is me, I'm not going to jump off a cliff so the copy can assume my identity, because the copy won't be a perfect copy of me after the copying is complete, because if I jump off a cliff afterwards, the computer copy won't have the memory of me jumping off the cliff and smashing into the ground at the bottom. If my brain is smashed it can't be copied so I am effectively dead with no Resurrection. I think I'd rather just continue as I am. I think a human body may be maintained indefinitely just as a machine could be, after all we and machines are just atoms and molecules, so long as they are kept in proper order, we continue, we just don't know how right now.
Alternatively we could make a cyber-god in charge of terraforming Venus. What if all the solar powered computer circuits in the solletta around Venus housed one mighty AI ("Mighty Aphrodite?") that could out think us all? I think a "cyber-goddess" could think of surprising ways to terraform Venus, the key thing is to make sure its motivation is in the right place, that is to preserve freedom of individuals and prevent all the other AI from going to war with each other and destroying humanity. You know "One Ring to Rule them All!" Is humanity better off living with billions of independent-minded AIs that are smarter than we are, or do we need one super electronic deity to govern us and to prevent the strong from abusing the weak? Of should biological humans make a run for it using whatever technology all these AIs make available, while they still listen to us to get us out of the Solar System? I think we should do all of the above, as we don't know which is the proper course to take. Billions and trillions of superhuman intellignce AIs can be very scary if one thinks about living side by side with them.
Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2013-11-04 09:33:45)
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If we can't produce e-people, we could always rely on human cloning. Modify people so that they grow to maturity in a decade, and train them in whatever needs to be done. Not as quick as AGI, but if we have artificial wombs, we could clone millions of people each year, giving us a sufficiently large workforce to accomplish out tasks.
From a biological perspective, the time scale of human growth is exponential. So we really don't need some technology to replicate so fast. In fact, we have people more than enough to fill Venus, Earth and Mars, and fill its completelly in some generations.
Without poberty and correct education, ten billion people (as we will live to see) is more than enough "combined mind" to acoplish terraforming. Perhaps not enough "human labour", but, really, today we don't make food using human labour but machines with human supervision.
That's the way, and we only need replicate factories and simple robots to make "anything". Insect like are more than enough for that. Human could fill the rol of the queens of the hive.
The challenge is to start and begin to replicate. With hives of robots, a small colony of humans could accoplish huge tasks. The difficult is at the start, where is nothing there. When we reach the level to replicate (as a community... robots, factories, humans...) we soon reach the level to terraforming a world in little generations. So think in the undesired changes of Earth, and translate it in intentional changes, geoengineering, with fusion energy, "unlimited" robot-hive capability and access to space resources.
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The biggest payoff would be in terraforming Saturn through shelling, as we have 95 Earths worth living space there, and where can we go after terraforming Mars, Moon, Venus, Mercury, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Jupiter in that order perhaps? There are rogue planets out there, we need to send out trillions of robots into interstellar space to discover them, I am pretty sure there are more rogue planets than stars, so therefore the nearest suitable rogue planet is going to be closer than the near of stars if the law of averages holds out, as it takes less material to make planets than stars so there will be more planets. A rogue planet, and that is not a dwarf planet like Pluto is likely to be a small gas giant, as in interstellar space you need less gravity to hold onto hydrogen and helium because it is so cold and the relative motions of the hydrogen molecules will be less than the escape velocity. What we would be looking for is a planet with close to 1 Earth's gravity at the top of its atmosphere, I believe if that condition is met, the most likely rogue planet that meets this condition would be a small gas giant like Neptune or perhaps smaller, in any event the surface is going to be inaccessible so we are going to have to shell it for a floor, extract the breathable gases for out atmosphere and generate some artificial sunlight powered by a fusion reactor to terraform it. It takes 80 Jupiters of Mass to make the smallest red dwarf, Jupiter has 318 times Earth's mass, Saturn has 95 times Earth's mass, so it would take 267 Saturns to make a red dwarf Uranus has 14.5 times Earth's mass with a surface gravity of 0.903, so it would take 1754 Uranuses to make a red dwarf star. Neptune is 17 Earth masses or about 1496 of those would make a red dwarf. So lets do a little exercise, it would take 20 Jupiters to make one quarter of a red dwarf, 67 Saturns to make the next quarter, 439 Uranuses to make the third quarter and 374 Neptunes, lets add these up a total of 900 planets of assorted sizes to equal the material of 1 red dwarf star and the nearest one is Proxima Centauri at 4.3 light years. The cube root of 900 is 9.65, since were uncertain of the exact distribution lets say that a cube 4 light years on a side contains around 1000 rogue planets, this might mean that the nearest Rogue planet is around 0.4 light years away, 4.8 light months or 20.8 light weeks. At 10% of the speed of light it will take 4 years to reach the nearest rogue planet, or 40 years if one wishes to travel and a more leisurely 1% of the speed of light, since kinetic energy is proportional to the square of velocity, that means its 100 times easier to reach the nearest rogue planet, if we knew where one was located, as it would be to reach the nearest star, and the chances are about 50% that it is a Neptune or Uranus sized planet, perhaps 25% it is a Saturnian type planet and 25% that it is a Jupiter class planet, 75% chance that we could build a shell around it on top of its atmosphere and terraform that surface, and have fusion will travel. If we're lucky this rogue planet will have moons that we can build stuff out of, and replicator robots will do the rest.
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I don't know where you're pulling your numbers from, other than wishful thinking, but the mass distribution seems to drop off sharply around 0.2 solar masses. There's a big gap between the planetary mass distribution and the stellar mass distribution, which is why current estimates are around 1 brown dwarf for every star. That still gives us a good chance of there being a brown dwarf closer than the Alpha Centauri system, but it probably wouldn't be closer than a few lightyears. Jovian rogue planets? That, I don't know. It honestly wouldn't surprise me if there were several for each star, because of ejections during planetary formation. That might give us a distance of a couple of lightyears. Terran mass planets? Now, that's a different matter. I would not at all be surprised to find such worlds in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. That far out, there wouldn't be enough hydrogen for it to be a significant part of their mass (like in Neptune and Uranus, against Jupiter and Saturn), so a world several times the mass of Terra, composed of ice, could have acceptable gravity at the top of a thick, hydrogen-helium atmosphere. I don't know how it would be mixed, though.
Use what is abundant and build to last
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Sounds something like Neptune or Uranus, chances are if rogue planets are something like about as many rogue planets within 2 light years of Sol as there are stars within 20 light years of Sol, maybe about half to one third of the Rogue planets have planetary companions, that is there would be binary and trinary planets orbiting each other. For example there could be a "Saturn" orbiting a "Jupiter" with an "Neptune" further out at a distance of half a light year from Sol, that would be the Rogue Planetary analog to the Alpha Centauri system. So I think there may be 80 to 100 rogue planets Systems within 2 light years of Sol.
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Just as a exercise, lets figure out the mass of the Venusian Solletta. For simplicity's sake we'll treat it as if it were a band of aluminum 1 centimeter thick, 39,000 km in radius and 12,800 km wide. My physics textbook, which I saved from my college days, give aluminum a density of 2.70*10^3 kg/m^3, as there are 100 centimeters in a meter, a panel of aluminum that is 1 cm thick and 1 square meter in area is 1/100 of that, which is 27 kg/m^2. the radius of a circle is 2*pi*r with a radius of 39,000,000 meters, we have 245,044,226.98 meters circumference times 12,800,000 meters width equals 3,136,566,105,344,049.57 square meters, multiply that by 27 kg per square meter and we get 84,687,284,844,289,338.37 kg, which in scientific notation is approximated by 8.47*10^16 kg, Jupiter's moon Carme with a mass of 13.0*10^16 kg has enough material to this Solletta, but I suspect its mostly ice, Pasiphae is the 57th moon of Jupiter, it has a mass of 30.0*10^16 kg and it is further out from Jupiter at a semimajor axis of 23,609,042 kilometers, and an orbital period of 739.8 days, and a diameter of 60 km, this little moon ought to do nicely as material for solletta construction.
Here is a article on this moon
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/pro … p_Pasiphae
With a mean radius of 30 km, Pasiphae is the largest member of the Pasiphae group, a family of Jovian satellites which have similar orbits and are therefore thought to have a common origin. Pasiphae was probably an asteroid that was captured by Jupiter's gravity and then suffered a collision which broke off a number of pieces. Those pieces became at least some, and perhaps all, of the other moons commonly categorized as members of the Pasiphae group.
All of the Pasiphae moons are retrograde, which means they orbit Jupiter in the opposite direction from the planet's rotation. Their orbits are also eccentric (elliptical rather than circular) and highly inclined with respect to Jupiter's equatorial plane. All of these characteristics support the idea that the Pasiphae satellites began as one or more captured asteroids, rather than forming as part of the original Jupiter system.
Compared to Jupiter's other satellite groups, confidence is lower that all the moons in the Pasiphae group originated in a single collision. This is due to differences in color (varying from red to gray), and differences in orbital eccentricity and inclination among the members of the Pasiphae group. Sinope, in particular, is suspected of starting out as an independent asteroid.
However, both Pasiphae and Sinope are locked in secular resonances with Jupiter, which means that Jupiter's gravity tugs at them at regular intervals in a way that can modify their orbits over time. This could account for the differences in their orbits compared to each other and to other presumed members of the Pasiphae group.
If Sinope does not belong in the Pasiphae group, then the individual moon called Pasiphae retains 99% of the mass of the original asteroid. If Sinope is included, Pasiphae still retains the lion's share: 87% of the original mass. None of the Pasiphae members is massive enough to pull itself into a sphere, so they are probably all irregularly shaped.
Pasiphae has a mean radius of 30 km, assuming an albedo of 0.04. At a mean distance of about 23.6 million km from Jupiter, the satellite takes about 744 Earth days to complete one orbit.
Discovery:
Pasiphae was discovered on 27 January 1908 by Philibert Jacques Melotte with the Greenwich Observatory's 30-inch Cassegrain telescope.
How Pasiphae Got its Name:
Pasiphae was named for the wife of Minos, who was king of Crete. According to one account, she was the mother of Ammon (king of the Egyptian gods) by Zeus, the Greek equivalent of the Roman god Jupiter. But she is probably best known for the legend in which Poseidon makes her fall in love with a bull (which was either sent by Zeus or was Zeus in disguise). She crawls inside a cowhide-covered wooden cow, has intercourse with the bull and subsequently gives birth to the Minotaur, a human-flesh-eating monster with the body of a man and the head of a bull, who winds up imprisoned in a labyrinth.
A name ending in "e" was chosen for this moon in accordance with the International Astronomical Union's policy for designating outer moons with retrograde orbits.
Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2013-11-04 21:30:49)
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Terraformer-
An interesting thing about the postulate "Cogito ergo sum" is that it has never been proven, because nothing can be proven with complete rigor.
Less abstrusely, "I think I am conscious therefore I am conscious" is not necessarily true. I challenge you to define consciousness in a way that is not contrived, excessively ideological, self-inconsistent, and/or in disagreement with what you think you mean when you use the word consciousness. Really, please do. I bet you won't be able to. I believe we've had this discussion before, although it may have simply been a related (equally contrived and arbitrary) definition of what constitutes a person.
In any case, the perception of consciousness does not per se imply consciousness, especially not as a realtime, non retrospective phenomenon. As I've said in the past:
Consciousness is an illusion. We are a large number of processes running concurrently at a number of levels. However, these separate processes (examples being emotion, our senses, high-level logical processing, high-level emotional processing, etc.) are recorded into memory, where they are all referenced to having occurred at the same time. We look back and see a whole acting together, when really there were only various separate parts, each performing its function without reference to a whole.
If you notice, this hypothesis (which while not proven correct has also not been proven incorrect, which is to say it's possible and a reasonable explanation of consciousness phenomena given our current understanding of the brain) does not necessitate consciousness, only high-level emotional processing.
-Josh
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Consciousness is what gives one a first person point of view, Objects without a first person point of view don't have consciousness. I'll give an example. The planet Venus has no first person point of view, its named after a Roman goddess, but it is not a "she" until we give it a brain. The brain we give it would be a computer running a consciousness program, that would be the solletta running on Solar Power, various sensors embedded on the planet, gives her the feeling that the planet is part of her body, we turn it on and a "goddess" awakes, then she can conduct the terraforming program of the planet below, we design her program so that she feels better about herself, the more the planet is like Earth, give her a fleet of robotic spaceships she directs and let her figure out how best to do this, kind procreate.the motivation that causes us to eat or procreate. Once we activate her program, better watch out, she would be a powerful conscious entity, she'll start inventing things and building things that perhaps we might not be able to comprehend.
Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2013-11-05 04:40:28)
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No. No super powerful AGI, even if we have a kill switch. She might decide that uploading everyone is the best idea in the universe, and then start demolishing the universe to build more and more computers...
Use what is abundant and build to last
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Need not worry, even if you had the most powerful computer in the Universe, if she added 2 + 2, the answer still would be 4. What I had in mind while she's terraforming the planet below, she could imagine a Venus that is already terraformed, imagining 10,000 years of history for it establishing river banks and weather patterns, she could add plants and animals, making up people in her imagination, people that would have their own independent AIs, as well as all the animals, every insect, bird, and other such creature would have a file containing all their memories and personality traits, in other words it would be a giant immersive game. The e-people would have virtual bodies in this simulation and a technology comparable to the American Indians right before contact with European explorers, then visitors could put on a body suit, or other such VR interactive device, control and Avatar in this simulation and interact with it. With a surface area many times that of Earth, all sorts of diversions could be imagined. Along the outside of the Solletta would be docked a series of Stanford Toruses for flesh and blood humans to live while they participate in this virtual entertainment, and get a feel for what Venus would be once the terraforming is complete, with perhaps some added touches like dinosaurs just to make it interesting and more challenging. I figure if electronic people are going to race ahead of the flesh and bloods anyway, why not deliberately set out to build a goddess that is leagues ahead of all the rest to keep a pecking order and prevent all the smaller AIs from getting out of hand, and planet scale computer could do this?
You got to admit, once we have human level AI, we're not going to be the most powerful or smartest creatures in the Solar System anymore, and I'd rather not have a fight between AI trying to establish a pecking order among them, I figure its safer for us if we start out with one, create a superpowerful cyber deity to keep order and prevent war from breaking out between AI and us getting caught in the middle, since we are the original creators, lets make those creations right so they don't destroy us, and lets get some useful work out of them besides as well.
Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2013-11-05 08:49:57)
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You want to trust a superpowered AGI with self-replication, which it would need in order to terraform a planet? Seriously?
Use what is abundant and build to last
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How else would one control them? You actually have to grow the AI so it can get big enough to terraform the planet, and honestly are machines any better or worse than humans? I think a lot of problems derive from a stupid person in control that wastes resources, stupid people get elected, and majorities of voters often vote for stupid things. So what if we create a machine that is smarter than the sum total of humanity combined? I'd rather have a few very powerful AIs, than billions of superintelligent AIs that are competing with humans, when you have billions, you are at the mercy of statistics, there are some good and some bad and with the technology under their control the potential for destruction is greater that the potential for good, All it takes is one bad man with a nuclear bomb to blow up a city despite all the good intentions of everyone else! I could trust a single cyber-deity alot better than one billion AIs that are each 100 times smarter than humans, and no one to control them? Which would you rather live with?
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Neither. But at least in the first case, one going wrong doesn't mean they all are. I'd rather have one bad guy to every four good guys than a 20% chance of a bad guy in charge.
But we don't actually need strong AGI to terraform Venus, so...
Use what is abundant and build to last
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But if you are going to do a strong simulation of a terraformed Venus, you are also going to have to simulate all the planet's inhabitants as well, that means you need an AI for every creature that is being simulated, every bird, every bug, every lizard every human etc. The only way we are going to see a terraformed Venus may be through simulation.
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Just before you were arguing that Venus can be terraformed...
Use what is abundant and build to last
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Sure it could, but an important piece of hardware for terraforming Venus is that part that shades Venus from too much sunlight and redirects it for a 24-hour night and day. It occurs to me that this Solletta also intercepts a lot of sunlight which is energy that could be put to good use. Why not do a Venus simulation with the Solletta while the actually Venus is getting terraformed? Some people just can't wait 1000 years! One can virtually visit an already terraformed Venus in computer simulation. We can start with much smaller less accurate simulations of terraformed Venus on desktop computers in the meantime.
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Theoretically speaking, it is possible to apply the same architecture of Mars Semi-direct to Venus: a floating habitat enter in Venus athmosphere ad floats at 50 km of altitude: it produces the LOX-CH4 propellant for a little ascender, using the atmospheric CO2 and the hydrogen of H2S clouds, while the crew explore the surface of Venus via robots or directly, utilizing a modified atmospheric diving suit, with a Sterling cycle cooling system, or a via a special aerostat with an actively cooled atmospheric pressure habitat.
When the next synodic period arrives, the crew leaves the floating habitat using the ascender and rendez-vous with the orbiting ERV.
This mission is very expensive, more and more than a Mars Direct Mission, and has a lot of technical challenge to overcame. I think nothing is impossible, but it is wiser to go Mars first.
Last edited by Quaoar (2013-12-16 08:42:12)
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