Human Erector Set

Here's a thought. It is an incomplete thought, so maybe others can assist.

Premise - Long distance high speed space travel (i.e. light years) is not possible for human beings who are constructed of matter and have mass.

The only way for something like this to be possible would be if the human form could be deconstructed and then reconstructed at the far end of the journey from matter and mass available locally. This presents a problem.

Problem - Human DNA is an instruction set of sorts. It is unique to the individual. So, if it were possible to deconstruct the human form, the DNA from that form could be used as an instruction set to rebuild that form. However, this would only reconstruct the form, and it would not reconstruct the knowledge contained in the brain of that form. So what is the "DNA" of knowledge? In other words, how do you download a person's entire brain, soup to nuts?

Solution - ?

Solution?

Download memories, thoughts and knowledge onto a memory stick and get a robot to insert and upload at the far end of the journey?

I’m sure someone will come up with a solution, unless our primeval instincts ends up destroying our existence before this is possible.

Sollution: Transfer our cociousness into a small solid state and make our bodies out of hard light projected through said conciosness cariying small solid state.. It should be be as a.. idk.. gem?

a reply to: Cobaltic1978

Think about this for a second. If someone asked you to write down everything you know, how would you do it? As soon as you got done someone could ask you a simple question like what is 1+1, and you would answer 2...but you didn't write that down.

Many of the things you do and know in life are a function of the moment, or the situation that you are in. Trying to recite all those permutations is not possible.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

I doubt any really advanced alien civilisation would go anywhere. Why would they? They would bring the universe to them through information garnered from light. Perhaps any desire for direct experience could be in the form of a 'holo deck or even a direct download via brain linked technology. To be honest I doubt we could imagine what a much older civilisation would be capable of.

S+F for thread though!

we are isolated here for a reason,once it come to pass i guess anything is possible...
maybe we need to find destination first

a reply to: midicon

That's an interesting idea!

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

In other words, how do you download a person's entire brain, soup to nuts?

Our thoughts are the result of electrical and chemical signals moving through our neurons. Theoretically, if you could perfectly capture details about every single atom and every electron, you could rebuild a person. The main issue is quantum mechanics, which states you drastically alter a particle by trying to measure it, and the more precisely you measure one property, the less you know about other properties. There is a limited amount of information you can get from any particle and the process of measuring a particle will change it, so in reality QM probably prevents us from getting enough information to rebuild a person perfectly.

This is a neat idea, and one that was a mode of transport in the sci-fi series The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons. In the story, a ship drive system had been developed that could permit FTL travel, however, using the drive meant that it would produce ridiculous inertial forces ramping up to its top speed; any living organism on board was crushed into paste. So, a system was developed to resurrect human occupants (IDK presumably through some cloning/genetic reconstruction process) after the ship reached its final destination.

The Gideon drive, a Core-provided starship drive, allows for near-instantaneous travel between any two points in human-occupied space. The drive's use kills any human on board a Gideon-propelled starship; thus, the technology is only of use with remote probes or when used in conjunction with the Pax's resurrection technology. The resurrection creche can regenerate someone carrying a cruciform from their remains.

One of my favorite space sci-fi series, highly recommend.

Still wouldn’t be “you” on the other end (following reconstruction). It would just be a copy of you.

The Amazon prime series “Upload” plays with the idea of uploading a persons consciousness into a computer so that they can live forever. The first episode shows the upload process. As soon as the persons brain is uploaded (copied) the person’s human body is destroyed. The person dies and a just a copy of their brain lives on...pretty sad when you think about it.

a reply to: Cobaltic1978

originally posted by: Buvvy
Still wouldn’t be “you” on the other end (following reconstruction). It would just be a copy of you.

The Amazon prime series “Upload” plays with the idea of uploading a persons consciousness into a computer so that they can live forever. The first episode shows the upload process. As soon as the persons brain is uploaded (copied) the person’s human body is destroyed. The person dies and a just a copy of their brain lives on...pretty sad when you think about it.

a reply to: Cobaltic1978

Another plot device from a terrific sci-fi novel series I really liked, The Commonwealth Saga.

Death may be postponed indefinitely in the Commonwealth. Most Commonwealth citizens have a memory crystal (which was invented in the events of Misspent Youth) inserted at the base of the brain which is able to record memories including those before insertion. Commonwealth citizens undergo a process called rejuvenation, approximately every thirty to fifty years (also introduced in Misspent Youth). Rejuvenation is an intense process which leaves the subject's body aged around 20 with adjustment made for personal preference. Citizens can also create backups of memories which are placed in a safe environment, called their "secure store". In the event of a fatal accident or premature death, a clone of the person is created and the stored memories of the original are inserted. If the memory crystal of the deceased is still intact, all the memories, including the one of the pain of the death itself, are reinjected into the clone. This is the "re-life" process, which effectively makes all humans equipped with a memory crystal immortal. Even if still threatened by the loss of their body, the memory crystal implant and "secure store" enable a seamless transition between 'death' and any given human's next life. Not all humans, however, have chosen these implants. In particular, rebels of Far Away are usually not implanted. Most Commonwealth citizens must pay for rejuvenation insurance, similar to superannuation, although some citizens elect to forgo rejuvenation altogether. Rejuvenation is said to be akin to starting a new life, with those who have undergone the process being referred to as second-lifers, third-lifers, and so on. Psychologically, some people tend to shake off the responsibilities of their previous life including employment and marriage. Memories can even be edited to facilitate easy transition to a new life.

Why does it not surprise me that somebody ripped off this idea from an older book/novel and re-packaged it as a "hip(ster), COOL new-fangled Amazon Prime!" series

Just joking (sort of).

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

So what is the "DNA" of knowledge?

Some say memory is in water.:





Deconstruction /reconstruction may be un-necessary
According to this video, long peroids of time, do not have to
be involved in some modes of travel.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

I think they did something like this in the movie Star Trek III.
Spock had downloaded his spirit into McCoy.
Of course Spock is a Vulcan, so there.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk


Try the series "Altered Carbon " on Netfilx. Great first season and some very interesting ideas that would match your premise.

The series takes place over 360 years in the future,[5][6] with most episodes the first season set in the year 2384, in a futuristic metropolis known as Bay City.[7] In the future, a person's memories and consciousness are written onto a disk-shaped device called a cortical stack, which is implanted in the vertebrae at the back of the neck. These storage devices are of alien design and have been reverse engineered and mass-produced but can only be made from the material on Harlan's world. Physical human or synthetic bodies are called "sleeves" and stacks can be transferred to new bodies after death, but a person can still be killed if their stack is destroyed and there is no backup. While this means anyone can live forever, only the wealthiest, known as "Meths" in reference to Methuselah, have the means to change bodies through clones and remote storage of their consciousness in satellites, so they never have to die of old age before being resleeved.[7]

originally posted by: Flyingclaydisk
The only way for something like this to be possible would be if the human form could be deconstructed and then reconstructed at the far end of the journey from matter and mass available locally. This presents a problem.

This is what science fiction portrays, like the star trek transporters, which appear to deconstruct and reconstruct as you put it.

But that's not how transporters really would work, they would scan the original and make a copy at the destination, sort of like a fax machine does. Then to get rid of the original, you have to destroy it. The paper doesn't care if you sent a fax, but the human might not want to be destroyed, so then you have just made a clone.

originally posted by: ChaoticOrder
The main issue is quantum mechanics, which states you drastically alter a particle by trying to measure it, and the more precisely you measure one property, the less you know about other properties. There is a limited amount of information you can get from any particle and the process of measuring a particle will change it, so in reality QM probably prevents us from getting enough information to rebuild a person perfectly.

You're referring to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

Star Trek transporters get around that problem by using "Heisenberg compensators", but the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a fundamental part of our understanding of physics and therefore no technology we know of can overcome it. So we would have to re-write what we know about physics, since making a "Heisenberg compensator" is not possible based on what we know now.

originally posted by: DAVID64
Try the series "Altered Carbon " on Netfilx. Great first season and some very interesting ideas that would match your premise.

I did watch it and there was really no plausible description of the technology used to download and store consciousness, and it didn't really make good sense. It was a piece of hardware inserted in the neck in the spinal column. So does that mean that once the hardware is implanted, only the hardware stores memories and the brain's ability to store memories stops? They didn't explain that either.

It's been said that good science fiction should be a realistic projection of what can be accomplished in the future. Star Trek's "Heisenberg compensators" at least acknowledge there's a problem we don't know how to solve, but the science behind altered carbon deviates so much from what we know that it doesn't really provide any insights into potential solutions.

Anil Seth, professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, is skeptical that we can ever do what altered carbon infers.

Science Behind the Fiction: How body swapping could really work, like Altered Carbon IRL

In most science fiction, consciousness is "extracted" from the brain and "injected" into a computer. Seth said it seems unlikely this will ever happen.

"It's been a very powerful metaphor for a long time that we've thought of the brain as a kind of computer and the mind as the software that runs on that computer," Seth said.

"The brain isn't a computer. It doesn't work anything like a normal computer does. There are some similarities, I suppose, but it's not a computer. So there's no obvious sense in which one would upload one's mind or awareness to a machine at all," he added.

But Seth said there may be another way.

It's more likely consciousness will be transferred to another person by replicating human bodies, he said. This still poses some problems.

A person's sense of self is not just a set of memories, but is tied to their physical body. So if human consciousness could be transferred then it would "massively" alter their personal identity, Seth said.

"It's not just this 'Stack' thing, it's not just a few lines of code or a few billion lines of code that I can slip in and out of different sleeves or different bodies without anything particular changing," he said, referencing the plot of Altered Carbon.

I share his skepticism about being able to transplant human consciousness.

However AIs may develop consciousness, no human is required for that, but it won't be human consciousness because they aren't human. And that makes AI potentially dangerous, which is why Elon Musk called AI humanity’s “biggest existential threat” and compared it to “summoning the demon.”

a reply to: RavenSpeaks

Well, I certainly learned one thing from that guy. People who put those earlobe plug things in their ears look completely hideous and comical when they get older! How do you take someone like that seriously?

Have you played a video game called SOMA? I highly suggest it, given the topic of mind transfer.

originally posted by: Cobaltic1978
Solution?

Download memories, thoughts and knowledge onto a memory stick and get a robot to insert and upload at the far end of the journey?

I’m sure someone will come up with a solution, unless our primeval instincts ends up destroying our existence before this is possible.

That will of course not be you, but a clone of you with independent memories, thoughts and emotions. One of the HUGE trappings of the Transhumanist movement.

Some Star Trek nerds did the math about matter stream being a bandwidth issue. The decoding and recoding on the other end are going to need huge datasets for the location of every atom you want to send across the universe. Thats just raw data but a sensible being would want error correction built-in so the amount of data is even larger. It better be fast because you don't want your blood to fall out while you are still downloading your arteries and skin.

a reply to: staple

I'm ok to skip the data checksums, as long as it's 'bank error in my favor'.