From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Sun Feb 17 2002 - 14:02:45 MST
In a message dated 2/17/2002 2:57:19 PM Eastern Standard Time,
mail@HarveyNewstrom.com writes:
<< This solution does not help space exploration or the viability of
multi-generational space missions. This is merely an attempt to impose
traditional family units onto space travelers and to limit sexual
reproduction to married couples while shunning the use of artificial
insemination. I see no reason why these traditional (and possibly
religious) limits should be imposed on the space program. >>
Because, if your sperm and ova bank, production of humans is deemed subject
to inordinate flaws, if cryosleep is considered ultimately to be a failure,
if uploading is demonstrated to be a dead-end, if relativistic flight is
unachievable, if FTL ultimately becomes a pipe-dream...what else will work?
You are banking on technological successes, while the evidence of the 20th
century is replete with technological failures.
*Disclaimer* I am NOT pronouncing any of these projects un-doable. I am
playing Devil's Advocate in stating that they May Not be workable, for
unknown reason, over the next several hundred years.
Therefore, if you piss on the article's premise (feel free to do so) you also
neglect to see it for the thought-experiement that it really is. The idea is
focused almost exclusively, on no big advances in technology (highly
unlikely), and it gives the Anthropologist some room to view this a a social
experiment.
If, for whatever reason, the human species, in the future, uses the gold old
fashoned natalist venue, then that would indeed mean, that there are no
alternatives, like relativistic interstellar flight. Perhaps 150 years after
the launch of the good ship Procreation, the Ramship, Excelsior, bypasses the
generation-ship by some 250,000 kilometers per second. By the time, the
Procreation enters the Target solar system, the bots and their human
companions, stage a welcoming celebration for the astonished new arrivals.
Far fetched, but not so far fetched.
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