Let's Reconstitute Humans From Genomes Launched Into Space! and Other Ambitious Proposals for Galac

Read this article on Popular Science...I must say, I'm disappointed we don't have flying cars yet and I was looking forward to them since I was 6. Hopefully DARPA can pull off this 100 year starship project because civilization in space seems like the only way we can thrive as a species since we're already running out of room here on planet Earth...Hopefully our morals outweigh our greed so we don't destroy other planets like we've destroyed this one...

Fragmented human genomes could be shipped toward the stars and reconstructed upon their arrival, spawning the first interstellar citizens and avoiding the problems of long-distance space survival. That’s just one idea — proposed by genome pioneer J. Craig Venter — emerging from the field of dreams seeded by DARPA’s 100-Year Starship project. DARPA is collecting proposals for a conference on the starship project this fall. You can submit ideas through July 8; find out more here.

[url=http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-06/100-year-starship-will-inspire-currently-inconceivable-tech-military-and-public-darpa-says]PopSci[/ url]

reply to post by NephlimKilla


I've long believed that the most straightforward way to colonize and/or explore other solar systems is to send an automated probe carrying the materials needed to spawn the parent species on the other side of the journey. It would completely eliminate the need to propel the huge mass of a generational ship. If mixed with a von neumann design it could even copy itself (to then send the copies to other adjacent systems) and autonomously build the facilities needed to perform the reconstitution (life support systems, greenhouses to grow food, habitable sections to live in, vehicles to explore within the destination system, etc) using raw materials at the destination to further save on weight. In my opinion it would almost certainly be the "path of least resistance." The major technical hurdles are of course the robotics and software needed for that level of automated building and autonomous gathering of raw materials, and the ability to reconstitute without any members of the species already being present to start reproduction. Neither of those seem impossible however, and if they could be accomplished the energy requirements needed to explore and/or colonize space at a geometric rate become significantly smaller and the rest could even be reasonably accomplished by our own level of technology and requires no "new physics."

reply to post by ngchunter


LOL not to mention being the first set of individuals spawned to end up on an alien planet alone....

Who knows what horrible diseases await for them... without the aid of an artificial intelligence to speed up the creation of a immune system for the enviroment it could take millions and millions of dead people to create a genetic immunity.

If your gonna need machines to babysit why make the people at all? As if another infant sentient species wouldnt be more deserving of this own chance to progress.

So we send our genome into space to arrive at destination in the distant future.

Destination happens to be inhabited by hostile alien species with time travel.

End result; present day Earth infested with human looking aliens who tell us they will teach us how to live spritually if we disarm our nukes.

This would make a great film.

reply to post by ngchunter

Fantastic post, ngchunter. Of course, ‘seed ships’ are a well-established science-fiction trope, used by everyone from Ursula le Guin to James Blish. One of the finest (and most charming) SF short stories ever is Blish’s ‘Surface Tension’, which describes some of the hazards and problems involved – and proposes some solutions. It was published, by the way, in 1952.

I’m not sure if von Neumann machines are really possible at ourlevel of technology. The only von Neumann machines human beings have ever yet produced are... human beings. Biological entities are Nature’s very own von Neumann machines. To me, this suggests that good old-fashioned sexual reproduction is the most efficient way to produce them – which takes us back in a loop to the OP and his seed-ships again. Frankly, I think we’d do best to forget about artificial VNMs and just stick with the natural ones.

So future interstellar colonization may involve the colonists returning to the wheel and fire stage for a few millennia. No harm in that. Their more technologically accomplished descendants could make up stories about supernaturally powerful beings who descended from the skies in ancient times to fashion the race. In twenty thousand years or so, they’ll even have conspiracy web sites to discuss it on.

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reply to posts by Wertdagf and akkad

What a pair of Jonahs you two are.

Wertdagf: so what if you need millions, or even billions? Sperm and eggs are available in unlimited quantities. So, it would seem, are stars with planets.

Have you ever watched ant or termite queens swarming? They emerge from their underground nurseries in thousands and just fly – randomly and blindly, it would seem – until they find a suitable place and land to start a new colony there. One of the most memorable nights of my life was passed in a jungle pavilion lit by oil lamps on a rainy night when the termites swarmed. Every mound in the area exploded with flying queens, and of course our lights attracted them. The lamps were glassed-in, but within twenty minutes or so dead termite queens were piled in vast hills and drifts around them. These grew until we turned the lamps out and went to sleep under mosquito nets among ramparts of dead insects. At dawn the next morning we were woken by early birds in a feeding frenzy – forest birds made so bold by this bounty they hopped among us like tame budgerigars. When it got properly light, the servants swept away bushel-baskets full of dead termites. But of course, enough survived the night’s carnage to breed next season’s population.

That, my friend, would be the perfect model for interstellar colonization. What the SF author Iain M. Banks calls a Hegemonizing Swarm. Of course, the rest of the population of the Galaxy may not like it very much, so we’d better watch out for giant flying Flit-cans.

Which brings me to you, akkad. I think we can rule out time travel, but it’s quite likely that any attempt to spread ourselves into space will bring us into contact with other civilizations which may regard us as invaders or simply as pests. The Sun and his children are ours, but if we plan to spread ourselves off-system we had better be well tooled up, because there will be objections – violent ones – from our fellow sentients.

Notice I say ‘will’, not ‘may’...

How does a machine nurture live humans to the point they can feed themselves, or even wipe themselves. I think the whole idea of sending human genome out to deep space, (without human food genome) is for the likelihood of terrestrial beings having enough curiosity and initiative to assemble 'specimens' for study. Nothing more and nothing less and yes we do not have the technology to build such a machine to nurture humans for a decade or more to a self-sustaining natural contributing life. Like the kids are just going to sit still or something! We can't make life from DNA today with humans outside of movies.

reply to post by Illustronic

A little genetic engineering will take care of these little troubles, don’t you worry.

Originally posted by Illustronic
How does a machine nurture live humans to the point they can feed themselves, or even wipe themselves.

Advanced robotics could do it in a mechanical sense, pardon the pun. Such robotics could provide virtual parents, though without AI it would only be able to handle scenarios that had already been anticipated. Any parent knows that you can't anticipate everything. The best solution would be to do dry runs on earth simulating the exact same spacecraft environment the reconstituted humans would be raised on initially, using clones of the same humans to be reconstituted and do enough "dry runs" with it to develop a parenting protocol that accounts for everything seen in the dry run testing (and hope that anything unanticipated doesn't lead to complete failure). I don't know that humans, "un-engineered" humans anyway, could handle that kind of relatively emotion-less upbringing or not, and more importantly I don't know that society would ever approve of such a harsh experiment that so coldly treats human life, but physically speaking there's no absolute reason why it couldn't work.

I was really thinking about this concept in a more general sense, as something some hypothetical species might do, particularly if their need for "emotional feeding" is less than ours or somehow easier to fulfill without an adult. I still think even we could hypothetically do it, but even I don't think we should based on the ethical issues of what you'd have to put clones through just to test it, to say nothing of actually executing the plan.

yes we do not have the technology to build such a machine to nurture humans for a decade or more to a self-sustaining natural contributing life. Like the kids are just going to sit still or something! We can't make life from DNA today with humans outside of movies

Not sure if this part was really addressed to me or not, but I fully understand that there are serious technological barriers in the fields of robotics and biology that we could not currently overcome, but there's no physical reason why they couldn't be overcome eventually. It's not like a faster than light vessel where some unproven theory or exotic matter allowing for a loophole in advanced physics has to come true to make it work. I was envisioning something more akin to android like machines to do the raising, so they wouldn't have to sit still like baby Kal-El in his little spaceship pod. Of course it begs the question, if you have androids and autonomous spacecraft, why bother to reconstitute humans (or insert hypothetical alien species here) anyway? Well, to get the eggs out of a single solar system basket for one thing. To fulfill the basic primal biological urge to spread, for another. Note, I'm not making value statements about these things, just stating the reasons that a species, not even necessarily ours, might do these things.

Originally posted by Astyanax
I’m not sure if von Neumann machines are really possible at ourlevel of technology. The only von Neumann machines human beings have ever yet produced are... human beings. Biological entities are Nature’s very own von Neumann machines. To me, this suggests that good old-fashioned sexual reproduction is the most efficient way to produce them – which takes us back in a loop to the OP and his seed-ships again. Frankly, I think we’d do best to forget about artificial VNMs and just stick with the natural ones.

Fair enough. I think nanotechnology may provide a gateway to making artificial self-replicating machines possible by making machines more like cellular-based lifeforms, but of course self-replicating and expanding spaceships are still a long way off. Like you said though, such proposals are not new. Time will tell I suppose.