Moral Debate ahead!

IF we ever send missions to other star systems I think there is as
good a chance of sending unmanned colonizing missions as manned
colonizing missions.

Did you catch the incongruety?

Bear with me as I spin a yarn of future tech before I lay out the
moral conundrum.

The unmanned missions may have DNA that is computer encoded and the
DNA may be constituted when planetfall ( or Habitatfall, for the
robots could build a Habitat before the gestation begins) is
achieved. Then the sperm and eggs are combined, the fetuses
artificially gestated, birthed, reared by robots until they reach
maturity and can continue the lifecycle in a more traditional manner.

I'd think that all of the components of this process will be
thoroughly tested before launch but the most troubling may be the
psychological results of raising children by robots.

How can we know that children raised without ANY human contact can
grow into well-adjusted people that can pick up the parenting cycle
on behalf of the human race in some new star system?

How would you balance the goal of the human race in colonizing the
galaxy against the sentence you would be imposing on the future
innocents that would be born years and light years away?

Of course, I'm presupposing that a manned mission may involve 100+
years transit time, so if you send a generation ship, the people who
make planetfall will be the descendents of the people who left
Earth. They'll have no choice in the matter, just like the Robot
Ship descendents. But they would have had parents.

I think an easy out is to claim that a mission could reach the new
system in 30 years, or that there'll be hyperspace, etc. That avoids
the dilemma.

The benefits of this Robot Ship are little life support
infrastructure, time limits on the mission are irrelevent, lower
mass, etc. It may be Robot Ship or no mission at all, if that helps
crystallize the debate for those who are interested.

Generally, medical and social scientists don't conduct experiments
that cause harm to humans. We don't want to spawn a Dr. Mengele. But
who could, in good conscience, send out the probe, knowing that all
the technology works because it was tested on animials, and hope for
the best. I see a rock and a hard place kind of dilemma here, where
an experiment may have to be conducted in Earth orbit on a small,
deserted Habitat to replicate what may come to be in another star
system, yet the participants will not have made a conscious informed
decision to particpate (think of the movie "The Truman Show.")

In this case, we wouldn't a priori, know that harm would result from
this experiment, until we conducted the experiment and measured the
harm or lack of it.

Perhaps, an intermediate step is to raise children, absent parents,
but with teachers, caregivers, deeply involved. Think intentional
orphans. In this case, though, they get the best of everything, -
education, medical care, facilities, etc to give them the best
chance for succeeding in life (because we would want our future
settlers to succeed), unlike the scraps that the unfortunates get
who have to go through the child welfare system in the West and
orphanages elsewhere.

Last step, would be raising the children absent all human contact on
a small Habitat and they'd have no knowledge of their neighbors in
orbit.

I hope that this gets the list hopping :) Any takers?

TangoMan