Yes, the Ark may be conceived as the “exocytosis vesicle” of the Gaia cell. A “seminosphere” (from semen, inis: seed).

The goal is not to “save humanity”, but to spread it within the Galaxy in its own human and sustainable entirety. And I do not think that humanity is in danger in short-medium term. Even, not at all. However, at bigger timescales, at scales that formidably exceeds us, the ability to propagate our being in multiple points of the universe is perhaps the only strategy that can make humanity a cosmic time phenomenon.

And “our being”, Humanity, does not only include the biological species “Homo sapiens” (which is expected to “soon” give birth to new species), but also the biosphere which gave ti birth and the incredible evolutionary success it has accumulated in its various species.

But for this, it takes a great vessel ^ _ ^. A miniature biosphere.

One way to do it big is to repeat “ad infinitum” the same pattern, repeat the same process. Ark is a thin surface (thickness / surface: 10-7) formed by hollow identical polymer strands. In the central channel (diameter: ~ 1-2 m), filled with water which also circulates nutrients (CO2 dissolved … NPK) and light. The wall is made of vegetative fibre bundles (not giving flowers or fruits), of small diameter (some mm -> some tenth of cm) with a “hair” chlorophilian root in the central channel. The thickness of the fiber walls is the same as the diameter of the central channel.

Some properties of these fibers:
* They grow on both ends towards the light source,
* They are aligned in the direction of constraints,
* They cease to grow when the stress reaches a certain threshold and then grow in diameter,
* They wrap themselves around each other when they come into contact,
* They secrete bark as a viscous and water-resistant latex.

It is “enough” to devise such a kind of vegetal being to generate the two walls of the Ark. Initially, the Ark is just a few meters in diameter but it has already its final geometry (fiber arrangemen), and the growth can achieve sizes of the order of the kilometer.

Architecture of walls:

I cheated to represent two types of walls as one: the floor of the Ark that supports the ocean’s weight is thick (50 m or 12 ~ thick strands) and without inter-wall vacuum. The vacuum is 30 m between the sidewalls, finer (2 * 3 layers), which falls on the hub.There is very little inorganic system integrated with walls: just the gateways.

In the interior, there is an ocean of 25 m depth on which float a “continental platform” in the form of a puzzle of hexagons: the human habitat is completely decoupled from the walls.

The surface soil is about 3 m.

Total ocean habitat + ~ 8 Gt

Underneath the pattern of walls there is a diagram of the solar ring of 125 GW as a tapestry of élécroluminescent LED (light output close to 1). On the day, the ring shines on the surface of the Ark. The night it is turned off and the light power is injected into the strands, to feed the chlorophyllian fibers.

All elements of the Ark are 100% recycled (except 16 Gt of fuel, of course:)).

I’ll continue on the same later.

Could you elaborate on the nature of the Ark’s organic construction material and the internal structure of the Ark. The three diagrams in the article are captioned in French and, unfortunately for me, I am not fluent. (By the way I do greatly appreciate the fact that you are fluent in English!) How would it be “grown” into Ark proportions? integrated with the non-organic systems? Maintained with enough water, sunlight, and nutrients through the long journey?

What are your thoughts on terraforming? Mars, for example, sounds like a decent candidate for this process in our immediate solar system. Each case would of course have different variables, but it seems we could apply basic principles we might learn about the process in attempting to terraform Mars to bodies in other star systems.

I do feel that humanity will and should focus on colonizing our immediate neighborhood to a reasonable extent (orbital stations, Moon, Mars at the very least, perhaps Mercury, Venus, asteroids, and a few of the outer system moons) before venturing to “nearby” stars, and regardless of what transhumanistic developments occur in the next few centuries. Learning to crawl before we try to run and all that.

Convincing enough people that space settlement is an inevitable part of humanities future and should be pursued wholeheartedly is another matter.

Not to mention making sure that space is a demilitarized zone of human operation. This will take an awful lot of sociopolitical cooperation at an international level to pressure the warmongering hawks enough to make peaceful coexistence a reality for space.

What do you think about the “space elevator” (you may know it by other names) idea to decrease to cost of payloads exponentially? Once they perfect the carbon nanotube technology it seems this could be a reality in the next 10 to 20 years or so.

Thanks for responding so promptly and thoroughly to my last post!

I have no particular prejudices against the transhumanist movement, it is an idea to be researched, but philosophically, I think that the human phenomenon is an inseparable whole:

* A biology: in biology, I put also the spirit (anima, awareness …), which is like Spinoza said “the idea of the body.” The man-organism capable of thought.
* A society: the man-organism is characterised by a hyper-sociability and only develops in interaction with others.
* A natural environment: the men in society have given birth to the so-called humanity, interacting with a biotic and abiotic environments (the starry sky for example).

With these three elements, we can reconstruct what we call humanity in its essential aspects, even if its entire memory has been obliterated in the past.

While a single thinking machine (even aware of itself and of the world) is not an humanity and can not reproduce. Even bearing in mind all that man has done in terms of knowledge and memories. And the same, in my opinion, applies to a machine without a body, without this particular interaction with a natural environment.

Of course, this is not because the spirit “in silico” is a sub-mind. But it is no humanity, is something else to explore. The ark is a “minimum Humanity”: this is the concept. (Whether technically it can be reached with the Ark of the article, it is another story…). It is a fully human entity requiring the minimum energy expenditure.

Otherwise, of course, we can add the idea that the Ark also boards an hypothetical “silicium soul” (or whatever …), or “hibernants” embryos, why not?

Returning to more “down to earth” consideration How is it possible to “land” from the Ark?

The Ark is not abandoned once arriving in the target planetary system. It remains the living environment of reference. So this is a place to live virtually forever (as a planet). Its walls are renewed permanently. The target stellar system is a largely hostile environment.

To get on this “planet”, I imagine a dozen shuttles containing some dozen of people (say 100 tons of payload) powered by fusion propulsion. These shuttles would be used initially to carry out missions in the solar system. During the last centuries of the travel, the arkonauts could of course improve or rebuild them. The ark has a significant technological capacity.

a+

I love the idea of a plant based structure for the ship.

I’ll have to go back and read my Kurzweil book to really have much to say about the feasibility of uploading the mind. My personal belief is that we are made up of three basic parts, body, mind, and spirit, working in unison to create human consciousness. It seems to me it will be quite some time, if ever, for us to be able to technologically transfer the spirit element into an artificial host.

What would the process of disembarking from the ship and setting up a colony once it arrives at its destination look like? Wouldn’t they need some sort of smaller vessels along, or the ability to construct them, to ferry raw materials and people around?

Aren’t there documented cases of certain yogis being buried alive for extended periods of time without food, water, and with limited air? Could these types of techniques be applied to a hibernation strategy?

Why couldn’t a single ship incorporate the several different strategies (generations, Methusalah (sp?), hibernation/cryo, embryonic, cybernetic etc.) into one amalgamated scenario?

I realize the last post was quite a while ago, but these are things I’ve been thinking about as I’ve been reading. I’ll have to see if I can find the Wiki page….

Take care and keep dreaming!

The Ark is made of growing vegetable strands, and starting from a few hundred meters in diameter it is already livable (in the lower part, the Coriolis acceleration generated by the rotation is impeding). The propelling surface is made of a disk, gradually increasing in size with the increase of mass of the cylinder to be propelled.

Gathering of the fusion fuel mass needed to undertake an interstellar travel is a long term effort of several generations, but during this time autonomous life in space would be already a reality. And for the arkonauts, to live on Earth’s orbit, or Jupiter’s, or Kuiper’s belt or further, that does not make any difference.

Where I am less in agreement it is when you speak about entirely colonizing as a condition to travel further. It is without any doubt a condition to be able to reach the borders of the solar system in a few months, to dispose of “spaceports”, and to be able to undertake inhabited missions of several months or years. But I do not see any requirement for the space nation to have permanent colonies on Ganymede, Triton, or Pluto. These places will be never accessible, firstly because of the weak gravity which reigns there.

In addition, I do not think that it must take “from 1,000 to 10,000 years”: I bet on an order of magnitude less, that is from 100 to 1,000 years.

Your fictional blog is an enjoyable read, and the idea of post-vitrification memory losses is well found, I find.

However, the Ark is an anti-Starlark - I hope that this does not constitute an intellectual “casus belli” between us. The two ideas are complementary, heads and tails, to illustrate what could be a space flight, at comparable propulsion system (Isp ~ 10⁶ s).

Starting condition :
Starlark: one escapes from oppressive and unhealthy conditions which reigns on Tyr. The Earth became a prohibited territory.
Ark: prosperous terrestrial nations help give birth to a new nation formed by free citizens.

Travel condition:

Starlark: overloaded vessel, high speed (0.1 c). Quasi-prison life. Authoritative capacity exerted by Hoyle, the AI.
Ark: garden-vessel, low density (150 people/km2), slow speed (0.015 c). Open-air life. Democratic power.

The link between the two conditions is logical: in order to accept the living conditions in Starlark, it is necessary that the starting conditions are even worse. Conversely, if one starts from a happy humanity, living conditions must be even better on the Ark.

Mass:
Starlark ~ 2 x 10⁵ tons
Ark ~ 2 x 10¹⁰ tons

The “price of happiness” requires to raise mass by 5 orders of magnitude…

The only thing that I can see that would force an earlier exodus would be a threat to the entire solar system. A large asteroid impacting the Earth would only cause people to move underground for a while. A rogue planetoid might render Earth uninhabitable, but people would, I think, evacuate to the moon or Mars. Only a stellar catastrophe would require an ark to survive, and astronomers don’t think there are any dangers within several light-years of here.

Concerning the first point, I was assuming no coercion is involved, else the whole morality business was moot (I don’t think any form of forceful coercion is moral). Indeed, a free, voluntary community is the only way to build an ark.

Concerning the second, I guess only some rich yet persecuted minority… Hard to say, but it’s possible.

A third possibility I have just thought of will be as a vanity project for a government at war (like.the moon landing was). If the driving force isn’t ’save humanity’ idealism or basic survival instinct, it could be patriotism that’ll drive these people far far waway from home.

I think in order to reach this magnitude of patriotism though, the country sending them would have to be very very fascist, so the morality of it is debatable.

You said:
“What is worse - condemning several generations to cramped and lonely living conditions, or endangering the existance of the entire race?”

The first alternative is maybe “preferable”, but I do not think that one can send people far from the Earth by authority: I think that it is possible for people to found an autonomous community wanting to leave, which is not at all the same thing. An authoritative project, where one would place people in ships and send them in remote regions (as for the colonization of Australia, for example) is possible only if the travel lasts for a few months. The sailors are voluntary, because they know that they are able to return! But if the travel lasts for tens of years, then it should be thought that the people who are leaving are collectively the crew of this vessel. If the motivation does not come from the crew, but that it is imposed from an external agency, I do not give a long time to the project to fail lamentably by mutiny, scuttling, and so on… It is difficult to be morally bounded (to ensure the immortality of humanity is a high goal) to a terrestrial community which despises your existence and condemns you to a containment worse than a prison. Especially that at the end of the travel there is not a viable place (like it was Australia, with a gravity of 1g, a respirable air, water, cultivable grounds, wild mammals, etc) but a planet undoubtedly inhospitable, which obliges to a confined life during whole generations.
To ensure the immortality of humanity is an immense goal, one of the most beautiful conceivable. It may constitute a very strong motivation, a moral ‘raison d’être’ to try the project voluntarily. One does not need to imagine that it must be imposed by someone. It is necessary that it is a free community, free of its destiny, and consequently the question of the following generations is very different. A community which choose its destiny rises his/her children in the love of this goal, and shares this destiny with them. That completely changes the appreciation which the future generations will have of their destiny.

Concerning the second point, I think that over geological durations (1 million years or more) the survival of humanity is in question. But that on a few thousand years, it is difficult to imagine that the Earth becomes less viable than close planets, even after 1000 Tchernobyl or Seveso, even if temperature increases by 10°C on average or that we return to Ice Age. Earth would still remain an extremely hospitable place, compared to Mars for example. If the problem is political, eg that the Earth becomes intolerable for lack of freedom, then we return to the above and moreover, it is difficult to see WHO would undertake such an adventure in such case, who would have the means for it?

If hibernation cannot be perfected, then journeys between the stars will be long and difficult; but generation ships are not the only alternative (as I mentioned in my earlier post).