Space Travel: Overcoming Cosmic Radiation Challenges

[sophiecentaur]

Sooner or later humans *need* to settle on another planet to avoid accidental extinction

This is a very optimistic statement. The reaction of humans to disasters in general is not to think 'long term', it's more likely that any serious thread will be dealt with after the fashion of the population of Easter Island - virtual self destruction, instead of dealing with the problem of lack of resources. (That example is, of course only the view of some anthropologists but it's a very reasonable scenario).
One good Ice Age or the opposite could cause an extinction well before human technology could take us away from the problem. But these arguments have been visited time and again on PF and we never agree on a possible outcome of this.

 

[mfb]

Computers are still stupid. They outperform humans in specialized tasks with a very limited set of variables (like many games, where you can easily describe the rules and the full game state), but there is nothing that would even come close to a general artificial intelligence. This is not (only) a limit of computing power - even if we ignore hardware limitations, we don't have software we could run on faster computers that would behave intelligently.

We might have intelligent software before we sent humans to Mars - both timescales have a large range of estimates. Follow-up problem: Does it require a supercomputer or can we put it in a ton-scale lander?