Quote:
Originally Posted by jowey
Why not, if space travel becomes feasible the ship will need the ability to "heal", there are no "WayStations" that we know of out there. Ideally it will have a fully integrated system, what better system is there than an organic one. There would be no real bond between a creature of space and a planet dweller - except.....
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The problem is how to engineer a living organism that has enough metabolic energy to cross between stars without dying from radiation in space nor killing itself with all that energy. Plus, an organism's migrational instincts [so required for the purposes of navigation and astrogation] need to be far more accurate than anything seen now. These two threshholds, energy and precision, are the limiting factors for exosolar spaceflight.
Some organisms, even one type of animal, can handle the rough environment of hard vacuum and unfiltered solar radiation, but they have to be metabolically inactive to do so. The reason is cell division amid that much radiation lends itself to mutations, cancer and tissue breakdown from radiation burns when severe enough. An organism bred for spaceflight would have to have radically different chemistry.