conquer - 29 September 2007 07:17 PM

Hawking is practically a clown when he claims…

seriously, I got an allegorical image of a poodle trying to pick a fight with a pitbull…

... or a gnat with an elephant ...

:ohoh:

I used to chat a *lot* online, until I started having whacko dreams about uploading myself and downloading and backing-up my incorporeal friends.  I pretty much quit chatting cold-turkey at that point.  That was about six years ago.

A couple of zippy thoughts:

1) Our bodies and metabolisms are highly attenuated to not just the physical environmental thingamabobs of Earth, but also the specific relative chemical abundances (at least surface abundances).  Another planet may be able to support water and an oxygen atmosphere (assuming O2 won’t waft away into space like it would in the weak gravity and “warming” sunlight of Mars or the Moon), but plants and animals would get all puny-like without Earthlike abundances of trace chemicals.

2) I got myself this durned notion that modeling mental identity isn’t just a matter of collecting “states” but trajectories:  It’s not enough to know what all the positions of chemical signaling agents, one must also know their fluxes and trajectories.  It’s kind’a like knowing wave and particle properties at the same time, though I won’t go so far as to make the (in my opinion dubious) claim that the brain is a “quantum computer”.  Rather, the idea is that in order to fully characterize a system, it’s not good enough to simply know the location, orientation and composition of its constituent thingys, one must also know how they are moving and interacting. 

My personal prognostication (worth about $2x10^-zillion on the open market) and brought up by some of ya’all is that we’re far more likely to have intelligent non-biological (I hate to call them “machines”) entities leave Earth for the stars than we are to send folks wandering the vast cold interstices of the universe.

truthaddict - 01 October 2007 09:17 AM

conquer - 29 September 2007 07:17 PM

Hawking is practically a clown when he claims…

seriously, I got an allegorical image of a poodle trying to pick a fight with a pitbull…

Lol, the pitbull of your allegory is blind…no problems for me at all, he still is a clown.

tscott - 04 October 2007 12:57 AM

1) Our bodies and metabolisms are highly attenuated to not just the physical environmental thingamabobs of Earth, but also the specific relative chemical abundances (at least surface abundances).  Another planet may be able to support water and an oxygen atmosphere (assuming O2 won’t waft away into space like it would in the weak gravity and “warming” sunlight of Mars or the Moon), but plants and animals would get all puny-like without Earthlike abundances of trace chemicals.

 

This is a good point to be exploited.

We have first the environment of outer space with a different gravity which causes in us several health problems as faster osteoporosis, low levels of red cells, deformed discs in our backs, distortion of our bodies, and more. Without the proper care our bodies probably should end as spread mass in the floor like jello.

So, I can predict right now that astronauts will have to use drugs in order to help them to survive better in long trips in outer space…there is no other choice by now.

After this “adaptation” in the space ship, the astronauts will have to “adapt again” in the planet where they will land. The problem is that the health problems will be unknown until they arrive over there.

So, they will have to have several drugs of all kind to help them to survive over there, otherwise they will have to live in the space ship for weeks, months and even years until they find the right ones.

What about if unknown bacteria or viruses attack them and no medicine is available?

You have lots of possible negative events which may cause the fast extinction of the astronauts right with their landing in such new home in another planet.

It appears that today people have been watching to many movies about astronauts traveling and finding a new home in other planets “with a similar atmosphera like ours”, but here we are not discussing about fiction movies with such happy endings.

We must be realistic and take in consideration the pros and cons of this idea of traveling to another planets to inhabit them.

Of course, Hawking still living in the days of Einstein when Einstein thought that traveling to outer space was like to traveling from New York to Washington DC in a train. Both are still ignorants that space traveling causes lots of health damages to astronauts…and it appears that some posters here also suffer of such deliberate ignorance.