Colonisation of space is completely impractical.
I would say closer to impossible.
I would say neither of those things is actually true. There are plenty of people in the world who are ready and willing to give up a humanoid body in exchange for a form factor that could very well operate in space, and technology is getting closer every day to allow achieving that.
As soon as you punt on demanding a human body to be part of the mix, concepts like food water and air become completely superfluous.
Will it happen in the next year? Probably not. But it will almost certainly happen in the next 5-10 years.
I think you're being
quite optimistic in the timescale. Upload involves both computing (which probably could exist today if someone like Warren Buffet wanted it--I expect the first uploads will be of the ultra-wealthy facing terminal health problems) and the ability to understand/extract the information from the brain (and I think we are
far from the latter.) There's also the problem that having the computer power for it assumes the hardware actually runs it--which means even more comprehension of how the brain works. Without that understanding we would have to emulate it--which adds a zero or two to the required computer power.
The issue is that the compute costs less than you think it does, and the technology is closer than you think it is.
The primary hurdles at this point aren't even the scan technology but rather well understanding the platform needed.
Just this year an experiment in Australia is turning on with a computer guaranteed to meet the compute requirements using binary transistors (hella inefficient), and the technology to do high enough resolution scans happened early this year.
The purpose of the Australia experiment is
specifically to emulate a whole human brain, and
this is being done today. We were doing this with rat brains and fly brains only a few years ago.
The next hurdle is getting past Moore's Law's Wall (transistor size), by making non-binary computational circuits, and understanding the unification between "analog switches" and spoken language outcomes in the same way we understand binary's relationship to language.
It's kind of sad that I already know what the Australian team will find ("binary transistors require orders of magnitude more switches and thus orders of magnitude more energy to calculate a continuous scale value; a neuron can do in one switch what it takes a hundreds of transistors in a floating point arithmetic unit to accomplish"; "neurons create compact fuzzy linguistic structures on their preconditions").
In many senses, though, we don't really even need to disassemble the brain's structure to the point of understanding it all; really the bigger question is just "how do we arrange similar switches in similar ways at similar density."
I'm not going to ask you to take my word. Heck, I'm not sure the world will be able to "hold it together" for the 5-10 years we need, but I am going to have a big ass I-told-you-so ready.
Really I expect it to be more of a 2-4 year frame before the first rich fuck tries badly, a d more of 3-6 years before they succeed. After all, I said 5-10 years 3-4 years ago on AGI when the rest of you folks were screaming 20 years and 40 years, and here we are maybe a few months off; all the pieces are here for that, even if some posters here really want to bury their head in the sand.
Pretty much if you think it's "10-20 years off" it's either impossible and it won't happen at all, or it's actually more like 5-10 because Moore's law says your "learned pace" is too slow.
See the map they're hovering right over us
