Intergalactic Summit

A new goldfish is found swimming in its bowl after the previous one is found dead and flushed down the latrine. This is a sort of necessary trickery that parents use to fool a child into thinking that the fish never dies. We thought only children were susceptible to the lie.

Someone still dies. Only worse, they die in stead of another for money with no choice in the matter.

This is killing covered up with a compassionate horrific lie.

Imagine you were one such clone and how cruel and dark you would think the universe is.

Once upon a time in Mirkamurka, there were two sisters. Twins.

When they were young women, they grew apart, having been quite close when they were young.

Much later, they were reunited. By this point, they were very old.

The first sister said "It is good to see you again, after all this time."

The second sister said "It is good to see you too, sister, how have you been?"

The first sister said "Oh, I got married twice, had four children, went swimming with Hels, planted an orchard, learned to play 3 musical instruments, wrote a book of poetry, went on a vision quest, and built a house. How about you ?"

The second sister said "I searched for the secret to immortality"

The first sister said "Oh, did you find it ?"

The second sister said nothing.

I feel as if people are fixating on cloning as the only solution available to death, which of course brings out the "they're still dead, clones are just clones" crowd. While I'm not of the agreement that dying and being re-lifed as a clone doesn't count because the clone died, I understand the sentiment. My writings on that topic can be found here, and my basic argument is that who we are is constantly changing all the time, and cloning doesn't interfere with our persistence of consciousness because there is no persistence, merely the illusion of it created within our minds. That however is a topic I've hashed out enough before that I don't feel the need to focus on it.

Instead, what I would say to all those arguing against cloning is "so find another way." As I said before, death is an extremely complicated technical problem that can and should be approached from many angles. Cloning is merely one option, but there are others. Uploading our minds into machines, modifying ourselves to be genetically immortal, replacing our bodies with cybernetics as they wear out, injecting nanobots into ourselves that repair damage as it's acquired...

These are just the first ideas that come to my head after not even five minutes of thinking, and there are likely many more possible avenues to take for fighting death. If cloning does not suit you (then what are you doing as a capsuleer but wahey). then find another method. We are sitting on a veritable cornucopia of technology, and as capsuleers we have the access to the best of it. Simply saying "you can't win" isn't remotely helpful. I'm sure there's plenty of people out there who were saying FTL travel was impossible, right up until the point that we did it anyway. Instead of pointing out the flaws one perceives in my own method of fighting death, come up with your own methods and take them to the world. Instead of telling me I'm doing it wrong, do it right yourselves. If this is something you actually care about, and aren't simply attacking me on reflex as I suggest something you don't like, then come up with other ways. Cloning isn't the end all be all of anti-death technology, not even close. It is however, a first stepping stone towards the greater things to come. If cloning isn't your forte, then there's plenty of other avenues to strike down. Don't just stand around bad mouthing people for trying to bring about change because you think their methods are flawed. If my methods are flawed, come up with something better. You're already immortal, you should have plenty of time to figure something out.

Its certainly possible. You could use cloned crews, robotic crews, you could have a real crew working from a ground site an connecting via telepresence to android avatars, fly ships that can get by without crews in the first place, or perhaps even just keep your ships out of harm's way in the first place. These things again, took me less then five minutes to come up with. Really think about the problem before declaring something isn't possible. Try spending at least five minutes on coming up with different ideas. Even totally outlandish ones might point the way to a clever insight.

We live in the real world, Ms. Riordan, not in the realm of science fiction.

1. Cloning has ethical implications. Those clones you're creating and killing are dying all the same. This is what everyone has been trying to tell you so far.


2. Robotic crews do not have the creativity and the field experience seen with patriotic, high-morale crew, or as Tuulinen-haan would say, without "half as much initiative and intuition as a 30 year old Deteis crew chief".


3. Telepresence can easily be jammed, and suddenly you find yourself flying a crewless scrap of metal. The cost of robust telepresence and training is prohibitive.


4. Keeping your ship out of harm's way. Tell that to our Empress.

Cloned Crews: Doesn't prevent mortality.
Robotic Crews: Distinct loss of performance, including initiative, problem-solving, and creative solutions
Remote Crew: Because relying on an absence of signal interference is never a foolish idea, right?
Fly ships that don't need crews: Sooo... shuttles? Even frigates require at least one assistant.
Keeping your ship out of harm's way: Don't undock? Nothing else will do it.

And you still haven't addressed the finite nature of available resources.

Matar Ronin,
Signed,
Corp & Alliance

Drake Ashigaru offers the slingshot "remedy" as an employee benefit.

Our crews no longer fear coming home to less family than they had when we ship out on missions.

Death has not been cured but it is in remission for employees and their family members in the Drake Ashigaru Alliance.

That's precisely the wrong perspective to take. That's the same sentiment that led to people saying 'FTL travel is impossible and trying to figure it out is a waste of time," or "Blindness isn't a thing to be cured, blind people should just accept their blindness and be happy with it."

Just because it hasn't been cured yet outside of small subsets of the population (Origin, we capsuleers, important industrial leaders), doesn't mean it isn't curable, or isn't a thing to try and solve. I bet you didn't even take 60 seconds to think before you made that post.

Also, as to the entropy thing that other people have mentioned as problem. Its a big universe, and we have literally billions of years before it even begins to burn itself out. We have plenty of time to figure out a way around the second law of thermodynamics. One problem at a time.

Hmm. I'd like to see a source on that. Is that restricted to citizens only? Because somehow I doubt that if you included your slaves' lifespans in that statistic you'd have such a lead.