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Old 16-January-2009, 11:41 AM
marsbug marsbug is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Vultur View Post
The embryo stuff ... I'm not sure. I think it would be easier to build a generation ship than an AI competent enough to raise functional humans. Human parents find it very difficult; and how much of it do we do instinctually, or take for granted, that we wouldn't know to program in?

A generation ship just requires the ability to move lots of mass in space. It's still far away, but I think it requires a lot fewer technologies that we don't understand. A competent enough AI to raise human children is so far beyond anything possible now as to require lots of radically new knowledge; a generation ship would mostly be larger scale applications of technology we understand in principle.
A generation ship is a self contained artificial world, if we can build them, do we really need a destination? The crew might decide that roaming the galaxy was a better option than colonising a planet, and just wander away. And who could blame them?
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