[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Rather than braintapes being "installed in meat bodies at the destination," how about "brains are grown under guidance from the braintape data, which is then uploaded into them." That means you can only upload a braintape into a purpose-grown brain. That avoids the ability to install a new braintape on an existing person, which comes with some large cans of cyber-worms.

Sure- I kind of had the old Car Wars or Paranoia clone paradigm in mind for this. Your braintape only works with your brain-clone in your body-clone.

Given that, the inability to run a brainstate under emulation on a computer doesn't have to be a hard inability. It's just that the necessary computing power to do it at a useful speed is huge and expensive, and Moore's law stopped in the 2020s (there are grounds for this being plausible).

Being able to run a human mind at 0.1 to 1% of its usual speed isn't very useful - although it was handy for STL probes.

That works.
Why though would you send a braintape with a cloning tank instead of sending the original frozen person in the first place?

(Note that these are just me getting some brain-itches down on paper, not actual suggestions for the setting.)
Thought the First:
It's dangerous, and scary, and very far. And dangerous doesn't just mean that you might die- astronauts have lived with that risk for centuries. It's that you'll be frozen and stored in the STL colony-scout ship, and in the intervening light years anything could happen- meteorite, gamma ray burst, rogue planet, become a frozen dinner for an alien space jellyfish. And you'd never see it coming. The last thing you'll have ever known was the anaesthetist counting down from 10. Who wants that kind of fate?

On top of that, these scout-colonist astronauts wouldn't be just anyone, you'd want highly trained, experienced professional pilots, scientists, engineers and leaders. The monetary and human capital investment in crewing a scout-colony ship would be far too much to waste on a crap shoot. No, you recruit these guys not to go, but to copy so you can send their skills and expertise, then they go back to their regular highly productive jobs and comfortable family settings. Send their braintape and genomic record for the clone tank to save space and weight, and to avoid intermediary degradation from cosmic rays and such. If the computerised scout-colony ship reaches its destination, then it generates the colony crew while robotically building habitats for them.

Thought the First and a Halfth:
Who are these experts that get cloned? They're not the adventure seeking explorer sort- they're intelligent enough, but these are the guys who'd prefer, very reasonably, to stay at home on Earth in comfort and safety. And their clones, when they awaken, wouldn't be a jot different. The clone colonists could have a lot of resentment when they wake and realise that they're not the prime original, they're not going back to their family, and actually they have to build a space colony from scratch. They're disposable meat-things and the only possible future they have is a sterile habitat and restricted rations for the next few foreseeable generations. Not all of the clone colonists would feel like this, but the psychological and sociological stresses would be high.

Think then what happens when the second wave of colonists arrive- by STL or by the transported wormhole. Possibly the colony is now under the rule of a despotic ruler, with the whole society resentful and hateful towards the privileged newcomers. Thus starts the empire of the clones.

Thought the Second: Ultra-slow Hyperspace
A different answer to the "why not send a frozen colonist" problem: hyperspace travel is very inconvenient for organics. We have a hyperspace drive that can reach distant worlds in a useful span of time, months or years objectively, but subjectively for the crew of the scout-colony ship it takes millenia. This is due to seriously weird time dilation effects or some kind of chronal radiation, but the ship's clock ticks over 6,000 years and all the frozen organic bodies perish. The first hyperspace scientists were confounded by the effect, but eventually figured out a work-around. Store the crew as braintapes on solid-state, long-life crystal storage devices, engineer the machinery of the ark to cope with the incredibly long time span, and build a cloning factory that operates from feedstock of pure base carbon and other elements, then proceed with the normal deep space exploration program. Bingo! A slow but effective colonisation process.

Improved hyperspace ships could move faster objectively, but might have an inversely longer subjective time. Crew for multiple-jump missions- there and back again, or scouting a number of systems- would have a reconstitute-deconstitute protocol for each hyperspace jump. By the time they get back to Earth, their ship and constituent elements have been through eons subjectively, but they only know the passing of a few months or so.

I think this echoes some transhuman themes, but probably not in a way that's incredibly useful though.