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Comment by hereonbusiness | Hacker News Reader

We expect human nature to stay the same. Human beings of the future will have the same drives and needs we have now. Practically speaking, their home must have abundant energy, livable temperatures and protection from the rigors of space, including cosmic radiation, which new research suggests is unavoidably dangerous for biological beings like us

I would expect the complete opposite if we really want to colonize the solar system at some point. It seems far easier to modify/replace the human body than to try to suit all it's biological needs.

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In the episode The Science of Humans at War[1] of the StarTalk podcast, around the 25 min mark, they ask the question of human modification, specially for the harsh environments of space, and claim that in almost every case it has been tried, an engineering solution has been found that is both cheaper and more practical than to directly modify humans.

[1]: https://www.startalkradio.net/show/cosmic-queries-science-hu...

Is it? We don't have any conceivable idea on how exactly human modification might work. We like to imaging how we gonna decouple bodies and consciousness, yet we can't even grow organs in a Petri dish or figure out how things like obesity are being caused. For traveling to Mars and beyond we already have some solid conventional plans, its just a matter of committing a huge amount of resources to it.

Easier is the wrong word, you cannot just at a second pair of legs to a human as you would think from mechanical thinking. If you really want humans to live there you might have brains contained in an artifical container but adding some functionality to a complex organic system is hard, really hard. We may be able to do that in bacteria or yeast (and there these are billion dollar projects like the next-fuel incentives) but are not in multi-cellular organisms. Too many levels of control you have to cover, you do not only have to manage the status quo but also the embrional development and managment over 90+ years. And this with-out trials, at least if you are against human trials which would be massive and lead to thousand of dead trial persons. (I mean we are not able to do this in mice and even there every trial faces massive ethical opposition). Maybe in a hundred years (but who knows what will exist in a hundred years), everything else is blatant optimism.

Yes, modifying humans to adapt better to different gravities, air pressures, ambient light levels and color, temperature, day length, etc., could make colonization much more practical.

Realistically, going to other planets/moons will be one way trips anyway, might as well make the most of it.

> replace the human body

But would not this be the same as the destruction of the human species as we know it? Which is exactly what is meant to be avoided by the idea of colonizing other planets?

(Incidentally, I suspect that the brain will not be the last organ that will be replaced with a mechanical part.)

My thoughts exactly, instead of adapting planets for our current form we should try to adapt humans for extraterrestrial environments. We need to find a way to transfer our brains(or brain data) into a machine, then adapt this machine to the conditions of the planet. Easier said than done obviously, but colonizing Titan doesn't seem a very realistic option either. Besides flying humans safely to Titan we also need to fly enough technology for them to survive until proper housing can be built and to be able to harvest Titan's resources.

"We need to find a way to transfer our brains(or brain data) into a machine"

It's debatable whether that's a "transfer" so much as the killing of one life and the creation of another one.

To me that would be more of a creation of another intelligent being, with some eerie similarities to humans.

probably faster and cheaper to create human like machines In the near term that have none of the problems we have living in harsher environments.

Exactly! That's why I think we should keep building better AI. It'll be AI, which will be traveling out to the stars, not humans.

We could send a probe to a star and once it reaches it, we could simply beam the AI using a transmitter to the probe. Once AI has done its work there, it can be beamed back to Earth (it there is need for that). Build a network of probes and AI can travel between stars at light speed!

Creation of AI is not without its own risks to humanity.

Not sure what you mean. If we create sentient AI, why dont you consider them to be as human as their creators? It's a matter of philosophy in the end.

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