• balderdash@lemmy.zip
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    8 hours ago

    But doesn’t the generation ship / cryogenic technology make it possible (albeit very slow)?

    • Canaconda@lemmy.ca
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      8 hours ago

      In theory yes… but the oldest frozen specimen of humans we’ve found is only a few thousand years old. We don’t even know if long term cryogenic reanimation is possible.

      Assuming the ship travels at 10x our current capabilities we’re still looking at ~8,000 years to reach our closest stellar neighbour at only 5 lightyears away.

        • Canaconda@lemmy.ca
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          6 hours ago

          We’ll still run into the same assumption/problem; shelf life.

          Consider how memories work. Every time you remember something, your brain alters that memory slightly. Even looking at how the brain parses the data through several cortex (visual etc) implies that consciousness is potentially inseparable from the components of the brain. In this video about Cockatoo intelligence they speculate that birds brain anatomy causes them to think in ways that seem limited to us.

          Basically we don’t even know if its possible to preserve human consciousness for that long. Similar to cryogenics we have to question if reanimation is even fundamentally possible after centuries.

    • bluGill@fedia.io
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      8 hours ago

      Sort of - but there is no reason to think we will ever be able to make something that won’t break. Even intersellar is questionable just because the odds of the ship breaking in the time needed are too high.