Our ongoing discussion of the Project Hyperion generation ship contest continues to spark a wide range of ideas. For my part, the interest in this concept is deeply rooted, as Brian Aldiss’ Non-Stop (1958 in Britain, and then 1959 in the U.S. under the title Starship), was an early foray into science fiction at the novel length for me. Before that, I had been reading the science fiction magazines, mostly short stories with the occasional serial, and I can remember being captivated by the cover of a Starship paperback in a Chicago bookstore’s science fiction section.
Of course, what was striking about Criterion Books’ re-naming of the novel is that it immediately gave away the central idea, which readers would otherwise have had to piece together as they absorbed Aldiss’ plot twists. Yes, this was a starship, and indeed a craft where entire generations would play out their lives. Alex Tolley and I were kicking the Chrysalis concept around and I was reminded how, having been raised in Britain, Alex had been surprised to learn of the American renaming of the book. But in a recent email, he reminded me of something else, and I’ll pass that along to further seed the discussion.
What follows is from Alex, with an occasional interjection by me. I’ll label my contributions and set them in italics to avoid confusion. Alex begins:
I should mention that in Aldiss’ novel Non-Stop, the twist was that the starship was no longer in transit, but was in Earth’s orbit. The crew could not be removed from the ship as it slowly degenerated. The Earthers were the ‘giants’ visiting the ship to monitor it and study the occupants.
PG: Exactly so. To recapitulate, the starship had traveled to a planet around Procyon, and in a previous generation had experienced a pandemic evidently caused by human incompatibility with the amino acids found in its water. On the return trip, order breaks down and the crew loses knowledge of their circumstances, although we learn that there are other beings who sometimes appear and interact in mysterious ways with the crew. The twenty-three generations that have passed are far more than was needed to reach their destination, but now, in Earth orbit, their mutated biology causes scrutiny from scientists who restrict their movement while continuing to study them.
PG: The generation ship always raises questions like this, not to mention creating questions about the ethics of controlling populations for the good of the whole. I commented to Alex about the Chrysalis plan to have multiple generations of prospective crew members live in Antarctica to ensure their suitability for an interstellar voyage and its myriad social and ethical demands. He mentions J.G. Ballard’s story “Thirteen to Centaurus” below, a short story discussed at some length in these pages by Christopher Phoenix in 2016.
Image: The original appearance of “Thirteen to Centaurus,” in The July, 1962 issue of Amazing Fact and Science Fiction Stories. Rather than having to scan this out of my collection, I’m thankful to the Classics of Science Fiction site for having done the scanning for me.
I missed the multiple generations in Antarctica bit, probably because I knew the UK placed Antarctic hopefuls in a similar environment for at least several weeks to evaluate suitability. The 500-day Martian voyage simulation would be like a prison sentence for the very motivated. But several generations in some enclosed environment would perhaps be like the simulated starship in “Thirteen to Centaurus” or the 2014 US TV series Ascension. Note that Antarctica is just a way of suggesting an isolated environment, which the authors indicate is TBD. Like the 500-day Mars simulation, all the authors want is a way to test for psychological suitability.
To do this over a span of multiple generations seems very unethical, to say the least. How are they going to weed out the “unsuitable”, especially after the first generation? I also think that there is a flaw in the reasoning. Genetics is not deterministic, especially as the authors expect normal human partnering on the ship. The sexual reproduction of the genes will constantly create genetically different children. This implies that the nurture component of socialization will be very important. How will that be maintained in the simulation, let alone the starship? Will the simulation inhabitants have to resolve all problems and any anti-social behavior by themselves? What if it becomes a “Lord of the Flies” situation? Is the simulation ended and a new one started when a breakdown occurs? It is a pity that the starship cannot be composed of an isolated tribe that has presumably already managed to maintain multi-generational stability.
If we’re going to simulate an interstellar voyage, we could build the starship, park it in an orbit within the solar system, and monitor it for the needed time. This would test everything for reliability and stability, yet ensure that the population could be rescued if it all goes pear-shaped. The ethics are still an issue, but if the accommodation is very attractive, it is perhaps not too different from living on a small island in the early industrial period, isolated from the world. The Hebrides until the mid-20th century might be an example, although the adventurous could leave, which is not a possibility on the starship.
Ethics aside, I suspect that the Antarctica idea is more hopeful than viable. In my view, it will take a very different kind of society to maintain a 100+ year simulation. But there are advantages to doing this in Earth orbit. It could be that the crew becomes a separate basket of eggs to repopulate the Earth after a devastating war, as Moon or Mars colonies are sometimes depicted.
PG: I’ve always thought that rather than building a generation ship, such vessels would evolve naturally. As we learn how to exploit the resources of the Solar System, we’ll surely become adept at creating large habitats for scientists and workers. A natural progression would be for some crew, no longer particularly interested in living on a planet, to ‘cast off’ and set off on a generational journey.
Slow boating to star systems will probably require something larger, more like an O’Neill Island 3 design. Such colonies will be mature, and the remaining issue of propulsion “solved” by strapping on whatever is the most appropriate – fusion, antimatter, etc. The ethics problem is presumably moot in such colonies, as long as the colony votes to leave the solar system, and anyone preferring to stay is allowed to leave.
This is certainly what Heppenheimer and O’Leary were advocating when the space colony idea was new and shiny. On the other hand, maybe the energy is best used to propel a much smaller ship at high fractional c to achieve time dilation. If it fails, only the first-generation explorer crew dies. In extremis, this is Anderson’s Tau Zero situation.
PG: With your background in biology, Alex, what’s your take on food production in a generation ship? I realize that we have to get past the huge question of closed loop life support first, but if we do manage that, what is the most efficient way to produce the food the crew will need?
I think that by the time a Chrysalis ship can be built, they won’t be farming field crops as we do today. The time allocated to agricultural activities might be better spent on some other activity. Food production will be whatever passes for vertical farms and food factory culture, with 3-D printing of foods for variety.
The only value I can see for traditional crop farming is that it may be the only way to expand the population on the destination planet, and that means maintaining basic farming skills. The Chrysalis design did not allow animal husbandry, which means that the crew would be Vegan or Vegetarian only. In that future, that may even be the norm, and eating animal flesh a repellant idea.
In any case, space colonies should be the first to develop the technology for very long-duration missions, then generation starships if that is the only way to reach the stars, and assuming it is deemed a worthwhile idea. That techbro, Peter Thiel, cannot get seasteading going. I do wonder whether human crewed starships for colonization make much sense.
But multi-year exploration ships evoking the golden age of exploration in sailing ships might be a viable idea. Exciting opportunities to travel, discover new worlds (“new life, and new civilizations…”), yet returning to the solar system after the tour is over. It would need fast ships or some sort of suspended animation to reduce the subjective time during the long cruise phase, so that most of the subjective time would be the exploration of each world.
PG: I’ll add to that the idea that crews on generation-class ships and their counterparts on this kind of faster mission may well represent the beginning of an evolutionary fork in our species. Plenty of interesting science fiction to be written playing with the idea that there is a segment of any population that would prefer to experience life within a huge, living habitat, and thus eventually become untethered to planting colonies or exploiting a planetary surface for anything more than scientific data-gathering.
Like the university-crewed, habitat-based starship in Vonda McIntyre’s Starfarers tetralogy. The ship is based on O’Neill’s space colony technology, but it can travel at FTL velocities and is mostly about exploring new worlds. It is very Star Trek in vibes, but more exploratory, fewer phasers and photon torpedoes.
PG: So the wave of outward expansion could consist of the fast ships Alex mentions followed by a much slower and different kind of expansion through ships like Chrysalis. I’ll bring this exchange to a close here, but we’ll keep pondering interstellar expansion in coming months, including the elephant-in-the-room question Alex mentioned above. Will we come to assume that crewed starships are a worthwhile idea? Is the future outbound population most likely to consist of machine intelligence?
The thing is once we become made of metal surly we are no longer human. The metal heads should only be our servants and not our masters or supplanters !
Those who wish them to win are surly evil.
@Michael
If you have seen the first couple of episodes of Alien:Earth set before the first Alien movie, it is stated that the megacorps, including the well-known Weyland-Yutani from the Alien franchise, are competing with different approaches to “enhanced/super human” development:
1. Cyborgs
2. Synthetics – the replicants of Blade Runner
3. Hybrids – synthetics with uploaded human minds.
I would argue that:
1. Cyborgs are just enhanced humans with artificial parts
2. Synthetics are artificial, although it is not clear how they are made. In Alien, Ash was a synthetic, as was Bishop in Aliens. We get some sense of their construction when they are severely damaged.
(In Blade Runner, and P K Dick’s novel (DADoES), replicants are so good at simulating being human that it takes a Voight-Kampf empathy test to detect them. Furthermore, the Nexus 6 replicants, like Rachel, didn’t even know they were not human. Does this mean that replicants are an obsolete technology, later replaced by synthetics?)
3. Hybrids would resolve the question of whether they are human or not, at least from inspection of their minds.
If synthetic technology is portable to a starship, and the entity can live forever, then the concept of a generation ship is moot. As they are artificial, all that ELSS seems rather superfluous. The ships can be much smaller, likely faster, with smaller crews, and far less expensive. Economics wins.
As I mentioned in the last post’s comments, Asimov had already questioned whether humaniform robots (effectively synthetics) would want to hand over their terraformed worlds to human followers. Yet, as we see with his robot, R. Daneel Olivaw, the humanoid robots can be very close to being human at least as regards minds (although their positronic brains are imprinted with the 3 Laws of Robotics).
In Aliens, Alien:Earth, Westworld (TV series), and Foundation (TV series), synthetics or robots are remarkably human-like. We are not talking about clanking metal robots. Add in the uploaded human minds to synthetics as hybrids, and you have a human being in all but biology.
Why would these beings, synthetics or hybrids, not be acceptable as human descendants for interstellar colonization? As we see in the Alien franchise, they are not vulnerable to alien biology, thus solving the problem of biocompatibility with alien biospheres.
SciFi has long had this trope of a binary case – a metal robot and a humanoid android. Yet we have increasingly seen depictions of very human-like robots in recent media offerings. Sure, it saves on costumes and CGI (although check out the robot Demerzel in Foundation), but I suspect apart from having almost entirely crossed the “uncanny valley”, we do seem to be pursuing the idea that robots should be very humaniform in both physical and mental attributes. Technology may well eventually reach that stage at some point in the future. If so, the logic of Blade Runner to send replicants to do the hard work of conquering space, fighting wars, and even being “comfort women” (like BR’s Pris, and being made even today), seems correct. The animosity towards robots in Asimov’s novels by Earthers, in Blade Runner, and in Robert Sawyer’s novel Mindscan results in non-human bodies (with or without human minds) being forced into exile off-world.
It is only our assumption that only original humans® should be pioneering space. Isn’t that just “Caucasian supremacy” or racism in new clothing?
I believe it was Asimov himself who wrote that the reason robots were deliberately constructed to be morphologically similar to humans was that it allowed them to operate vehicles, tools and machines designed for humans.
This allowed one design to be adaptable to a variety of applications.
R2-D2 couldn’t drive a car with a manual transmission. He couldn’t use a screwdriver, either, so he had to have one built into his chassis instead.
@Henry
Yes, he wanted robots to fulfil human roles using existing tools. His humaniform robot, R. Daneel, was both a way to explain detective Baley’s reasoning, but also to allow a human-appearing robot to be used in unexpected ways. By The Robots of Dawn, he had extended the idea of humaniform robots that looked like R. Daneel, but would have more human traits, to act exactly as humans would when developing a new planet, which led to the argument of whether this would solve the Spacers’ problem of not expanding populations as fast as Earthers and dooming the Spacer worlds to be eclipsed.
The Spacers, being far longer lived and more comfortable in their tailored worlds, would need some other approach to expand the number of Space Worlds from 50 to encompass the far greater number in the galaxy, denying them to Earth’s populations.
This is an argument I would agree with. However, Asimov needed to retcon his robot universe with robot-less, human-filled galaxy, so this argument’s outcome was designed to fail, and Baley’s son, Bentley, became an Earther pioneering a new world.
As we don’t need to argue from this human-populated galaxy outcome, I see the logic of machine “humanity” as being a better way to spread human culture across the galaxy. It may be that we instead spread post-human, artificial minds, in synthetic human/non-human bodies across the galaxy instead. To modify an analogy I have used in the past, if humans are the equivalent of Devonian fish, instead of evolving to be reptiles to colonize the land, we create artificial species to do the same instead. We might eventually evolve our fish species to become reptiles, but our technologically developed artificial species will have long since dominated the land, and it would prove too late to try to share that environment.
These days, it appears increasingly unlikely that decades-long interstellar voyages will be undertaken by living humans. Colonization ships will be operated by AI and carry frozen human gametes and/or embryos. They will carry both those biological seeds and a technological seed. We know the mass of biological seeds is minuscule. We don’t know the minimum size of a technology seed, yet. It is likely the sole determining factor for minimum ship size.
By technology seed I mean the minimum complement of machinery that needs to be carried to be able to start a self-sustaining high-tech economy. This aspect has been neglected in the seed ship literature, I think. We cannot and should not expect our colonists to survive on a distant planet without technology, especially if they are AI, so ALL technology must be carried on board, from mining to chipmaking equipment.
The “technology seed” needn’t be all physical artifacts. Simpler tools need be nothing more than electronic specifications that are “printed” or fabbed on demand, and recycled if desired. 3D printing is already being experimented with on the ISS. Some things will need to be in storage, such as microelectronics; otherwise, the fabs would need to be part of the seed kit.
How much can be constructed from “off-the-shelf” materials vs. manufactured by an industrial economy and stored, Idk. We didn’t have 3D printing 30 years ago, and apart from hobbyists using plastic, industrial additive printing can make metal rocket engines, and increasingly biological parts for surgical replacements. What will be possible centuries from now?
Increasingly, technology is becoming biologically based. Historically, plants and animal parts were used to make tools and clothes. Silk manufacture used silkworms to convert plant leaves to threads. Wood had long been a construction material. Now we use gene-engineered microorganisms to make a range of biologicals for medical use. But macroorganisms can be used to create simply formed parts on a faster time frame. What are the boundaries for using biology to manufacture materials and artifacts that could substitute for materials we use today, much as plastics have replaced wood and metal in so many items?
Interestingly, in Rendezvous with Rama (1973), Clarke indicates that the ship can create parts from a visual catalog, as well as the biots and spiders when needed. Was this influenced by Star Trek: TOS transporters, because the replicators in Star Trek: THG didn’t appear until 1987? Possibly the device in Forbidden Planet (1956) could have been the design phase for the creation of an artifact which predates RwR.
As a side effect, if we carry a full technology seed, as is necessary, that gives us the ability to indefinitely maintain, repair, and upgrade the ship en route until we run out of raw material. A ship could be on its way for millennia, that way.
I like the idea of starship crews training in simulators (like Antarctica) to get a taste of what a really long mission would really be like. It could be a little like the “Perisher” course the Royal Navy uses to vette its submarine skippers. If they fail, (even if its NOT “their fault”) they don’t get the command, and their career is pretty much finished. Too harsh? Maybe, but it does tend to weed out those who are not ready (along with many others who just got unlucky). The real world doesn’t accept excuses.
A long and rigorous training exercise in such a simulator could also be used for training, it would be one emergency drill and simulated catastrophe after another, if you’re gong to screw up, at least the real mission won’t be a failure.
“Caesar’s drills were like were bloodless battles, his battles were bloody drills.”
Food production will be purely synthetic. Biotech food factories. It will be people like us reanimated from cryonics suspension going to the stars. Our bodies (and minds) will be made of synthetic biology, bionano, or even true nanotechnology (if this latter is possible). So our physical needs will be somewhat different than those of baselines running around today. Our synthetic or bionano bodies will be capable of coldsleep. So we would have a scheduled mix of cold sleep and times when we are active (presumably doing maintenance on the ship). Of course our AI and robotics will be much more advanced as well. The ship itself could also be made of synthetic biology, bionano, or pure nanotechnology as well. So it can largely maintain itself. But there will always be the need for some human (or transhuman) intervention during the journey. We will have radical life extension. So “generation” will have different meaning to us then. My point is we will have all of these technologies, and self-modifications, long before we go to the stars.
Of course by this time,, many of us will be living in O-Neill style habitats. So living in one going to the stars will be no big deal. Travelling in groups is more desirable. Rather than one ship going to a star, have a fleet of 10-20 such ships going to the new star. Easier to support each other and greater redundancy is the benefit.
With bodies of synthetic biology or bionano, it will still be easier for someone used to living in Tokyo, Hong Kong, or a space colony to do the starship thing than some one like me, who is spoiled by growing up and living in the western U.S.
Something the chrysalis design team forgot to put in their starship habitat are the lagoons, artificial beaches, and palm trees. These are absolute necessities for any space colony or generation starship. You don’t want to cross interstellar space without beaches and lagoons.
But consider the problem of what to do with teh water during the acceleration phase and before spin-up. Bodies of water will be subject to micro-g and non-normal oriented gravity gradients. The “sloshing” could be extreme. Clarke describes this in Rendezvous with Rama and Vinge does similarly in A Fire Upon the Deep. For safety, there would need to be storage holds to contain the water for teh non-cruise periods. But if you want the bodies of water to be populated as part of the ecosystems, then what? IMO, it is best to stick to swimming pools for such vessels. This is very different from space habitats that once spun up remain in that state, and movement would be slow with very low acceleration forces.
I don’t know, Abelard.
As someone who spent years navigating small boats around real tropical coasts with real lagoons, beaches and palm trees, a tame pond on a starship just isn’t going to cut it. I’d much rather live inside a cramped metal and plastic hull, contemplating the outside universe through tiny windows and screens than sailing and sunbathing in a big Jacuzzi.
I’ve lived on a ship for months at a time, surrounded by bulkheads, pipes, conduit and machinery. It may have been artificial, but at least it was honest and real. But going out on the weather decks and simply staring at the sea and sky could simply not be reproduced on a submarine that never surfaces.
A garden is a poor substitute for a wilderness, but at least it is outdoors.
Human beings can easily adapt to any artificial environment, be it a ship, a space craft or even a city; but I don’t believe they will long tolerate living in a movie set. Design the starship to maximize its performance and its safety, human adaptability will easily accommodate to any structure necessary to get the job done. That is the indispensable skill we bring to the problem.
Wood paneling on the mess deck bulkheads isn’t going to help.
Based on these reviews of pertinent literature and the recent generation ship concepts, I feel nostalgic for Robert Heinlein’s “Time for the Stars”.
Too optimistic, of course, in its interpretation of propulsion capabilities, but much more fulfilling in its prospects for exploration. I cite it not to suggest that it is “foreseeably feasible”, but an alternative that should not be forgotten when contemplating “generation starships”.
For the latter the generation that takes off, there is at least the fanfare of leaving.
Flares if not foghorns and whistles. For the “nth”, there is the reward of arrival. But for the intermediate, the space genealogical component, there is many centuries of living in a shipping container under the constant duress of breakdowns, foreseen or unforeseen.
I would suppose that the ship would come equipped with the best in telescopic
capabilities that money ( credit? ) can buy, but from the open deck there would
be no horizon other than the deck and an interminable night sky. For centuries.
Approach to a star in the nth generation could be like the snap of psychological suspenders.
Some of the more prosaic failure types would be loss of thermal equilibrium or lighting, water or food contamination, failure of crops or what pass for such. Even transport in a miles long container could break down with wear out of bearings or guide rails. The list could go on and on. To a limited extent a smaller accelerated supply ship might be able to deliver parts not in reserve. It’s a trade between mass, acceleration and velocity. But this type of generosity toward the project will have its limits too: Terrestrial resources, rising animosity, even loss of signal from back home for reasons that have been examined in the literature before.
If life on Earth or in the solar system as a whole becomes so untenable, then I suppose that a generation ship might be an out. But near as much isolation should be possible to obtain within the confines of the sun, unless government becomes as imperial as Rome’s two millennia ago. Though if someone offered me a can to live in somewhere in the solar system, I am not so sure I would opt for that either sight/site unseen. But by comparison a generation ship is true banishment. Motivation could be envisioning an nth generation descendant opening a hatch to a world with a new and rewarding vista…
It has to be and nothing short of it.
To justify a generation ship, there has to be something of value at the end of the line. Science fiction has speculated on this theme to no end, but we are now in a transition state: We know there are exoplanets and we know that some of them
reside at standoff sufficient to provide fundamental Earth-like properties. And that’s about it. The promoters right now cannot point to anywhere with “free oxygen”.
That is sobering, of course, but decades before we didn’t even know IF there were any exoplanets or not. Astronomers pre-occupied with stellar nature were not too concerned about that level of stellar neighborhood debris. Simply speaking, astronomers had instruments for the former and not the latter and were very buttoned down about their work if they expected to get any grants such as telescope time.
Admittedly Percival Lowell could finance his own fantasies, but his case was more an exception to a rule. One might say that he kept seeing the glass is not half empty but more than half full. And that incited our lasting interest in Mars.
There might even be some Mars like real estate within a few parsecs of us here and there. The Trappist planets have the size of Earth, but their “trappings” are more like Mars. But we are still trying to figure out how to live on the Mars next door.
Reaching Alpha Centauri in 400 years without “free oxygen” nailed down? That’s not going to warrant an n-generation voyage on a starship.
In terms of space investment, better space telescopes or related sensors that can interpret exoplanet data should be of higher priority. Since 9/10ths of Earth history did not include that much free oxygen, if we were to find any “free oxygen” of the sort that would make generation ships tempting, then the next question would be “Why DOES this place have any free oxygen?” Rather than building a
generation ship, the likely response would be developing means of more intensive scrutiny aimed at that or those points of the sky. If we can get all that done and still interested, maybe our interstellar transport technology base will be improved in parallel as well.
Work up with other intentions this morning, but this was a welcome opportunity for digression.
Doing a little “rational actor modeling” I suspect if you couldn’t get me to give up a big part of my life to an Antarctica experiment (and you couldn’t) then you might not get many takers. Also, I’d worry about the psychology of such takers. Also I doubt the feasibility of suspended animation. Worse, we haven’t even conceived a robust radiation defense for either sleeping or awake humans. Nor for frozen embryos, though that seems more feasible. Raised by Wolves a science fiction drama series created by Aaron Guzikowski and directed by Ridley Scott, plays out a scenario with artificial beings raising human children (from embryos) on a destination planet. But I don’t think artificial people are feasible. So imagine, if you will, 10 humans raising 10 kids from embryos, 3,000 embryos in reserve. As one generation is raised the previous one “ages out”. Thus the infrastructure would be sized for nominally 20 active humans and up to 10 others in their dotage. Variations on cohort size and timing are, of course, imaginable. An optimistic transit time of 600 years is a long time if we can boldly assume a lot of things about shielding and propulsion. I’ll choose 55 years as the generation length. The population are all women, all the time, in my scenario. Solves the problem of accidentally making extra babies. There would need to be 11 generations of embryos raised to adulthood and trained in operations before a surface-landing-pod could be dispatched even with the good luck that a suitable planet exists at the destination. Yeah, you see? I’m not going on that trip…
@Benjamin
Your proposal is very similar to mine in my post on the critique of the ECLSS of The Hyperion project constraints. As you commented on that post, I wonder if you had even further thoughts, or a critique of my “small population” approach, where AFAIK, all the ECLSS and medical support technologies already exist.