Surviving the future 5 - Harnessing evolution

First part here.
Second part here.
Third part here.
Fourth part here.
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There are other solutions, too, to circumvent the limits imposed by c.

For example, crafting Von Neumann machines is not beyond our technological grasp.

Those are machines able to build, primarily, copies of themselves, secondarily other machines or structures, using materials taken from the surrounding environment. A self-replicating probe could be sent to another star system at sub-luminal speed. Once there, no matter how much time it takes, the probe will start mining out raw materials from the available asteroids, moons, gas giants and whatnot, to create replicas of itself. These replicas would then fly off that system toward other stars while the original probe could stay and start not only analyzing the athmosphere and the soil, but also building a full-fledged colony complete with factories, recycling plants (air and water, if necessary), power plants (geothermal, solar, nuclear), habitats and so on.

This initial probe would be followed at a distance of several years by a manned ship in which the crew is either conscious of unconscious. The former would be a generation ship of the aforementioned kind, the latter is feasible if we discover a way to suspend indefinitely our metabolism, i.e. “cryostasis”. Upon its arrival the crew will have only to disembark, check that everything's working and start living off the land.

In substitution for a manned starship we can envision a cheaper one, one in which a full life-support system is not even required. We could build a much smaller and crude hull full of frozen embryos – of animals and human beings alike. I'm aware that this is much more speculative but, given the technology, the machines themselves will thaw the embryos and educate the persons they will become.

They will be different from us, even radically so. Another kind of human beings.

Change is a fundamental part of our history, of evolution and adaptation themselves, and adapt we must if we want to survive indefinitely. Unless we discover how to reach and surpass c our travels in outer space will be a slow process, painstakingly slow, and this is another reason why we must learn to plan ahead.

We must accept that expansion in space will change us. Other values of gravity, sunlight with a different spectrum, differences in soil and air chemistry... all this will modify our body and mind. The voyages themselves will require us to be open to the necessary adjustments. Changes in our environment, existent or generated by us, will change our species just like it has already happened before. The meaning of the word “humanity” will shift to include something we cannot envision today. New creatures, separated by many generations from us apes evolved in Earth's savannah, as different from us as the first mammals from modern man, will bring on the history of our species. They will not be human in the sense we intend today. Our definition of a human being will not be valid anymore, as it is nonsense now when referred to our lemurid ancestors. This may be hard to accept, but it is inevitable if we are to survive the span of thousands of millennia or millions of years.

This is not even a novelty. We have already modified our own evolutionary process. We created an environment suited to our needs, we changed the conditions in which we live, so we transformed the influences this environment has on us.

We have already taken evolution in our hands. I propose that we do so openly and consciously. Genetic engineering is a promising field we don't yet fully understand, but it holds great possibilities and will be more than useful: it'll be fundamental to support our evolution toward new forms. We can adapt ourselves to microgravity, or let the space itself do that for us along the next millions of years. We could adapt our bodies to face every foreseen situation, like the colonization of a new planet with its chemistry and its biota.

We will become spacefarers, star-dwellers.

And then, only then, we will really be able to make far-sighted plans.

(to be continued... )