Boldly Going: Part Two

Rather than having a spaceship carry a passenger, have the passenger be an actual part of the spaceship!

Okay, so you want to boldly go. The problem is, you’re not small and you’re not light and you require life support like oxygen and water and food and a bed and artificial gravity and things to keep you occupied and psychologically sound and healthy over hundreds to thousands of years spent travelling. But, again, on reflection, ultimately the only part of you that actually needs to boldly go is your mind. Why bother taking your big toe along for the journey, or your wisdom teeth or for that matter the rest of the biological you along for the ride? All those body parts are just going to age and create health issues and complicate things. They get in the way of efficiently boldly going. You can see where this is leading I’m sure!

If you want to boldly go, without all that additional biological baggage, just download the contents of you mind into your spaceship’s computer. Because that’s not quite feasible today, I’m assuming that this takes place in the future, albeit not that distant future relative to human history – say just 200 to 300 years distant. You and associated spaceship – call it the Enterprise is you wish to – boldly go, molasses style, into the cosmos, seeking out – well new worlds, even if not new life and new civilizations. You get to explore and colonize new extraterrestrial real estate. 

Of course for the sake of the reproduction apex, you’d need to have low weight, small sized; no real life support needed, eggs and sperm on board. Under your guidance, you get to play stepmother and father and raise a new generation, which, ultimately, in turn, will download and boldly go!

Throwing around the idea of transferring the contents of your mind from brain to computer needs a bit of rationalization and explanation. It just seems to me that if you can build a machine (a computer say) and give it artificial intelligence (AI), then you can build a machine (perhaps a futuristic quantum computer) and give it an existing human intelligence (the mind – same difference) by downloading it directly from brain to machine.

So, let’s compare and contrast your ‘mind in machine’ vs. your ‘mind in the brain’ options with respect to boldly going.

Mind in the brain: Your brain has a fixed/limited capacity. Your brain is subject to aging, disease and injury. Your brain is not replaceable. Your brain is one copy only.  Your brain has in coming to terms with sensory input a rather limited range (you can’t see ultraviolet (UV) or infrared (IR) for example and thus that range is denied to your brain and thus mind). Your brain needs to sleep, or at least rest a bit. Your brain has a lifespan of about three score and ten years.

Mind in the machine: The machine has a near unlimited capacity – there’s lots of room for your mind to keep on absorbing things. The machine will experience no loss of essential sensory input (audio and visual), and in fact be able to accommodate an expanded range of same (detect UV and IR for example). The machine can be hooked up to other machinery that will provide mobility. The machine is less subject to aging and injury and in any event it is easier to repair and replace as necessary. The mind in machine option means there can be more than one copy of your mind in existence (and let’s leave the ethics of that aside for future philosophers). If you wish to reproduce, your biological eggs or sperm could be separately stored for use on a rainy day (not that you have rainy days in space) – if you wish – but you don’t get unlimited reproduction out of that of course, but then again you don’t have that option in a biological body either in the here and now. The mind in the machine has no need of sleep, but you’d have the option of an ‘off’ switch if you wanted. The mind in the machine may not provide you with immortality, but certainly something a lot longer than three score and ten, and probably long enough to boldly go for hundreds to thousands of years.  

Assuming this scenario actually happens, we note that at this point humanity has split into two ‘species’ – the biological composed of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen (CHON), and the artificial of iron and silicon. Actually, what I suspect might eventuate is that you start off with eggs and sperm, flesh and blood, until your inevitable biological termination nears – then you download your mind into your iron/silicon equivalent and live to think and do another day.

An interesting scenario is that those initially boldly go, be they flesh-and-blood or mind-in-machine or a combination of the two – half-flesh and half artificial parts like bioengineered cybernetic organisms of which current humans are already bona fide examples  - well might these ‘humans’, when they get to their destination, be greeted by their great, great, great, great grandchildren? It’s possible, indeed probable, that advances in propulsion technology might increase the initial molasses-in-Antarctica style of boldly going astronautics to a more water-in-the-tropics rate of flow. If initial velocities are some 1% to 10% light speed, then 200 years later 20% plus the speed of light becomes achievable, then despite the original boldly goers having a long head start, later generations could overtake their slower ancestors and arrive first!

Let’s now turn the tables around – flip the coin. Will aliens boldly go, and in the manner I’ve outlined for humans? Actually, given that we’re the new boys on the block, that’s actually ‘have aliens already boldly gone’?

Aliens could have seeded Earth, either via remote probes with microbial payloads, or perhaps in a more up-close-and-personal manner all those billions of terrestrial years ago. There’s no way we could really ever know, but it can’t be ruled out that our ancestry might be traceable back before our solar system even existed.

Extraterrestrial equivalents of our Von Neumann probes might be in our solar system right now, mining say asteroids and reproducing like mechanical rabbits. They wouldn’t be large enough to be detectable out there. An interesting question, might they be programmed to ‘seek out new life forms and new civilizations’ at a distance, say by monitoring planetary atmospheres for telltale signatures like the presence of oxygen or methane, or in fact be scanning the solar system for, say radio or microwave electromagnetic radiation of an artificial nature. They could transmit their findings back to home base. Maybe that might result in an eventual visitation and first contact by the parents of extraterrestrial Von Neumann machines. It would be a relatively inexpensive way of exploring the galaxy for life.

Maybe, apart from Von Neumann machines, the aliens are here – here being in our solar system, including not only the near Earth environment, but Earth itself.

Let me ask this, could the UFO itself actually be the alien?

In the very early days of the UFO (nee Flying Saucer) phenomena, one suggestion was that UFOs were alive – space critters that inhabited our solar system but now and again entered our atmosphere. These critters weren’t an intelligence, just an alien animal type organism.

Apart from the contactees, claiming to meet with purely human appearing extraterrestrials, all blonde and blue-eyed hunks and beauty-queens, the actual flesh-and-blood aliens are fairly rare in the UFO literature – with one exception. Before we get to that, only a relatively few UFO close encounters feature occupants – like for example the Lonnie Zamora, Socorro, New Mexico (1964) encounter, and the second to third hand reports of bodies, in say the Roswell (1947) incident.

The main reports of actual alien beings rest mainly with the alleged UFO adduction phenomena, which should not be dismissed out of hand without due research and investigation. If abduction reports are taken at face value, then there’s little doubt that these extraterrestrials have boldly gone in the flesh-and-blood. Well, the very fact that they are here, or could be here, suggests that they must, of necessity, be technologically superior to ourselves, and thus have achieved interstellar travel at somewhat better than the 1% to 10% light speed velocities I’ve postulated. Of course we can’t judge an alien’s lifespan based on our own. For all we know, a journey of dozens to hundreds of light years, at molasses-in-Antarctica velocities, could be to them a big yawn.

Of course we haven’t actually dissected an extraterrestrial being (Roswell perhaps an exception) so we really don’t actually know if these alien beings are really flesh-and-blood. Appearances can be deceiving, or, you can’t always judge a book by its cover. Perhaps they are robotic with realistic skin covering (androids) or cybernetic beings.

Anyway, if UFOs are extraterrestrial sorties into our environment, there’s no evidence to rule out the possibility that they are under the guidance of, what I’ve suggested above, an iron and silicon housed intelligence, which may, or may not, have been CHON initially.

The UFO ETH (ExtraTerrestrial Hypothesis) is controversial at best, so perhaps extrapolating to what the exact nature of the potential alien’s boldly going is, is best left to the imagination – for now.