I really enjoyed this podcast. But regarding space colonization, I do not think that uploading humans to computers is the only alternative to avoid transporting human colonies in space ships. For instance, we could send facilities for producing nutrition, oxygen and human artificial wombs there, plus two tiny test tubes of undamaged egg and sperm cells. Of course, once synthetic biology gives us the ability to create cells ourselves, we can also upload the human (epi)genome to a storage medium and synthetize the DNA and zygotes on the new planet.
I would have thought that this is magnitudes easier, because (with exception of my last sentence) this uses existing technology (although, AFAIK the artificial ecosystems we tried to create on earth failed after some time, so maybe there is a bit more fine-tuning needed). Whereas we still seem to be far away to understand humans or upload them to computers. But in the end, perhaps we would not want to colonise space with a rocket like structure, but with the lightest stuff we can possibly built do to relativistic mass increase. Who knows. The lightweight argument would certainly work in favour of the upload to computer solution.
I really enjoyed this podcast. But regarding space colonization, I do not think that uploading humans to computers is the only alternative to avoid transporting human colonies in space ships. For instance, we could send facilities for producing nutrition, oxygen and human artificial wombs there, plus two tiny test tubes of undamaged egg and sperm cells. Of course, once synthetic biology gives us the ability to create cells ourselves, we can also upload the human (epi)genome to a storage medium and synthetize the DNA and zygotes on the new planet.
Maybe we can do that eventually, but doesn’t that just seem unnecessarily hard?
I would have thought that this is magnitudes easier, because (with exception of my last sentence) this uses existing technology (although, AFAIK the artificial ecosystems we tried to create on earth failed after some time, so maybe there is a bit more fine-tuning needed). Whereas we still seem to be far away to understand humans or upload them to computers. But in the end, perhaps we would not want to colonise space with a rocket like structure, but with the lightest stuff we can possibly built do to relativistic mass increase. Who knows. The lightweight argument would certainly work in favour of the upload to computer solution.