The Speculist

I love it that this story comes from right here in Colorado:

Better make room for an extra crewmember aboard any spaceship heading outward. This person won’t require food, oxygen or water, nor even need to buckle up for safety. The tag-along traveler could, however, be a lifesaver in terms of getting the expedition to and from a celestial destination.

Roll out the welcome mat for the virtual astronaut and enter the 3D space of Peter Plantec, a consultant in virtual human design and animation, as well as a leading expert on visual entertainment. He also initiated the "Sylvie" project -- the first commercially available virtual human interface.

If you can make them smart enough, virtual humans have it all over the meat-based kind*. They don't need elaborate life-support systems, they can survive any g-force you'd care to throw at them, and they can last thousands, tens of thousands, millions of years.

The folks in Telluride are working on building virtual humans from scratch, but that might not be necessary. Eventually, we should be able to make virtual humans by uploading human minds into computers.

I've just been reading a book called Eater by Gregory Benford in which an uploaded human personality is sent to engage "face-to-face" with an intelligent alien lifeform which resides in (or rather, is made up of) the magnetic fields surrounding a black hole. Virtual humans would be perfect for this kind of high-risk assignment. After all, it's a lot easier to come up with ways to get a computer close to a black hole — or even someplace more mundane like the corona of the sun or deep into the atmosphere of Jupiter — than it would be a human.

However, what fun would Star Trek be if the crew were nothing but a bunch of computer programs? On the other hand, what if they didn't know?

Morpheus: So now you must choose. Red pill, or blue?

Kirk: I'm not interested in any damn pills. I want to know how you got on this ship, mister!

* Mmmmmmmmm...meat-based.