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Comment by monk_e_boy | Hacker News Reader

Do you think mankind will ever reach one of them? Robots or humans? Interstellar ark or von Neumann machines?

Or will these planets be simulated in VR?

I think humans will eventually visit a few planets and maybe live on the Moon or Mars. To go further will require either radical bioengineering or AI / brain upload. (The distinction gets blurry there.)

We are just too fragile and we don't live long enough for interstellar trips. Even the outer solar system may be prohibitively hard for us.

I guess we could upload our personalities to a computer then fly around in space for thousands of years. Then grow a body on whatever planet we feel like.

What kinds of science and technology advancements will be needed to make a Starship Enterprise a reality? The first step is getting more humans living in space or on planetary colonies.

Even if we don't, the observation that all these potentially-life-hosting worlds are (or aren't) dead would tell us something important.

We're already living in VR. Each of us are just threads running on the Universe VM. All we need to do is find a use after free bug in reality, and we'll be able to go wherever we want.

Using what humans have learnt from developing software as an analogy for how the universe operates is fine until you start expecting human-type exploits to also be present in the rules of physics.

At that point you're basically hammering a square peg into a round hole that may not exist, expecting the analogy to hold true.

If there are bugs in the universal algorithm, they'll not be the kind of bugs you find in C, but the kind you find in the ideal programming language. So research into better programming languages is crucial to human transcendence!

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