Embryo Space Colonization to overcome the

Embryo Space Colonization to overcome the Interstellar Time/Distance Bottleneck Authors: Adam Crowl, John Hunt M.D., Andreas Hein Affiliation: Icarus Interstellar Address: Icarus Interstellar 2809 Spenard Rd, Anchorage, AK 99503

Introduction Embryo Space Colonization, defined as the use of the embryos of humans (and other species) as interstellar colonists, has a long history in fiction. Stapledon (1) described the last Human species as launching embryonic forms to avoid the death of the Sun as long ago as 1930. More recently Vinge’s (2) short-story “Long Shot” featured an artificial intelligence carrying a human embryo to Alpha Centauri. Now technology has advanced to the point where fiction can start to become tentative reality. Embryo Space Colonization (ESC) has three potential time-frames of application: Option (A) Near Term: Low-speed (0.0001-0.01 c) ESCAPE mission to a nearby star, to provide a back-up or “reboot” of the human species. Option (B) Mid-Term: In the same time-frame as “Project Icarus” interstellar rendezvous mission, travelling at moderate speeds (0.05-0.15 ) to set-up scientific bases. Option (C), Far-Term: Colonizing habitable environments, but unlike Earth, by using pantropy, to modify the human genome. The chief points of ESC will be covered in the Near-Term discussion, with some following speculation for the Mid-Term and Far-Term. Option (A) Near-Term – the ESCAPE Mission Interstellar missions require large energy expenditures. Dyson (3) argued that the first interstellar missions, assumed to be of the same relative cost as Project Apollo, would leave in roughly 2200 AD based on a simple economic

growth model. Some 42 years later Millis (4) drew the same conclusions. Growth in energy production and usage rates might shave a century off that figure (4), but the gross energy requirements for interstellar travel still require development of space-based resources. Achievable with a century of development, but we may not have enough time. Humanity faces potential extinction risks this century (5) and a prudent approach would be to launch a species reboot – an ESCAPE (Embryo Space Colonization to Avoid Species Extinction) Mission – within 50 years, as a fallback option. Self-replicating technologies, particularly chemical/biochemical nanotechnologies, have the non-zero risk of consuming the entire biosphere (6) and to avoid total extinction, an ESCAPE mission should be launched to another star-system. To enable an ESCAPE mission within the next 50 years before the slow pace of energy growth makes it reasonable to send a full colony ship, we need to bypass the energy bottleneck pointed out by Millis (4).To do so we need to use the available free energy of our environment – chiefly the Sun’s photon and Solar Wind flux. Solar-sails can efficiently capture the flux from the Sun, sufficient for transport of a biostatic payload. The probable long duration of a near-term ESCAPE mission requires the use of biostasis, the reversible cessation of life, and the only proven biostasis available for human beings is via frozen embryos, kept in liquid nitrogen. Balloon like pillow-sails, inflated with hydrogen gas and using beryllium metal can conceivably achieve 0.0015c in the near term (6). If targets are further away than expected, then higher terminal speeds will be required. An advantage of frozen embryos is they can withstand much higher gee-forces thanks to being solidified. To achieve 0.01c an acceleration of ~400 g is required (7), potentially achievable by carbon nanotube based sails (8). The chief biomedical breakthrough required for ESC is the successful ectogenesis of a human from early stage embryo, where current IVF ends, to Full Term. Current thinking, as summarized in (9), is that advances in tissue engineering will enable the creation of viable artificial uteruses for attachment of an embryo and the formation of a placenta, with the blood flow and chemistry being controlled by artificial heart/lung/kidney systems. Some success has been achieved in emulating late stages of pregnancy in other

animals and it’s believed the research will continue to advance to address the wide variety of pregnancy related disorders. Embryos have another advantage, in that genetic testing and correction are much easier to conduct on an organism when it has fewer cells. Very recently the discovery of genetic error correction at an early division stage, suggests a potentially higher radiation tolerance than previously thought (10). Additionally superconducting loops can provide a mechanism for deflecting high-energy Galactic Cosmic Rays, the chief source of radiation damage while travelling through interstellar space (11). Biostasis provides a simple solution to the difficult problem of long term Closed Ecology Life-Support Systems, by only requiring use of in situ resources at the destination. The ESCAPE Mission automation would find a suitable exoplanet target. Habitable planets are to be avoided due to our total ignorance of possible biological threats we might encounter. Instead any planet with icecaps and some atmosphere, like Mars, would be preferred. On landing a team of robots would create a habitat from the local materials. The simplest approach seems to be the utilization of the ALPH-based architecture (12), proposed by Powell et.al. (12). Using a small nuclear reactor and robust chemosynthesis systems, the ALPH, in a compact 4 tonne unit, can generate a 500 person habitat over several years. Large amounts of raw materials are produced and these can be used as feed-stocks for advanced 3-D printing/manufacturing systems to create the machines and requirements of a burgeoning technical civilization. Android parents? The main difficulty of embryo ships is the way the children/crew are nurtured, raised and educated at the target destination. Absent any break-through in long-term adult biostasis and/or organ-printing whole functional bodies, then the children will be raised by androids. A common erroneous assumption about parenting is that raising children is so complex that parents must be at least as intelligent, whether biological or artificial. This may not be the case. The purpose of the ESCAPE Mission is to reboot civilization in the event of our own self-replicating technology causing the extinction of humanity. If this were to happen then ANY attempt to reboot civilization would be justified. In that event, our best efforts to provide the best possible parenting would be all that we could do however imperfect that parenting would be. With humanity's

future hanging in the balance, we cannot afford to allow the perfect to be the worst enemy of the good enough. In 50 or so years of preparation, we could provide the children with parenting good enough that they would survive into adulthood. The androids would not need to have full AI, but would be a type of extensively programmed expert system, with sophisticated natural language abilities. There are several basic dimensions of androids: their body and face, their movements, interpersonal behaviour, speech, and dialogue. We already have fairly decent androidal bodies, with naturalistic movements and speech production. However, it is the interpersonal physical and verbal behaviours that would be the greatest challenge. Yet already in Europe and Japan research programs are endeavouring to produce android helpers to the increasingly “Greying” populace (13). Eliminate any mental picture of children being raised by a monotone, jerky robot. Also the children raised from frozen embryos would not be limited to social interaction from their parents only. They would have same-age siblings which would provide 100% real human interaction, and potentially androidal peers to help teach as only peer-to-peer interaction can. Such children need the best parents they can get and an ESCAPE Mission would try to give them the best that can be programmed. Even today robots are being used to model behaviours to teach autistic children. As for physical interaction, home game systems are already able to produce computerized stick figures based upon video input alone. So, an android parent could touch their children. They could hug them, grab an arm to get their attention, and even discipline. Of course, all of this would need to be done given the audio and video interpretation of the child's behaviour. For example, the governing expert-system would need to determine if a child is throwing a tantrum, based on educated android systems used in controlled conditions back on Earth. For realistic verbal interaction, there are two parts to successful emulation of the natural learning process. Children observe the interaction between their parents and learn a lot of contextual information about the meanings of words, especially nouns and simple verbs. Presently it is technically possible to accurately record the body movements, facial expressions, and speech of human carers/parents and to replay those behaviours through androidal robots. Indeed, entertainment companies such as Disney do this with

animatronics. Thus when the android parents interact with each other, they could be simply emulating previously recorded interactions, preferably of the actual biological parents of the chosen embryos. Although the bodies of the androids are not those of the biological parents, nonetheless, the animating minds behind those bodies would be. The second and hardest part of verbal interaction would be dialogue between the android parents and the children. However, much work is already being done in this direction in the form of things like IBM's Watson, A.L.I.C.E., and similar attempts to win the Turing Test. A large, but finite number of prepared responses, perhaps 30,000, could cover almost any question / statement, aside from the more extensive emulated repertoire available in the android’s systems. Some of these responses would be "fudge" responses in which the android would give pre-recorded responses that would apparently be an appropriate response but would actually be somewhat of a dodge. For example a child asks, "Mommy, why do some people have shiny noses"? Without a specific response available the mother android responds, "Oh honey, how am I supposed to know? Sometimes things are just the way they are". This reduces the need for true human-level artificial general intelligence, if that proves an intractable problem in the next 50 years. Once old enough, the children would be schooled by their biological parents thanks to pre-recorded lessons, perhaps edited in real time for flexibility by the governing expert system. The children would also learn using interactive computer programs as many do today. Naturally the most important and probably earliest lessons would be on how to repair equipment and deal with expected emergencies. Option (B) Middle Term ESC can be deployed at higher speeds to nearby systems by “Icarus” style vehicles as part of a scientific base building effort. Embryos could be produced from raw data, rather than in cryostorage, and not just of the human species. Alternatively, and preferably, whole adult bodies could be grown and scanned human minds imprinted onto an assembled brain. Already tissue engineering is advancing towards complex 3-D organ structures, while the intricacies of neurogenesis are slowly being mapped out. The application of brain repair technology in a Greying populace should be obvious, potentially leading to attempts at whole body replacement. Success at brain repair and brain neuronal replacement will allow probing of the difficult philosophical question

of the persistence of personal identity, giving more confidence that a reconstructed mind/body is not merely a copy. With more time to prepare and more ambitious goals at the destination than a mere colony, an industrial civilization in embryo could be sent. Freitas (14) estimated about 1,000 tonnes, including 443 tonnes of rare minerals, would be sufficient as a seed of a large industrial complex able to generate, after about 1,000 years, a 10 million tonne daughter probe. The advantage of ESC is that significant time for the industrial base of the colony to be expanded can be planned without human habitability being an immediate requirement. Option (C) Far Term Finally ESC enables rapid adaptation of humans to novel environments, a process known as Pantropy. As human engineering remains purely speculative only tentative suggestions can be made, such as: 1. Hydrogen greenhouse planet colonization. Planets can be warmed to Earth-like temperatures via dense hydrogen greenhouse atmospheres (15). Hydrogenosomes, organelles that utilize hydrogen, and hydrogen decompression tolerance enabling bacteria (16), used successfully with pigs to 70 bar, could be incorporated directly into human embryos perhaps more successfully than with adult humans. 2. Oxygenated closed oceans (e.g. Europa) could exist beneath the ice of many extrasolar planet moons, providing a potentially viable habitat for modified humans. 3. Ammonia tolerance. Guano bats can survive high levels of ammonia which would otherwise prove fatal to other mammals. This could be bioengineered directly. Ammonia could possibly build up in atmospheres of planets orbiting red dwarf stars, due to the lower UV flux of older M dwarf stars. 4. Methane utilization on “Warm Titans” posited to exist around off Main Sequence stars – a highly speculative prospect. Thus the future of ESC is potentially wide-ranging and a possible major part of any strategy to spread the human species, if not the entire biosphere, across the Galaxy.

Conclusion Embryo Space Colonization is another potential tool in the adaptation of humans, and all other species, to new environments. Single-celled life is more durable and biostasis for the single-celled, or low cell-number, stages of animals and plants is a proven biotechnology. Less developed is the technology needed to bring mammals to term, but hopeful developments in that direction already exist. Presently the idea of android parenting and robotic care seem far-fetched, but equally trends in that direction are developing. If the reliability of the machinery can be assured, not a small task in itself, then missions of centuries to millennia can be contemplated. Even further along the speculative plank over the abyss of ignorance is the use of bioengineering to lightly adapt human biology to exotic habitats, a process which would be enabled by a proven ectogenetic technology. A competing technology, which might make the embryonic concept moot, is the whole scale printing of viable adult bodies to host adult human minds stored in more durable media than living neurons. This is a speculation reserved for future investigation.

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