From: den Otter (neosapient@geocities.com)
Date: Sat Mar 27 1999 - 04:09:23 MST
----------
> From: Spike Jones <spike66@ibm.net>
> > Lee Daniel Crocker wrote: ... -you can create [a Mars colony]
> > from scratch in a century or two starting with, say, 30
> > or 40 young, healthy, genetically diverse women and
> > a big dewar of sperm....
>
> Altho it presents some extreme difficulties, could we
> not start a Mars society with a single woman and
> a bunch of ethnically diverse frozen embryos? Could
> not the single crosser of interplanetary space have
> her birth canal surgically enlarged before launch
> in order to facilitate giving birth by herself after self
> implanting an embryo some time after it starts looking
> like she will survive on the surface? It appears to me
> that all the mission requirements scale to the size of the
> astronaut. Our best bet might be a single very small
> woman, perhaps one with no legs, whose weight
> might be 30 kilos or less. spike
Surely we'll have artificial wombs a decade or two into the future,
(those would be a good idea anyway), so there will be no need
for such things. Besides, biological bodies are *not* the wave
of the future. There'll likely never be a large-scale, multi-generation
colonization of Mars or any other planet (save, maybe, the moon)
by humans. Even the most conservative estimates place the
Singularity at no more than a century from now. If the human
race survives that, everyone with any serious pioneering ambitions
will upload into some artificial form that's better adapted for space
travel.
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