Bioships and the Speed of Thought

[radienx000]

I was speculating on UFOs for abit, watching NASA footage of unidentified spacecraft. And I think those weird shapes of spacecraft is probably due to "aliens" using Bioships (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioship). These bioships come in a variety of sizes and shapes because the ship "grows" extra limbs or something.

 

And I also saw "unidentified objects" in the NASA footage's appearing out of nowhere. So probably these aliens programmed these flying organisms to travel at the speed of thought. Cause physical can travel faster than the speed of light, but what about the speed of thought? Maybe the bioship has it's own brain or something.

[insane_alien]

thought doesn't have a speed. although i guess you could give it a speed by using the speed of the nerve impulses in the brain. in that case the speed of thought can be exceeded by merely boarding a jet aircraft.

 

even some very fast cars can exceed it.

[Edtharan]

Yeah, the speed of thought is pretty slow. A good Human reaction time is around 0.25 of a second (yes 1/4 of a second). And this is not actual "Thought" but the speed neurons travel from the brain to the limb - so it would be faster than thought.

 

However, what I think the OP is meaning by "thought" is some kind of telepathy or extra sensory perception. However, even if these existed, they would still be limited to the speed of light, so no, you couldn't travel faster than light like that (if that were possible).

 

using Bioships (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioship).

If you read the very first sentence of that article it reads: "A bioship is a type of spacecraft described in science fiction." (italics mine)

 

Please note the last three words: "in science fiction". In other words, they aren't real.

 

But lets for the moment consider the viability of a biological ship.

 

Firstly, they won't be able to travel faster than light speed, so these ships are going to take hundreds, if not thousands of years to reach the nearest stars. This means they ahve to not only take the fuel to reach there (and slow down too), they will also need to carry the life-support needs of both the crew and themselves) and the fuel to accelerate and decelerate this mass too).

 

Why go to the bother of doing that if you don't need to?

 

A Bioship would have to have a metabolism (it is living after all), so it needs food and would produce waste (the waste might be used as fuel/propellent - or weapons, which gives the phrase "Getting into a pissing contest" a new meaning ). All these need to be dealt with or taken along with you. It is hard enough getting to other planets, not to mention the difficulties of getting to another star, so why would you make it harder?

 

Many Bioships in fiction state they make them biological because it makes them easy to repair/maintain (because it can regrow any damaged parts). However, what they all forget is that this would take longer to do (how long does it take a wound to heal as compared how long it takes to replace a damaged component) and cost more energy/resources (repair is so resource intensive for animals that many forgo full repair and just stop more damage from occuring - do we regrow arms?)

 

So, Bioships, although they sound good in fiction, would actually not be very good in reality.

 

The only reason I can think of using a Bioship is that they can reproduce easier. A factory can only produce a certain number of ships in a given time, and the only way to increase this is to build more factories. However, with Bioships, they production capacity increases exponentially as the number of ships increases.

 

However, it is feasible to make mechanical ships that can reproduce themselves using 3d Printing/fabrication techniques. These would ahve all the benefits of a Bioship (exponential replication, self repairability, etc) without any of the problems (waste management and life support for the ship, etc).

 

So again the question: Why bother with a Bioship when there are better alternatives?