runsforcelery wrote:As for the more . . . esoteric notions being floated about, there are two problems. One is that some of the people proposing them seem to be making assumptions about Federation technology based on facts not in evidence. For example, the notion that “the entire human race” could have been recorded on a molecular disk and that the necessary biological material could have been synthesized from elements extracted from asteroids. If you think the Federation was capable of that, then you are are hugely overestimating its capabilities, at least as constructed in my tech bible.
Getting the entire human race recorded? Probably not. But you can get a substantial number of people recorded since you described it as already done. However, "substantial" in this case could very well mean "enough to keep from getting lonely" and be well short of "sizeable minority". You basically pack copies of every virtual personality that already existed (and perhaps record as many more as you can) onto whatever the Federation used for hard drives and then send them... wherever. And you don't pull them out of storage until it's deemed safe to power up other equipment again. This is tech that is already demonstrated to exist.
Replicating whole new biology from raw materials is a whole other kettle of fish. I agree, nothing you've shown so far suggests that Federation technology can do it. However, given PICA technology and virtual worlds tech displayed, there's no reason that any virtual personality archive needs to do it. You could have a "colony" that exists entirely of virtual personalities living out their lives in computers and robotic shells that after a certain hibernation period where everything was turned off to avoid Gbaba detection goes all Von Neumann building an anti-Gbaba fleet and researching better technology for it. And the "seed" for such a thing would require much less in the way of resources than what got committed to Operation Ark.
OTOH, I can also see some problems with the Virtual Colony with Von Neumann fleet (let's call this Plan B) idea.
1) It doesn't do a thing to preserve biological humanity. It's more a "revenge from beyond the grave" sort of deal.
2) Because of its focus as an anti-Gbaba revenge deal, Plan B could very well turn into the Gbaba, at least insofar that it goes around irrationally blowing away everyone on the off chance they might be "Gbaba". Just because they were created to fight the Gbaba doesn't mean they'll STOP at the Gbaba.
3) If Operation Ark (the Plan A) survives and prospered as it was meant to, it could very well find itself fighting the Plan B colony if the B colony went the route in (2).
4) There's textev that one of the dangers of living in virtual worlds that the residents become so enamored with them that they stop interacting with the outside universe. I can just imagine the majority inhabitants of Plan B going this route. What makes it worse is that they may well decide to leave the Von Neumann anti-Gbaba warfleet they built running on "automatic" as it were, resulting in Scenario 2 above.