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.
The technology seed, of course, contains 3d-printers and information. But that is not enough. You need MUCH more.
We simply don’t know what the minimum mass of a technology seed is.
An absolute lower limit is the mass of a 3d-printer, but the actual limit is MUCH larger, since you also need to take all the equipment to mine and refine the materials needed to feed the printer. I suppose you could have the printer print that equipment, but then you’d have to include an equal mass of material in the seed to print it with, so that doesn’t really help. Also, there is no one 3d printer that can print all of its parts, so a lot more machinery is needed to fabricate those parts that the printer cannot print.
You don’t need to include a semiconductor fab in the seed, I think. It is likely much better to construct that fab on location, from simpler parts, after the material supply chain is built up. A supply of chips that lasts until the first fab is constructed should be easy enough to carry.
When you say “off-the-shelf materials”, consider that there are no shelves where we are going. All materials will eventually have to be sourced from rocks, because that’s the only thing we can reliably expect to find where we are going.
Even if we construct our technology very frugally, with a minimal set of materials (steel, aluminum, ceramics, glass), the machinery needed to make those from rock is going to be very heavy, indeed, and will all have to be included in the seed.
@Eniac,
Everything you say is true, although we don’t know what the capabilities and requirements will be by the time the starship gets going.
All I can say is that Star Trek replicator technology is almost certainly not an option, although it would make the technology seed vastly easier.
It is rather similar to the question: “What is the minimum population needed to reboot a technological civilization (technological era to be determined)?” I’ve read arguments that the 1950s may be the most technological we can manage with a million or so people and replaceable technology.
My first cut as a technology seed is this:
1. A digital store for every piece of lit you need.
2. Fabricators to get this started. The will include material handling from starter material stores.
[1 &2 should be recognizable as analogous to biological cells].
3. Construct robots to do the needed universal finding, extraction, and handling of materials, replacing the functions of humans.
4. Start simple, if necessary, using ancient techniques to mine and refine minerals. (You don’t need blast furnaces to make steel, just employ them when you need steel on a massive scale.) Slowly increase sophistication.
[High-tech items, such as microelectronics components, are acquired from storage, and are the equivalent of trace elements in foods. Electrical power is the main source of energy.]
5. Increased scale will allow technological capabilities to increase until it reaches the same level as that of the civilization that built the starship.
As we managed to reach current technology starting from the base of the Industrial Revolution in less than 300 years, I see no reason why this period should be any longer for the technology seed, and probably much shorter.
The size of the seed needs to be determined using a development and logistics plan, which is well beyond anything I can even attempt. But clearly, it is very similar to what is required by replicating von Neumann replicator probes that are often invoked in discussions of the Fermi Question and galaxy occupation. (It could be “magic pixie dust” everywhere, but I think we are on the way to making it possible, just not in the near term.)
Yup, exactly.
An often overlooked factor is miniaturization. If we can make the machines smaller, that greatly reduces the size of the technological seed. However, there are scaling problems that prevent us from miniaturizing too much without radically changing the processes and materials. Ultimately, that line of thought leads to nanotechnology, which is far from what we can do, today.
I think my main point stands: The dominant factor determining the size of a colonization ship is the technological seed. Biological seeds are minuscule in comparison. It doesn’t even matter if biology is included, at all. The technology is needed, with or without people.
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.
I guess people can adapt to many things. The people who live in the following:
https://www.wired.com/2013/08/unbelievable-photographs-of-hong-kongs-crazy-high-rises/
are more likely to adapt to your generation ships than I would. Perhaps it will be the Chinese and, maybe, Indians that go to the stars.
I visited Hong Kong on business for a week shortly after the British handed over the island. Even then, the high, narrow blocks were pretty awful. And of course the smell!
Hong Kong is not as dense as Macao, or even Monaco. What is does have is pockets of extreme density, while other areas are far lower in density, and of course, the park at the top of the hill is building-free. Old Venice was quite dense, with multistory houses with common walls quite close to their neighbors on the opposite side of the canal. The old center of London is also quite dense, with narrow streets, but the buildings are less storied.
Watching movies of S.E.Asian cities, Seoul looks very pretty – large modern office buildings, but probably packed more tightly than in Manhattan. [The interiors of houses for a movie were probably selected for attractiveness.]
I suspect that if one lived in a shantytown in Asia, or a Brazilian favela, a generation ship of the Chrysalis design might seem idyllic, like “Heaven”. However, I suspect that in reality, the generation ship would look a lot more like the interior of the Babylon 5 space station, or Ceres station in the TV version of “The Expanse”. Artificial, crowded, and like living in the poorer parts of a city, but without any access to fresh air. A more luxurious one might look like the Venetian in Las Vegas, with a projected sky over the “Potemkin” facades of the shops.
The one thing I missed when visiting New York (Manhattan) was good views of the sky. It felt so enclosed with narrow strips of sky overhead between the skyscrapers. The views of the East River were a pleasure by comparision.
But no doubt we all get used to the environment we are born into. As a city boy, I don’t feel comfortable in places with no buildings in view at all. Nice to visit, but not to live in. I like enough space around me not to feel crowded, and preferably open space to visit. But living permanently indoors in an artificial environment, however well designed, would soon get on my nerves. The other thing I have learned is that I get “island fever”. Where I live has to be large enough not to feel like a cage. Napoleon must have felt very aggravated being cooped up on St. Helena.
In other words, it would suck.
I just looked at images of Ceres Station (I’ve never seen Expanse). It definitely looks like the Kowloon part of Hong Kong. I’ve stayed there and didn’t really like it. I like Singapore. I did live in Tokyo area for a decade and got used to it. Clean up the Ceres Station a little bit and get rid of the angular layout and it might even rise to the level of Tokyo. Still, you would definitely have to “urban” in the Asian style to live on a generation starship. Like I said before, it will be the Chinese and possibly Indians that will go to the stars like this.
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.
@Alex,
Thanks for asking. Though I worked for many years in engineering and technology I’m actually schooled in political science. My main critique regarding interstellar travel is not actually technological – plenty of people can deal with that better than I. I just don’t think our current human culture(s) will ever generate the sustained investment that would be required. More likely we will fool around and spoil the planet we already have. By the time the moneyed interests realize we are doomed I wonder if they will create a situation like that in “Don’t Look Up”? But I hope I’m wrong in my pessimism…
@Benjamin
I tend to be similarly pessimistic. OTOH, it does seem to me that if the funds and technology are available, a group could decide to try the journey. As has been suggested, a minority religious group seems most likely to make the attempt. But we cannot know. After all, Queen Isabella of Spain financed ships to try to reach the Indies for profit. The ships reached the Americas and plundered them for gold instead. It is possible that something similar may happen again. Western Democracies seem less likely to do so than, say, a rich nation with an effective monarch to make unilateral decisions. But unlike in Isabella’s Spain, there seems to be no profit in such endeavors. This implies the motive would have to be different, more like that of the religious group wishing to escape to freedom, or even the catholic Church’s cathedral building period, with supposedly higher goals than maintaining power and wealth.
@Alex. In the long run you must be right.
There is an earlier suggestion than O-Neill and Heppenheimer’s that once space habitats are established eventually some of them might install propulsion systems send themselves to the stars, was made by Isaac Asimov. This was in 1965 essay titled “There’s No Place Like Spome” that was reprinted and retitled in a collection of his non-fiction “Is Anyone There?” (1967).
The spomes Asimov was referring to, were space habitats or as he called them ‘space homes’, then abbreviated to the obvious ‘spome’. He suggested they would spread through the solar system with the eventual possibility of some of them decamping to the stars.
Before Vonda McIntyre’s Starfarers teralogy, Alexei Panshin had in his novel *Rite of Passage* huge faster-than-light generation ships called the Ships. The Ships were most likely a hommage to both Heinlein’s *Orphans to the Stars* and *Methuselah’s Children*. The hijacked spaceship in *Methuselah’s Children* does gain a faster-than-light drive later in the novel. While the generation ship is the main feature in *Orphans*. A nice recombinant fusion of ideas.
James Blish’s *Cities in Flight* are effectively faster-than-light generation ships. Their journeys take reasonably long timespans, even at faster-than-light speeds, but they had the added advantage of anti-ageing drugs.
Perhaps writers who want to take of the generation ship concepts developed for Project Hyperion might do so and give them faster-than-light drives to ease any narrative problems with long interstellar voyages.
@Jeff,
Thanks for the reminders.
Asimov’s “Spome…” was reprinted as “Spomelife: The Universe and the Future” in Skylife: Space habitats in Story and Science” which I have at home.
Blish’s “Cities in Flight” tetralogy, of which I also have at home, is an interesting take, as the “ship” is now an uprooted city, like Manhattan, protected and driven by the “spindizzy”. How the population feeds itself and maintains the air, I cannot recall if it was explained in the books. I regard this as more of a fantasy to focus on other issues, rather than any sort of “feasible” technology approach. I do regard it as a classic and worthy of its place in my library.
I have read the 2 Heinleins, although only “Methuselah’s Children remains in my library in the Heinlein section.
I never read Rite of Passage even though I know it was/is highly regarded.
In movieland, Passengers”was an STL sleeper ship, and Aniara was an involuntary “generation ship”.
The British SciFi TV series “Out of the Unknown” had an episode: Target Generation about a generation ship arriving at its destination. I vaguely recall watching it back in the day, but sadly, the BBC policy of wiping video tapes resulted in its loss. This is a link in IMDb. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065068/ Doctor Who had a number of stories set on generation ships. The Star Trek: TOS episode 58: “The Paradise Syndrome” is effectively a generation ship, and episode 63: “For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky” is another story of a generation ship.
I tend to agree with those who doubt that generation ships are a likely interstellar ship technology unless the Earth/Solar system is in severe danger and there is no alternative. If FTL remains physically impossible, then STL ships with a way to maintain a human complement in some form who are not aging or conscious during the long journeys will have to be the way to go, although I emphasize that creating artificial entities is by far the easiest technology to develop on the horizon. Clarke suggested that machine minds as spaceships would be an intermediate stage between biological, starfaring beings and transcendent incorporeal beings, a form into which Dave Bowman was reborn, and later merged with HAL9000 as Halman. This idea of incorporeal, g*d-like minds is not one I consider realistic, but a useful fictional concept going back to at least Stapledon’s Star Maker.
I suspect that a century or more from now, assuming humanity still exists as a technological civilization, these ideas of generation ships will seem very quaint and primitive, like Verne’s cannon-propelled moonship, or Godwin’s chariot of harnessed swans to fly to the Moon[e]. Designing generation ships that might work is similar to the design stage of Heyerdahl’s balsa, sailed raft Kon-Tiki, to reach a Pacific island from South America, or his reed sailing ship to show Egyptians could have reached the Americas across the Atlantic. Of course, unlike Heyerdahl, we cannot build the proposed generation ships to prove the concept would work and deposit a human crew on an exoplanet.
Why not leaving out humans of this altogether, for the foreseeable future?
– Life in space is not good for humans. Making it bearable will just make their entire expedition very heavy, thus very expansive and slow
– taking frozen eggs is no good, for they would have to be raised without human partens
– taking frozen humans along is no good, either, for cryosleep as of yet is not solved
Also: life on any planet is by definition not the life from our planet, thus in any case hostile and hazardous to us (s. KSR Aurora). And if there is not life on that planet, terraforming will take at least 3.000 years which have to be added to the generations living in their spaceship, or which should precede the generational spaceship by 3.000 years, by sending terraforming bots.
So, in any case, sending bots is better, for they need to food, medical equipment, water, rare elements, nutrition, shielding, books, farms, entertainment, etc.
@Gregor
I agree. It has been over 1/2 a century since humans last put footprints on the Moon. At teh time, there was talk of a Mars landing in 1986. 40 years later, nothing. Wild-eyed talk by various private groups of “colonizing” Mars, in sleek ships like Bradbury’s “Silver Locusts”, but with nothing beyond nice drawings and proposed huge BFRs.
In reality, we have yet to solve the problems of long-term human spaceflight. Exploration shifted to robot probes and landers. If one regards the 2 Pioneer, 2 Voyager, and the New Horizons probes as interstellar precursor missions, the Voyagers have been traveling for nearly 50 years. Who would even want to spend their lives in a tin can doing this, even if it were possible? What possible value would it have for exploration?
It has been claimed that humans could do almost everything the various Mars rovers have done very quickly. The Apollo finding of the lunar “Genesis rock” was achieved by training astronauts to be field geologists. Real experts might be useful on Mars, and we cannot yet manage to have robots recognize tiny fossil fragments that experienced paleontologists can do today.
But our robotic technology is improving by leaps and bounds. Pattern recognition technology is now on a par, or better, than humans in many cases. [I still have to read about robots besting paleontologists, but that may happen in due course.] Self-driving vehicles went from total failure to almost working as well as humans, albeit under known conditions. They still get confused by “out of sample” conditions.
Therefore, I expect that for various reasons, it will be machines doing exploration, especially as they are expendable and only require one-way journeys.
The Breakthrough Starshot project to devise a way to send a tiny probe to Proxima at 0.2c to reach the system in 20 years requires a huge, phased laser array in Chile’s Altiplano. The acceleration vastly exceeds anything biology could tolerate. This probe, if it were built, could reach Proxima and send back preliminary data much as our early flyby probes did. Scale the size of the probe up, perhaps use a different propulsion system, and the exploration could follow the pattern set by robotic probes in the solar system – flybys to orbiters to landers. Humans are strictly staying at home.
So, human starflight is really not for exploration. This will be by increasingly sophisticated machines, probably with capabilities far exceeding those of humans. They can explore, they can even start terraforming efforts. They could prepare the way for human colonists. But who are these colonists, if they must travel by “slow boat, with a future generation arriving to colonize? A multi-generational trip has not been done at any time in human history. Even if human migration is teh analogy, every movement ensured that each stopover was suitable for survival. Even religious cultists have expected that they would reach their “promised land” within their lifetimes.
The logic of machine exploration seems evident, even if we develop some magic teleportation technology. An explorer teleported to an exoplanet would either arrive many years in the future, no longer in touch with teh people back on Earth, or be teleported at FTL velocity, arrive in Earth’s past, unable to communicate with Earth. Maybe spacetime can be circumvented?
This has been raised by a number of critics, including SciFi writer Charlie Stross. At the time, it seemed reasonable. However, if AI can be made good enough, and humaniform robots close enough to real people, then I see no reason this cannot be done. The only difference I would suggest from stories where the embryos are started in advance of the journeys to allow children or adults to disembark, is that I would wait until the machine exploration of the planet ensured that the planet was safe for humans to colonize. No hidden surprises. Then revive the embryos, gestate in artificial wombs (already in development for animals), and decant for care by the robot parents to be released when ready onto the planet’s surface in a prepared, safe environment on the surface. Whether this is morally acceptable…
That we still think interstellar travel will be a biological human activity seems to me to be a hangover of our past as the more capable, cognitively advanced species on the planet. We seem to assume that the past is prologue, and that reaching the stars in our next huge jump in “conquering” the universe. Meanwhile, our invention of artificial cognitive beings, rapidly improving in capabilities, is already demonstrating, step by step, that they will be the inheritors of space. As a species, we haven’t come to terms with this. As a result, popular media show machines and robots as enemies to be defeated by superior humans. Asimov was an early writer to take an opposite POV, with robots as helpers of humans, and even ultimately our replacement.
[Unless ETI is very different or has solved FTL travel, then the above should apply to any believed occupants of UFOs. No “greys” or other claimed humanoid species. If UFOs exist, they are machines, not piloted craft.]
While I agree humans would do better staying on Earth for now, life on other planets wouldn’t necessarily be hazardous to us, certainly not in the way shown in Aurora. In fact, that was one of the aspects of that book criticised on this very site: https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2015/08/14/a-science-critique-of-aurora-by-kim-stanley-robinson/
@Anon
As you say, the critique was specific to KSM’s idea of a “prion” that is toxic to humans. Baxter’s critique is valid. Isaac Asimov had a similar idea in a short story called “Sucker Bait (1954), where the toxicity was due to a high beryllium content of the soil.
I read Aurora, and it seemed part of KSM’s turning away from planetary colonization in general. I think he has said that his Mars trilogy wasn’t plausible either. It is science fiction, not fact. The implausibility of the ship design and performance in Aurora is sufficient to indicate that the story is fiction, and the “hard scifi” is possible, but it stretches credulity.
While there are many issues with generation ships, we should keep them in mind in case some are required in the event our species and all other Earth life are somehow threatened in a manner that requires our escape and we do not have some form of relativistic propulsion available.
You may argue that a potential catastrophe would have to be very specific and also allow us enough time to build and launch such vessels. You may also argue that base human nature itself may keep such a project from happening. All valid points, but again, let’s not throw the idea away because for right now, it is one of the few real methods we have of getting us to another star system in bulk.
It also reminds me very much of the space settlement concepts which emerged in the 1970s, where planners seriously thought we would have these huge space cities floating in the Lagrange Points around Earth as early as the 1990s – or by 2026 if you read the Bicentennial issue of National Geographic Magazine.
So even if we do not use them for interstellar journeys, these concepts might pave the way for the revised version of a vintage plan to settle and explore the Sol system without requiring a planet or moon as a base.
See here:
https://nss.org/settlement/nasa/75SummerStudy/index.html
and here:
https://nss.org/space-settlement-library/
and one more:
https://nss.org/nasa-sp-413-space-settlements-a-design-study/
The problem is that unless we know how to build one, it is pure speculation. Even if we know that an ELE is going to happen in N years, we do not have the technology to build one. It would be a traveling coffin for the crew. It would be a technology that we would know how to build, but not a better star-faring technology that would displace it. What period is that likely to be in the face of a random catastrophe?
The other thing I would note is culture. Westerners are very self-preserving. Recall who the priority survivors were on the Titanic. It certainly wasn’t all “women and children first in the limited lifeboats.” We saw this is still the case with the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines just a handful of years ago. And we know the superwealthy have built bunkers for themselves and their families in the event of a [nuclear?] apocalypse. A scenario in the game and TV series, “Fallout”.
In Cixin Liu’s “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” novels he made a very interesting cultural observation (if true). He noted that in the event that a disaster occurs, if only a few can escape, e.g., with life jackets, to prevent the few abandoning the rest, it was better to destroy those jackets to force everyone to work for the common good, successful or not.
The relevance is with the generation ships. Earth would not be able to build enough for billions of inhabitants. So we would have the “When Worlds Collide” scenario. It might be better that we do nothing and prevent even the ultrawealthy from trying to escape with a private ship as they did in the movie “Don’t Look Up”.
Having said that, I would still expect some to try to escape extinction, like the government trying to survive underground, as suggested by Dr. Strangelove in the movie of nearly the same name.
It is an interesting philosophical problem that the rationalists would decry.
As the sun expands to become a red giant, in Stapledon’s “Last and First Men”, the 18th men have migrated as far out as Neptune, although this is insufficient to eventually result in extinction.
I am not sure that I wouldn’t prefer the cultural solution of creating a vast museum of our history and works and placed to survive the ELE catastrophe, as in Clarke’s short story “The Star” (1955).
Another take on the Space Settlements concept, definitely less dry than the NASA version, but no less serious:
From the Whole Earth Catalog – Space Colonies, December 1977…
https://wholeearth.info/p/space-colonies-december-1977?format=grid&index=0
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
I used to have a copy, but it went astray somewhere between England and the USA.
It also has the solar sailing article by Eric Drexler (pp 134-137) that I recall well but could never find again on the web. I will save those pages to add to my solar sailing books.
Very difficult to see us ever being able to produce a generation ship. We’re much too busy spending money on national militaries. I believe total global expenditures are approaching 6 trillion USD a year. Given that we have some pressing problems (some would say existential threats) that need the money far more, I would urge people to write or email or whatever your political appointees and press for a change in priorities. That is unlikely to work since our adversaries are going to continue to build up their military capabilities. It’s very frustrating to be a human. At least for me it is. If anyone has a solution could you please let us all know? The bottleneck approacheth.
@Gary. It is very frustrating to be a human… political scientist. All history has disproven the idea of the beneficent despot – wherever we see command economies we see an exacerbation of human greed and a diminution of interest in the common good or public works. Democracies have been better, but are subject to capture by moneyed interests. Since a generation ship (or other interstellar project) would almost certainly require a sustained global focus and investment, I seriously doubt if us monkeys (apes?) will ever mount one. That’s why I’m a supporter of space exploration here in our solar system. Maybe humanity will survive a global ELE, and there are aspects of us worth SAVING, by some combination of colonization and space habitats if we keep developing actual physics-compatible technologies.
I imagine generation ships could be of interest if exploration identifies a worthy destination for human habitation. But finding such a place, and entrusting one’s life (or descendants’s lives) to a migration, will require more than looking at it from afar. We will have to send missions to “taste the air” so to speak, and these will self-evidently not be manned missions. I used to imagine that we could come up with something like the “ansible” that LeGuin and Card portrayed. I thought maybe quantum entanglement might give us the means for FTL communications. I imagine a robot built in two parts connected by instantaneous or near instantaneous communications. An operator here on earth could “wear” the local half, which would be designed to extend sensory capabilities to/from the remote half which had been sent centuries ago to a far distant planet. Given the communications would be real-time even over many light years, the earthbound operator could experience much of what a visitor to that place could, and could run whatever tests and experiments the remote part was equipped to provide. I might spend a bit more effort fleshing out this concept. But since quantum entanglement has not yet proven to be a communication channel, the idea might be moot.
Could AI and Buddhism working together be one answer to interstellar exploration, settlement, and salvation…
https://religionnews.com/2021/02/17/the-salvage-crew-buddhist-artificial-intelligence-yudhanjaya-wijeratne-audibi-poetry/
Wijeratne summed it up this way:
“As we are the ultimate cause of our difficulties, we are also the solution. We cannot change the things that happen to us, but we can change our responses.”
Well I read the article, but I don’t see why Buddhism solves anything. Yes, the some of the beliefs may help, but you can arrive at those useful parts without taking on the baggage of the religion with its beliefs in reincarnation, and your current status based on past lives.
Just as we can be moral without Christianity despite what some believers state, we can arrive at good ways to living and treating others without the trappings of the religion within which it is embedded.
The Vulcans’ creedo, “The needs on the many, outweigh the needs or the few, or the one”, is an idea that is espoused by rationalists, and is the basis of the “Trolley Problem”. It doesn’t take a deity handing a prophet 10 rules that must be obeyed, when most are “Don’t murder people” and can be arrived at with some little thought and not giving into extreme emotions.
Now if I was an uploaded mind or a software AI, and in command of a deep space salvage vessel, my first command might be, “Keep my ship free of biological humans. Any we still have on board will be offloaded at the next starbase.” :-)
I am not Buddhist, but I prefer their approach to suffering compared some to other religions, especially the ones who claim it is due to some wrong committed by the individual and they just have to accept their divine punishment in order to learn a lesson. For me that is just another form of control by very mortal authorities using a deity as an excuse to maintain their power over others.
The issues of who would be in charge aboard a generation ship and what could happen if one gives a handful of people authority over the rest has been well-examined here and in many science fiction stories of this particular genre. Seldom do things end well for all involved. There are also plenty of real-world examples of this situation, past and present.
What I like about Buddhism is that it neither sugarcoats nor attempts to manipulate the suffering that takes place in existence with nearly everyone all the time. Buddhism simply says it exists and here are some ways to deal with it so that you are neither destroyed by suffering or transformed into a dark version of one’s self and project suffering onto others.
Unlike religions where a parental figure-style deity is the focus and unwavering obedience is demanded upon the pain of punishment, Buddhism assumes a follower is an individual who is smart and mature enough to decide their own paths of action.
Sadly, from what I have seen throughout my life, most people still prefer to be under the control of others. This way they can disavow any real responsibility for their actions (I was only following orders!) and also feel a sense of protection and comfort under the perception that their lives are being watched over by a more powerful and presumed-wiser being or beings.
This is also why existentialism has far fewer adherents than most religions: The Universe just is, there is no underlying meaning or purpose, and YOU are responsible for yourselves and your actions. Pretty scary for a species that is still mostly tribal in nature and constantly looks for those alpha leaders/saviors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBbuUWw30N8&t=129s
This is one of the big roadblocks to a successful generation ship, far more so than the technology or even the distances in time and space involved. In fact, I would bet if we could solve this big issue, then many people might actually want to take a long, long cruise of the galaxy aboard a luxury space liner.
I think you are confirming my point. One doesn’t need to join a group (religion/-ism/etc.) and accept all the group’s rules. Instead, one can determine which parts from an à la carte menu work best for “reasons”.
If Buddhism claims that your actions in a past life impact your current life, then that is a control mechanism too. Instead of a one-stop trip to “heaven/hell,” it just impacts your next life in an eternal progression of lives. So be good.
I don’t suppose that has anything to do with millions of years of primate evolution and the genetically supported hierarchies in the social group? It is inherent in our genes. On top of that, culture has punishments for individuals trying to “disobey” that social structure. It was a successful strategy for the various species of primates, including humans. It may be imperfect, even dysfunctional at times, but it does seem to have allowed humanity to build an advanced technological society that supports billions of individuals…so far. I don’t think you need to be religious and believe in an omniscient g*d watching your every action, but rather that one accepts that there are a few leaders and many followers that work best to achieve goals. I presume that this is why militaries retain a tight hierarchy as it remains the best way to win fights, even if the rest of society fragments and “do their own thing.”
Crawling comes before parkour. Before generation ships, Sedna. Before Sedna, Mars, before that the Moon. Before that, Antarctica, and deep underground settlements with preserved low-radiation invasives-free ecologies, and ocean settlements. Before that… the beach.
Today we watch houses in North Carolina slip inexorably into the sea. Nine percent of the state of Louisiana has already been ceded to an ungrateful “Gulf of America”. Those who dream of generation ships must first find a way to make pilings that are reinforced by active and well-controlled robots, akin to sand-fleas, that can resist the weather and collect tidal energy. They need to invent a way for a society to function in the face of such hardships as having to build walkways to connect beachside settlements on shallow seas to the land, and needing to maintain sewage drones to keep things sanitary.
If I could see a people who can alleviate a housing crisis and end homelessness everywhere by architectural innovation, and make new pleasant communities where residents are decent, friendly, and successful where no one could live before, then could I to the moment say… this is the beginning of the colonization of space.
Nomadic Space-Based Civilizations
Isaac Arthur
Spaceships and fleets of the future may host their own unique civilizations of nomads, traveling the space lanes or venturing deep into interstellar space to colonize the galaxy or flee peril. What would such cultures be like?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q4b7VZs6Uo&t=1s
Generation Ships
Isaac Arthur
Today we will begin our look at the spaceships we might use for colonizing interstellar space in the future. In order to cover the vast distances between even the nearest stars in our galaxy within the boundaries of known physics, we need vessels able to voyage at high speeds for very long periods of time while carrying everything they need to colonize another solar system, a concept typically known as a space ark or generation ship. We will explore the challenges and options for such a vessel, as well as some alternative approaches to the problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2f0Wd3zNj0&list=PLeWrygaI275vrTTwen2oSGRNTSCenQq5-
The World, The Flesh and the Devil by J. D. Bernal, from 1929…
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.171486
It is a pity that none of the Hyperion Project generation ship designs used any of the ideas in the Isaac Arthur “Exodus Fleet” episode for propulsion: acceleration and deceleration, and that the project constraints did not seem to allow for such ideas.
And note this is happening on planet Earth, however otherwise isolated. Imagine what could go wrong in the deep depths of space…
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/harassment-at-antarctic-research-bases-could-spell-problems-for-moon-mars-outposts
It isn’t physics or technology that is holding us back from the stars…
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-quiet-demise-of-breakthrough-starshot-a-billionaires-interstellar/
Those who design interstellar vessels and avoid the realities of humanity such as funding, politics, and other aspects of our species baser natures really need to start factoring these in to their equations. Otherwise, we might as well keep on enjoying our science fiction programs and glossy PowerPoint presentations on this matter.