Hi, Straggler.
Sorry about the delay.
Straggler writes:
Isn't Bluejay an SF writer............?
How bout it Bluejay?
Yes.
Most of the stuff in this thread is beyond me, though: I'm no physicist or engineer. I focus on biology and evolution, and just assume things like wormholes and starships in order to make other worlds possible to explore.
And, I actually
have written stuff similar to what you're talking about. I wrote about an automated system that is designed to generate new biospheres on habitable planets. Some industrialists used an automated system to terraform a remote, Earth-like planet with a "DNA ark" and declare that world a "nature sanctuary" in order to placate politically-powerful conservationists.
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It's fun to write about stuff like that in SF, but you always have to wonder whether the interest would ever exist to do it in real life. The conservation idea I came up with is probably not very practical, and probably wouldn't be satisfying to anybody in the real world, so it isn't very likely that people would buy into it.
Of course, you could always find some free-thinkers and misfits who would be interested in stuff like that, and, if any of them had financial or political connections (as in my story), they could make it happen.
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Straggler writes:
Simply transferring the biology of humanity to another far off place would, I think, not necessarily result in anything that particularly resembled humanity in so many ways that we take for granted.
I think a more pressing difficulty would be designing functional people with an automated system. Would the people be grown in artificial wombs and raised through childhood by the robots? Or, would they be built as adults? If the latter, could they be taught everything they need to know in order to build a functional---and advanced---society in a timely fashion?
Maybe you'd have to design the babies to be precocial, so they can walk and find food (which the robots could grow or produce) on their own from birth. Perhaps the robots could also construct complex environments designed to help the children mature into functional adults. At any rate, whatever culture evolves from this would clearly be very alien.
Of course, none of this happens unless society is willing to allow genetic engineering (designer babies is what this amounts to) and has a non-biological view of humanity.
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Maybe someday I’ll write up a thread to explain some of my SF concepts (a lot of it is quite applicable to EvC). Probably not anytime soon, though: I’m about to start a brutal field season.
-Bluejay/Mantis/Thylacosmilus
Darwin loves you.
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