Abstract
As the previous chapter reveals, sending humans to the stars will not be easy, barring some unexpected breakthrough. Perhaps humans could sleep their way to the stars, waking up like some Rip Van Winkle after a sleep of centuries or millennia. Or perhaps they could travel for a few centuries in a crowded interstellar ark or for a millennium in a more spacious, slower and expensive worldship.
And now, out among the stars, evolution was driving toward new goals. The first explorers of Earth had long since come to the limits of flesh and blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and plastic. In these, they roamed among the stars. They no longer build spaceships. They were spaceships.
Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
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Matloff, G.L. (2000). Conscious spacecraft. In: Deep-Space Probes. Space Exploration. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3641-5_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3641-5_12
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