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cgknight1 t1_j2ncnl2 wrote

>Send it with frozen human embryos and seeds on a seedship to an exoplanet hundreds (or thousands) of light years away.

Let's for argument sake say you travel 1000 light years away - how do you plan to get there in a time period that is shorter than critical failure on the 'ship'?

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matthewgdick OP t1_j2nek3n wrote

Yep, you’re right. The best chance is the ship would need to rely on component extended life by being at low temperatures without much temperature fluctuations and no moisture and no air. In the end, it would be a shot in the dark because no one would be around to know it if worked or not.

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cgknight1 t1_j2nfrev wrote

Because of the hard limit of speed of light - you'd be realistically looking at a couple of thousand years as a minimum. It's unlikely you could make anything last for that period of time.

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Chellaigh t1_j2och4s wrote

Spaceship of Theseus?

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katanakid13 t1_j2pdlg2 wrote

3D print replacement parts as you go until the robot ponders this and has a meltdown.

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Cutecumber_Roll t1_j2okyvx wrote

Time dilation removes the hard limit, but you'd run into soft limits long before you reached relativistic speeds with current tech so that doesn't make much difference.

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UniversalMomentum t1_j2p2bim wrote

You send a swarm of probes using laser propulsion and they land on the destination planet and self assemble communication and then you beam humans over as electromagnetic radiation because that's a thing you can do if you can put the human mind into an electronic format. You can hit fractional light speed light like that because the probes are small, the tricky part is the landing, but I suspect we can make that work using gravity, light energy from the star in the new solar system, atmosphere and the fact that it doesn't have to land super soft.. but you do have to slow down a lot with minimal power, which is tricky but should be doable. It's all about going super low mass on everything you send through space.

You don't need to carry the humans in the ship and you can lose some probes along the way, you just need one to get there and start a harvesting and assembly process to build the basic infrastructure.

Then you can send humans at the speed of light and clone them at the destination and all you risked was tiny probes accelerated by ground or space based lasers aka the lowest mass possible to keep speeds high and complexity low.

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MisterGGGGG t1_j2q28cl wrote

They wouldn't land on planets. Self replicating probes would land on asteroids and comets, mine them, and reconfigure them into space colonies, communications lasers, and into more self replicating probes.

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