Send Your Clone To Alpha Centauri, Digitally

You may never get the chance to travel to another star but your clone could and it could get there at the speed of light.

WE ARE DEFINED BY OUR DNA

In the heart of every cell in our body (except for the red blood cells) is the cell nucleus. This nucleus contains the genetic material, otherwise known as the DNA, that encodes the genetic instructions for building you from the time you were just a single cell in your mother's womb.

The cell also contains another type of genetic information in the mitochondria called mitochondrial DNA.

In either case these DNA molecules are long sequences of smaller molecular sub-units called nucleotides.

In humans the bases in these nucleotides are adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine or 'A', 'T', 'G' and 'C' for short. 'A' bonds only with 'T' and 'G' bonds only with 'C'. If you read down the length of a DNA molecule a sequence would form and might look something like ... ATTGACTAATCGGATCAAT ...

The DNA molecules in your cells can be now be read and the sequences can be stored in a computer. The cost to do so was once astronomically expensive but this has now fallen and is within reach of the research budgets of most university professors. In late 2015 it is claimed that the cost to sequence a person's DNA was only about $1,500.

NO NEED FOR LARGE INTERSTELLAR COLONY SHIPS

There are often proposals that to get to the stars we should send large fleets of mutually supporting interstellar transport ships to the stars. These ships would be massive and hold thousands, if not tens of thousands of people.

A viable breeding population if you will.

Why do this when you could instead send smaller, faster ships with fewer people and a bunch of cloning equipment. All you would need is a few pilots, a few engineers, a large team of biologists and an IT guy to wrangle the DNA computer.

The first ship could of course contain the genome of millions of people here on Earth stored in the onboard computer.

When the team gets to the new planet the first task after setting up the habitats would be to start producing clones. In a generation a large population of people who are identical twins to someone on Earth would be the colonists on the new planet.

When this colony is up and running though it may of course become a popular pastime for people still on Earth but not in the colony's original DNA database to get their DNA sequenced and the data broadcast to that colony by radio telescope across space. The information for producing your clone would travel at the speed of light across the void of space and be received by their communications people.

It could be gratifying to know that there would be multiple copies of you living and working across the vastness of space.

Even better you might be able to work it, for enough money, to get a new clone birthed every time one of your clones
grow old and died. A weird type of immortality.

Of course, these clones are not 'you' in the strictest sense of the word. They will be another human that would be essentially an identical twin with a different upbringing and different experiences.

CLOSING WORDS

In addition to humans, animal, plant, fungal, bacteria and viral genetic coding could also be transmitted across the dark reaches of space. If a colony finds that its ecosystem is missing a few critical strands in its web of life then Earth could fill in the gaps with some helpful genetic transmissions.

(But not mosquitoes. Fuck those little bastards.)

So in the future, if a person is living here on Earth and can't afford to go to the stars then they might be able to afford to send their genetic information across the vast distances of space to produce clones of themselves.

This could be useful if a colony finds that it has a genetic bottleneck. It could also be useful as a means to get Earthlings to fund continual supply missions to the colonies.

Earth will likely always be the industrial hub of any interstellar network of colonies. What better way to keep the Earthlings interested in funding new supply missions to the colonies than the lure of having their bodies replicated elsewhere and thus obtaining some type of immortality.

The colony could promise to create your clone if you send more ships and more supplies. Not a bad deal in my opinion.

Thank you for reading my post.

POST SOURCES

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_nucleus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_DNA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mitochondrial_genetics
https://knowgenetics.org/nucleotides-and-bases/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_sequencing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$1,000_genome
https://www.answers.com/Q/Example_of_a_DNA_nucleotide_sequence