>>3324Great thread, guys. Allow me to play the bioconservative here though i agree in spirit with everything said so far. Why terraform? Because our current whole stack of self reproducing life is water based and oxygen burning. Despite our dabblings with the machinic-electric substrate, we have not yet actually demonstrated its viability in the true sense. Nor have we even begun to demonstrate vacuum-native industry. One of you suggests adaptation to the “thin” “air” of mars, which is a bit of a joke: mars atmospheric pressure is less than 1% that of earth, ie 99.4% vacuum. Maybe we will want atmosphere, maybe vacuum will work better. It has not yet been demonstrated. I will note that despite 400 million years on land, we still pack our native ocean around with us in our cells. That said, mars may be the first and last terraforming.
>>3325This anon is right for now that the speed of our machinic engineering relative to bioengineering actually favors replicating native biology in the short term rather than exotic adaptation. But in the long run things will get interesting.
>>3326>rapid advances in genetic engineeringThese consist of trading around genes we already have within architectures we already have. None of that addresses the OP provocation, we can barely even do that, and we don’t even do it in practice. We are not close enough to have technological solutions to our political problems, let alone engineer vacuum-capable bioforms.
>>3327completely correct in spirit, but again i will play the biocon. I think you are giving the machinic substrate too much credit. In the long run, we very well may be made out of neomeat. You note we cant make a three eyed eagle, and this is not just because the designs are hard to modify but also protein nanotechnology is just technologically way more advanced. Show me anything like direct metabolism of fat into motive power, self-repairing materials with a service life of 80 years, or a self-replicating factory with only raw material inputs that can walk or jump under its own power. We sometimes forget how primitive our cave-man fire still is. Point being, by the time techne surpasses gene as the substrate of choice for agentic life, it may look nothing like cameras and propellors and replaceable parts.
Specifically, about software-like mind-substrate separation (eg beaming you to another solar system) that’s an interesting speculation and it is possible, but in practice complex living systems may find themselves to be much less standardized and portable than that. It could be we continue towards standardization and our descendants run on unix still, but i could see the opposite: by virtue of pervasive customization and selves being carved at relative sovereignty and trust boundaries, the software and hardware may not be all that separable. The ability to copy software is because of its unliving nature. Think about trying to migrate a corporation or even your own computer’s configuration from one substrate to another. Its not as simple in practice as copying some bits, because the bits don't mean the same thing on the other end. I would bet selves are more like that than version controlled source code. It is a great feat of engineering and social trust to keep things “containerized” like that. And google for example does not attempt to run on AWS. We may see similar things with future autopoetic selves.
Similarly, while mobile platforms may end up orthogonal to personalities, they also may not be. What happens to the mobile platforms when the internet goes down? What happens when the other guy has rigged the mobile platforms with backdoors? Platform trust and connectivity may not end up commoditized in the long run. But i agree in principle that vehicles and bodies will blur together, and self will probably be more abstracted from specific hardware than currently. I would just caution against overindexing on the specific properties of current machinic-electric systems. Despite the hype of the 19th century, the future was not steam.
