h a l f b a k e r y"This may be bollocks, but it's lovely bollocks."
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The tough thing about space travel is that you need to keep the space travelers alive during the trip. So how'se about this: you create a "Humanity in a box", which includes a bunch of frozen human eggs (as well as other animals and plants), as well as a supply of food and water and "robotic parent"
to raise the kids. We launch these off in spacecraft that fly around the universe looking for inhabitable planets. If they find a planet with enough air and water and is the right temperature, it lands and sets up camp.
Utnapishtim's ark, if you want to be pedantic about it.
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utnapishtim
[Monkfish, Oct 21 2004]
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Isn’t that how we got here? ;-) |
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I think that eventualy this will be a reality. |
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If everyone smacks the bottom right corner of their monitor, we can knock this apostrophe into the title: |
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There's an axiom I have heard quoted often but never proved. It goes something like this: "There's no point launchng a spacecraft at alpha centauri at this point in time because, given the current rate of technological adavance, a craft launched in 20 years would overtake it." |
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Assuming that there is some truth to this then we'd be better off doing things closer to home. |
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Plus, as waugs said, covered in a lot of SF. |
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kropotkin: <smack>
[admin: possessive apostrophe added to title] |
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<lobs an *s* in st3f's direction - good catch :) |
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hawktriad: 'Magic Wand' GM ideas generally get short shrift. Since the genetic engineering aspect of this idea seems to lie about the level of test-tube conception, I don't see it as fiting in that category. |
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Why bother with the hardware? Why not just broadcast our genetic code. Let advanced civilizations circling distant stars recreate humanity. Heck, they probably have already done this -- recreated us, that is. By taking us away in droves in their saucers. Or at least the eggs, the sperm. While we proudly travel to low earth orbit, proclaiming to ourselves that we are exploring the universe. Obviously though, we are idiots!
Sorry, just speaking for myself... |
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Maybe there's potential for a business that would beam your DNA into space for a fee. There'd certainly be a few romantics who would find the (infinitely remote) possibility of being cloned on a distant planet attractive. Or you could sell memory on a probe. |
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Programming the original idea's robotic parent seems like a difficult task. Just coming up with a suitably hilarious joke religion would be agony. |
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We are already doing something like this. Scientists routinely sample endangered species DNA to check biodiversity. Some samples are kept on ice. |
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Also, scientists are considering cloning Dodos, Thylacine, and other recently extinct species. |
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//Maybe there's potential for a business that would beam your DNA into space for a fee// |
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Scenario 1 - Thousands of years later, we land on the alien homeworld and somebody notices that all the meat-livestock look like Monkfish. There's even veal-monkfish-babyflesh and monkfish-pate-de-fois-gras. |
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Scenario 2 - SETI receives an alien DNA fragment and the baby alien has a birthmark that reads - beam your DNA into the far reaches of space for only 17 credits. Offer valid till stardate 13004597, subject to bandwidth. |
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Scenario 3 - In year 2150, SETI finally receives its first signal. They decode it and discover it's monkfish's DNA, copyrighted by ZORG SlaveBots(tm). |
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Fifteen seconds of static, at a guess. |
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So basically we'd be just like "Sea Monkeys"...but on a much larger scale. |
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[st3f] - how ironic would it be for the first interstellar
space travellers to arrive on a planet, to them the most
awesome achievement of their entire civilization, only to
find that a ship launched after theirs has already set up a
colony, complete with an interstellar McDonalds,
receiving colonists via warp gate every other day... |
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// If everyone smacks the bottom right corner of their monitor, we can knock this apostrophe into the title: // UUmm! Right did that, now my monitors gone all purple and there a crackling noise coming from the back....... |
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not sure if colonization is workable at this stage of the game, but this could be a new kind of Pioneer type probe. For the cost of a few billion dollars, send a half a dozen of these on their way and wether or not we self destroy or manage to nudge the asteroid, someone someday could pick it up. |
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they could make it the new "survivor" series......only i may actually watch if we launched the contestants into space.....;) |
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//Noah's Ark//
Didn't you mean Gilgamesh's Ark? He was there long before Noah. |
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this is not going to deteriorate into another "my creation myth predates your creation myth" disaster, is it? :) |
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thanks Monkfish -- do your worldwide expeditions cover the bottom of the Black Sea where they're searching for evidence of the flood(s) and the melting plug to the meditteranean theory? |
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"...this is not going to deteriate into another "my creation myth predates your creation myth" disaster, is it?", pleaded the believer in a later myth. |
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I believe it was either Issac Asimov or Arthur C Clarke who asked why the people on the ship would get off the ship. If it was durable enough to last the tens or hundreds of years such a journey would take, it should last many, many more years. |
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proto57 -- actually I'm an atheist -- does that qualify? |
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