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Interstellar Ark
xantox writes "There are three strategies to travel 10.5 light-years from Earth to Epsilon Eridani and bring humanity into a new stellar system : 1) Wait for future discovery of Star Trek physics and go there almost instantaneously, 2) Build a relativistic rocket powered by antimatter and go there in 22 years by accelerating constantly at 1g, provided that you master stellar amounts of energy (so, nothing realistic until now), but what about 3): go there by classical means, by building a gigantic Ark of several miles in radius, propulsed by nuclear fusion and featuring artificial gravity, oceans and cities, for a travel of seven centuries — where many generations of men and women would live ? This new speculation uses some actual physics and math to figure out how far are our fantasies of space travel from their actual implementation."
I would just take billions of pill sized coctails of bacteria from all extreme regions of the earth and fire them off semi randomly throughout the galaxy, wait a billion years for them to evolve and contact us back.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
we could do that, but the odds of us being screwed over by either a gamma ray burst or some other dangerous interstellar space event would be pretty high.
but then again, the resulting mutations might come in handy.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
So, let's take a passenger manifest...
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How many human societies have survived 7 centuries unchanged?
Heck, just look at how much language has changed in the last century ...
Or imagine trying to talk to someone from the 1300s ...
Besides, how would you select the crew and avoid any more "diaper rash" candidates?
may not be all that enthuastic about having humanity brought to them.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Yeah, but then who will make sure all our phones are clean?
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Maybe Arthur C. Clark wasn't that far off...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama
I don't mean to be existential about this but why? We don't have a mission from God to spread and conquer. It seems a little strange how atheists are very keen to strike down the pointless values of religion, yet still believe in many aspects which have no basis.
What's the goal here? After billions of years the human race is all over the galaxy, few billion years later and its all over the universe. And then what? We cling on for dear life as we exploit the last few sources of energy as black holes swallow up any traces of our fantastic achievements.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
* Decode and activate appropriate chevrons on that Stargate-thingy.
VOTE!
.....might be to determine if Epsilon Eridani has any terrestrial planets to live upon. Boy would our ancestors 700 years from now be upset if they got there only to find no place to land.
adventure-today.com
How would you ever get that many people to cooperate that consistently over that long of a time period? How would you prevent the intermediate generations from feeling like they are meaningless just because they only exist to father the generations that will be able to accomplish something? The rate of clinical depression caused by that would be probably staggering. How do you prevent the development of new religions or philosophies or conspiracy theories that would hinder the progress of the voyage, or perhaps express doubts its goals? Not to mention the more mundane problems like new bacteria and viruses mutating on the tiny ecosystem and wiping out all of its occupants, and liberationists starting political revolutions (ala: we didn't choose this voyage, why should we finish it?), and psychopathic serial killers, and the question of how such a tiny economy would maintain itself (do we go communist or capitalist on this voyage)?
...En að Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað Er Nýr Dagur
Doh!
technology will progress at a faster rate than the ark does.
In 50 years time, you could probably build a spaceship that can overtake the ark go visit this star system and comeback to earth all in the same afternoon.
They will all be really bummed out when during their journey of centuries, somebody invents #1 and gets there ahead of them.
For an interesting read on what such a ship might be like, take a look at: Rendevous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. I read it not long after it came out and thoroughly enjoyed it. Highly acclaimed, too:
Option 4: We have to face the fact that we can't do it. For the forseeable future, such a trip is impractical bordering on impossible. Check back again in several centuries to see if there is any hope of this limitation being overcome ... it certainly doesn't look like it at this point in time.
it seems like it would actually be 1400 years as he's presumed constant 1G acceleration towards the destination for the whole trip. Once you got there you'd need to go into a decreasing orbit and slow down for about 700 years (assuming 1G) too!
Go catch up with Battlestar Galactica and avoid all the trouble.
It seems to me that there is a 4th solution, assuming that it is possible to build a computer powerful enough to simulate a human mind, and that it is possible to upload a human consciousness into such a structure. Sending a machine across interstellar distances is likely going to be significantly more practical than trying to transport billions of tonnes of habitat. You don't have to worry about setting up complex biospheres; all you need is a computer significantly robust to survive in interstellar space, and we have more experience in this field than in self-supporting biospheres.
Likewise, it doesn't seem like it'll be too many decades before we have the technology construct a computer powerful enough to simulate (to a reasonable degree of accuracy) the trillions of parallel interactions that occur every second in our brains. Figuring out a way of mapping neurons to 1s and 0s is likely to be a far more difficult problem, but it seems to me that this would be a relatively simple problem compared to creating some manner of ark-ship. Research into this is likely to be relatively inexpensive by comparison as well, as we could start by mapping brain structures of simpler animals (such as Lobsters), and then work our way up.
I suspect that when humanity does visit the stars, it'll be as lumps of silicon (or some more exotic material) strapped onto a dirty great big rocket. Ships that lug their own biosphere around with them are just too costly and complex by comparison.
The engineering and logistical problems of sending a gazillion tons
of materials , the labor, etc,. would not be feasible.
Water - several million tons of salt-free water for the construction
Water - ditto for the colonists
Engines, superstructure and ALL they entail - Trillions of dollars
Sheilding - Several trillion more
Life support - this has not been fixed - see ISS
Get a grip. Dream on, but get a grip.
Why not all three?
Start out with the generational ship. Resupply them with constant acceleration anti-matter probes.
Then we'll pick everyone up in a few hundred years and carry them the rest of the way with warp drive.
The Star Seekers... My 4th grade teacher read it to us as a class and I remember it clearly to this day. It's about the exact same space ark concept...
It will come about! It is the Will of Jordan! The Ship is all! Anyone who says otherwise will be fed into the Matter Converter.
I feel like death on a soda cracker.
The possibilities of what'll happen have been explored countless times. One of the most recent with most vivid possibility comes from (of all sources) a computer game. Anyone remembers Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri?
Now, where did I put my CD..
They even spin-off a few novels out of it..
Will sys-admin for food
A robot-piloted ship with the crew held in suspended-animation or some kind of a stasis field until vessel arrived at the target star. That is preferable to a generation ship, in that (assuming by some miracle I got to be a crewmember on such a vessel) I would actually be alive when the ship reached its destination, rather that hoping that my great-great-great-great-whatever-grandkids make it there. You know, kind of like the Botany Bay, where Khan and his friends were stored fish-stick fashion until Kirk & Co. foolishly thawed them out.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
From the article:
...
This prospect undoubtedly constitutes the most immediate psychological brake, but not inevitably the deepest, that every normally made human being will oppose first of all to the idea of a life in the Ark.
Well, maybe if there was free broadband
Park pick-up in field. Wave down spacecraft. Enjoy complimentary anal probe. Take hot bath. Hibernate, dreaming of naked dancing Bollywood starlets. Arrive at third planet of Epsilon Eridani system to discover George Bush is dictator of the world. Rod Serling voice-over and out.
Instead of building one large ark and setting up for one large catastrophic failure, build lots of smaller arks that can fly in formation. If one runs into an asteroid or breaks down, the rest will be OK. It may even be possible to allow for transportation between the different arks.
m0nstr42.blogspot.com
Why not wait a while? In the past 100 years, there have been more technological breakthroughs than it pretty much all of human history before that. Isn't it likely that in the next 100 years we'll find a way to get us that far in a lot less than 700 years? I mean, even if we knocked it down to only 100 years, we'd have people there 500 years faster. Hell, they'd probably be stopping off at the "ark" to pick people up and take them the rest of the way.
As well as we might be able to determine if planets have atmospheres, lands and oceans in the next few decades, we don't know that they'll be habitable. What if we get there and there's something wrong with the soil that makes planting food impossible? The ark's survivors won't ever be able to live beyond the means of what they can grow on the ark. In the end, we need a way to get people there fast enough that if the first choice turns out to not be habitable for some reason, they can go somewhere else. I dunno about you, but after 700 years of traveling, if I was in the generation arriving to find a planet I couldn't live on, I'd probably be seriously bummed!
I'm all for moving us out to interstellar distances, but I don't think we really need to do it today. On top of which, with the rate that technology is advancing, by the time such a stupendous project were completed, we'd probably have already come up with a way to cut the trip in half.
If you have the tech and money to build something like an O'Neill structure, you don't need to leave the solar system for thousands of years...
The article states "The only theoretical limit is the acceleration, which should be kept within physiologically acceptable limits for a human, that is to 1 g or 9,81 m/s", which is not quite true. Jet fighter pilots have to take up to nine G during dog-fights (more than nine G leads to black outs), which is one of the reasons why on the long run the jet fighter pilot will become obsolete, since UAV's can handle more. The nine G figure is unrealistically high, but there are no reasons to assume you can't have a realitivistic rocket that starts out with six G for a short while and then drops its acceleration off to about two G. Combine this with some form of suspended animation, which we can already do for mice and all of a sudden the relativistic rocket becomes less far out.
-- Spelling and grammar errors tend to be a sign of erroneous thinking.
Where do I sign up?
"Luck is a tag given by the mediocre to account for the accomplishments of genius." -Heinlein
The problem is that we assume that our children will do what we did... and they do in fact have their own free will... it is not the technology that will fail this scenario, people will fail.
>> What's the goal here?
... there was too much crap imposed on them by the rest of society.
The goal here is the same as the one which made the Pilgrims leave the old world on the Mayflower
Of course, after a few hundred years, that same crap appeared in the new world. That's life.
And that's precisely why this kind of voyage to pastures new must be repeated again and again.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
generational trips can't work due to the danger of large radiation bursts and micro metero's. it's dangerous to spend months in space let alone your entire life. the obvious answer is to spend less time reaching your destination, and for that we need another break through in propolsion to happen.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Remains "Science Fiction", just like the first two ideas...
For a total of zero currently possible strategies proposed.
Spool up the FTL Drive; begin jump-prep. Let's hope we don't get too close to the atmosphere, else we might fall like a rock.
Informatus Technologicus
I doubt we would evolve much being trapped on a ship like that.
Perhaps our grey matter might, since there woudlnt be much to do but think. ( and play service tech ) but i dont see much real evolution.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I seem to recall an episode where a civilization was loaded into a large hollow asteroid and hurled into space. Yes, this was it.
I think I've read a number of stories with similar plot, actually. Not that that's a bad thing, just thought I'd point out that it's not an "original" idea. Gotta love sci-fi. =)
Don Head
UNIX/Linux Administrator
Send a gigantic Ark full of robots instead ..
--
CmdrTaco: my posts are stuck in pending for days now.
davecb5620@gmail.com
In my mind, option #4 is "Evolve humans so that interstellar travel is easy". That might mean long lives, smaller space-adapted bodies, or purely digital beings, transmitted via a series of relays placed by robotic probes.
Travel over a period of 700 years with 1000 or so people introduces a massive risk in that we have no way to assure that the culture of such a small population in isolation could survive. If they did survive, how much has society changed in the past 700 years? With only one ship, all our eggs are in one basket, so to speak. Instead, it makes more sense to send small ships laden with thousands of freeze-dried gametes, thaw them out, and nurture the embryos to maturity.
The ship would leave with the sperm and eggs of many carefully selected individuals suitably freeze dried. The small ship would require much less energy and the cold of interstellar space would keep the embryos nicely preserved. Upon locating a suitable planet, the onboard intelligence would thaw and combine the gametes and voila - people. Managed by the computer and residing on the planet, the population would grow and by adolesence start to multiply. The accumulated knowlege of humanity would accompany them and they would use it as a means to get themselves started.
In fact, since the cargo is light, a mother ship could release one of 100 individual 1000 embryo capsules while passing apparently suitable worlds and continue on to others. That way, the survival of at least a few groups would be more likely.
Of course, the people already on the planet might not like the goings-on but that would be a problem in any case. The humans might populate their zoos, become slaves, become worshiped, or maybe we don't drop people on planets with really intelligent life. Humans seem to like to be at the top of their local pyramid. It is up to our sci-fi writers to explore and filter the possibilities and guide the implementaiton.
If each colony carries the information to construct and launch a ship, the universe would be ours rather quickly, even if only 10% of each generation of colonies survived.
One other advantage to this plan. The people would know whence they came, how they got there, and what their destiny was. Mystics and Philosophers would not be required in that gene pool. Of course, they might wonder where WE came from, but that is another problem.
Humans are incredibly fragile (both physically and psychologically), live short lives, and space is immense and utterly hostile.
Years ago I worked through a lot of numbers for fusion ramjets, antimatter, laser-powered sails et al.
The only interstellar travel I can see us ever doing is as frozen embryos.
Generation ships would be bloated tombs. There would be a serious shortage of funding and volunteers. People won't consign themselves to die without reaching a destination, after years spent inhaling each other's BO.
Self-reproducing intelligent robots, OTOH, could crawl along between the stars at 1% c happily. 1,000 years of travel is nothing to something that can turn itself off and then back on.We could travel with them, in the aformentioned frozen embryo form, to be gestated in artifical wombs on arrival.
Interstellar ships will never be built by humans. No return on investment and no glory in a lifetime = no deal. Self-reproducing robots are the way to go.
Azural - instrumentals
.. and now I'll reply to my own post with more information.
Per this nice page:
The idea of a multi-generational ship or "interstellar ark" is an old one that was proposed in an unpublished paper by Robert Goddard in 1918. Goddard's fellow rocket pioneers Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and J. D. Bernal also considered the idea in the 1920s. Olaf Stapledon and Don Wilcox wrote stories about the idea in the 1940s, and Robert Heinlein originated the notion that inhabitants might forget they were on a ship in his book Orphans of the Sky. Nevertheless, considering the energy, ecology, and life support needs such a ship would require, the interstellar ark is a highly unlikely prospect.
Don Head
UNIX/Linux Administrator
Most stories solve this by having a priesthood ruling the people. Run by scientists or a AI. Ah, the eternal optimism of fiction!
Religion has rarely been the driving force behind great exploration; the domain of religion is merely to conquer and kill after other people have made the discovery.
In any case, the decision to do this won't be based on some grand design for the human race; rather, humans will naturally leave earth when it becomes feasible to do so at reasonable cost. If we survive as a technological society, I'd say that's somewhere in the next 500-1000 years.
Provided, of course, religions don't cause a second dark ages first. Without the Vatican, the industrial revolution might well have happened 1000 years ago.
My company doesn't speak for me, nor do I speak for my company.
dude... that's a lot of inbreeding.
Brian Aldiss Non-Stop - this is a very good book describing a possible progression of events on a gigantic spaceship taking a colony to some far away solar system. Let's just say that it didn't go too well.
You can't handle the truth.
Trouble is, if you have the technology to build a generation ship, then you also have the technology to build indefinitely sustainable space colonies and park them in more convenient locations with all the services (solar energy) and convinient for the shops (asteroids and comets) - solving the "population pressure" incentive for space colonization.
Also, if you have the "long view" needed to see your great^N grandchildren walk on another planet, you can probably settle for your great^N grandchildren receiving the data from a robot probe and/or - as the first post suggested - fire off Earth's DNA into space.
This is the flaw in the whole Fermi Paradox "where are the aliens?" argument: it assumes that (a) interstellar travel is feasible and (b) a critical mass of alien races share our "because its there" monkey curiosity and would make the effort with no practical motive.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Or we can wait for a planet that gets so addicted to people it tracks them down... http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?350901
[-- accountant of the noosphere --]
Without some means of sending a probe will in advance of our colonization efforts we could find a system full of gas giants like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, dessicated balls of rock like Mars, acidic pressure cookers like Venus or sterilized, blasted hot rocks like Mercury. Moving any body at near-relativistic velocities means that it won't turn worth a damn. Once you have completed most of your acceleration on the way to the target system you are pretty much committed to that destination. If it ends up being without planets friendly to our form of biological life you may end up with a space based colony, eking out it's existence among the asteroids or small moons of that system. This is not a viable, long term colony unless we have a mastery of living in space and in low gravity environments. Before we send colonists on what is essentially a one way trip, we should try to establish a few long term, self supporting colonies in our asteroid belt. This would be an ideal place to perfect the colonization efforts that may greet our colonists in another system.
Tisha Hayes
The lifestyle of hunter gatherers is not necessarily nasty, brutish and short. (I nearly wrote "British" there - Freudian slip.) Why is it that, when so many people get money, they want to spend it on living like hunter gatherers and nomads? Why do civilised people buy cars, and motorhomes, and boats, hunting licences, fishing gear? Why don't they want to spend their lives in cubicle farms before going home to be sold rubbish products on television?
The "Civilisation" that so many people seem to want to export to the rest of the Solar System and beyond is a pretty poor thing.
As a matter of fact this was very effectively satirised by C S Lewis long ago in his book "Out of the Silent Planet", and the likes of Stephen Hawking have never come up with any kind of rebuttal. If Hawking was not so badly disabled, it would be tempting to draw out the parallels between Lewis's scientist who wants to populate the Universe with people like him, and Hawking himself. As it is, Hawking can be excused his views on the grounds of the limitations he has to live with every day. But other proponents of the spread around the Universe of WASPs have fewer excuses.
Pining for the fjords
Instead of building this huge arc and going there using fusion power (fusion reactors are not small or lightweight), you would build a large space based mass driver (nanotechnology cares significantly less about high-g accelerations than human bodies) and launch a carrier at 0.1c or 0.5c (increasing v if you are willing to expend the energy, decreasing v depending upon the mass required for shields to defend against damage caused by encountering interstellar dust at high velocities). The carrier contains either its own mass driver or moderately large chemical rockets that launch the probe in the opposite direction at -0.9999... * v of the carrier entering the system so as to result in the probe having a net velocity that will result in its capture by the gravity of the destination system. The first probe can then go about constructing an reverse mass driver so future probes can be decelerated using power from the destination system (allowing most of the subsequent mass transfered to be "information content" rather than power systems or velocity control systems [2]).
If most of humanity hasn't undergone mind uploading several hundred years from now I'd be very surprised. So those early pioneers who decided on the "ark" approach are going to very surprised as they approach the destination system and discover that it has been converted into a Matrioshka Brain [3] and there is nothing left to explore or colonize [4,5].
No matter *how* pessimistic you are about molecular nanotechology developing in the next two decades -- you have to make a *very* strong argument that it will not be developed over the next fifty years [6]. So any future planning scenarios involving 100+ year time frames should be left as virtual reality exercises.
Well, according to wikipedia there is at least one planet of the size of Jupiter. I think it is pretty safe to assume, there are at least some ice-covered satellites, but it is not a very good place to search for terrestrial planets because of the low level of heavy metals in the Epsilon Eridani atmosphere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epsilon_Eridani
The lag would be pretty bad after you are 10 light years away.
In order for us to actually do something like this, we'd have to get past all the dogma involved in the creation and taking of human lives. Since you are dealing with severely limited resources within a highly confined area, we would need to regularly sheer our numbers down, "Logan's Run" style. Anyone on this ark would have to agree to be put to death once they've become unable to contribute into the community by as much as they take away from it. This means all severely disabled, physically/mentally handicapped, or just plain lazy people would have to be destroyed and recycled back into the community ecosystem, regardless of their age or status among the community itself. It would be the ultimate in "zero-tolerance" policy, with sentencing issued and carried out with extreme prejudice. It would require death squads equal to the Nazis during WWII... only done out of necessity, rather than hatred. (Every second a useless individual mooches off the community, the less resources the contributing members of the community have to survive on.)
The concept of family would be a thing of the past, replaced with child farming. There would be no relationships between anyone outside of basic affection. Sex itself would be discouraged or considered a capital offense, as the act itself would waste precious resources. Instead all children would be a product of test-tube fertilization. Every member of the community would be required to submit their egg/sperm cells every few weeks to be catalogued in order to keep the gene pool as diverse as possible. After fertilization, the embryo is placed into one of several hundred women tagged as surrogate mother stock, who's sole purpose in the community is to be impregnated, gestate and give birth, not unlike a queen insect laying thousands of eggs... while the real mothers of these children are left to continue work in whatever section of the community they serve in.
These child farms then serve as large scale permanant daycare centers until the children are old enough to contribute back into the community. No child would ever know their real parents or genetic siblings to prevent familial conflicts from disrupting community contribution. Names would be assigned only as a novelty, like one does with their pets, to get around the trouble of memorizing dozens of similar sounding identification numbers.
In a lot of ways, the life style of an interstellar ark would be best visualized by watching ant or bee colonies. No one is "special"... you're simply there to plug up a particular hole in the wall where someone else inevitably failed at the task.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Instead of terraforming planets, I suggest genoforming humans, plants and animals to fit the planets.
It is a lot less time and energy consuming.
We could just fill the spacecraft with coca cola and mentos tablets, and keep popping them into a bottle every minute. I mean, that's free energy.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
In seven hundred years, we will become thoroughly acclimated to life in space. We will know how to survive there. And thrive! We will know how to find rogue bodies in space, intersteller and intrasystem, that will provide us with materials to sustain us. Our needs will be relatively simple. With fusion, we will need boron and hydrogen for the focus fusion machine. For food, we will need gas trace elements that can be gathered with a Bussard sail or some atmospheric skimming of planetary air masses....not possible in interstellar space so the sail will have to do. Away froms stars will be away from the majority of radiation, but we will have to watch out for rogues as they are a hazard as well as life giving benefits. Their matter can be broken down to soil for our hydroponics bays. Oh and yes we will have to be constantly on the alert for upstart 'religious' so they can be eliminated befor they gain a foothold, as these inevitably lead to civil strife and mutinees. Our biggest problems will be ourselves. We better take lots of Asians as they know better how to live in close quarters without killing each other. As again for acclimation, we will control our own diseases and will not be too keen on getting new ones from a new place unless there is an overpowering reason to go there. We may just become content with traveling the cosmos forever, dropping a 'colony' here and there but not polluting the 'source' with reverse biologic contamination from the new host planet until a few years go by and the planet is deemed safe. New systems may have several habitable bodies, planets and moons of planets. From above would be a good place to install huge energy mirrors and space elevators to sustain colony life until viable fusion plants could be installed from local materials. Planets without heavy metal elements needed for civilization would be forever small outposts as they will be dependant.
Again, we may really want to be forever wanderers once we are in space for a few years or generations and know how to survive there. Life will be good...and comfortable with hard work and a little luck. It is a big universe. Star systems even without habitable planets will have Oort clouds just packed with elements and minerals that we would need and could mine with minimal encumbrance from inconvenient gravity wells or infestive biota. Caution must be excersized here on the biota possibility here, as we are NOT alone in this universe. Life can survive in interplanetary space and has found to be se. We ourselves contaminated Mars with Streptococcus bacteria from one of our early insufficiently sterilized probes. NASA has admitted this. So we will have to watch what we bring aboard even in the interstellar void. Oh yes, and it will not take us seven hundred years to get to Eridani. First of all, if we can get a fusion process to accellerate us at one 'g', we could become accustomed to a little more. Just a matter of conditioning. Fusion fuels are common as boron and hydrogen is common. Just sustaining a single 'g' for two years will arrive us at lightspeed. We will find that lightspeed as a speed limit is only a fantasy, just like the old fantasy about the sound 'barrier'. The very idea that no body can have a velocity greater than 'c' is to say that it can have no relative velocity greater than 'c' with respect with any other object in the universe that is itself in motion in any relative direction. That would mean that we have an unseen connection with every place in the universe at once at every instant in every smallest particle of matter. That is preposterous! Further evidence is the fact that every astronomer taking measurements of possibly relativistic speeds lies in his report per instructions from his superiors to 'correct' all measured 'superliminal' speeds to some drastically lower velocity deemed 'acceptable by Einstein'. Even black holes have been found to emit radiation, and these by definition have escape velocities in excess of 'c'. In space we will not have the luxury of affording liars, as we will have to deal with the real universe.
I haven't seen one comment about putting a colony on the moon and then blasting it out of orbit with a nuclear waste. And that was suppose to happen 8 years ago.
If we do send an ark, and it arrives an odd 70 years later, the crew will be thoroughly pissed off. Because in the meantime, here on earth we would have invented Star Trek Physics (tm) and can get there in half an hour. So they would arrive at a fully colonised Holiday Inn Resort Planet.
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
I think if the propulsion problem can be solved it will. The real problem comes in creating machines that can continue to operate over such large spans of time. Pumps, valves even wiring and tubing don't normally last 100 years. Our computers have drastically shorter life spans. If the crew are awake, a massive maintenance effort would be required as things age. The amount of replacement parts would be staggering. If the crew is in some form of hibernation, then the problem is much worse. Perhaps rotational shifts of 5 years awake on a maintenance crew. The amount of things that can fail versus what can practically be carried might make the whole effort unfeesible.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
They should do it BSG style and have hundreds of ships with a working government and a military and when the second generation of crew were born the first should tell them that they were the last humans left since earth was destroyed. But we would be smart and program into the computer a hidden process that would keep sending progress reports back to earth.
Unless you want to be a mother.
But you can get to Epsilon Eridani in about a century by the following method proposed by Robert L. Forward:
That sounds a little far out, but what about bringing a frozen embryos and sperm and then getting a robot to fertilize the embryos once the destination is reached. There would have to be some substitute for the womb, of course. And there would need to be robots that can take care of the children, teach then, etc.
It is probably not far off from what we could do now if we really wanted to.
If Im going to travel into Deep Space on neuclear reactor I would want to know what operatin system it would be running
That's one alternative.
Another has been kicking around the theoretical star-travel circles for a while now: Make a VERY small (1Kg) instrument package, put a sail on it, then fire some big lasers at it. For the cost of the ark mentioned in the article you could set up the infrastructure to send out a lot of these packages at a sizable fraction of the speed of light. You'd be able to get decent data about planets in the Epsilon Eridani system within a century; assuming the reports were positive, THEN you'd send out the ark.
If we can build an Ark with a self-contained ecosystem, artificial gravity, etc etc... why send it to another solar system? It seems like a far better use of the resources to put it in orbit around Earth, or another planet in OUR solar system.
If anything goes wrong, it's possible to get things fixed in a somewhat reasonable amount of time. You are also staying near a source of power (the Sun), and aren't throwing the dice by risking all those lives and all that technological investment compared to travel between stars.
The "Ark" would thus be put to practical use, while we wait for propulsion technology to mature. Let's say we send the Ark, and it will take like 100 years to get there. What if we have a breakthrough 30 or 40 years after it leaves? What do you do then? Let them keep going, and meet them at their destination with a fully built settlement?
After billions of years the human race is all over the galaxy, few billion years later and its all over the universe. And then what? We cling on for dear life as we exploit the last few sources of energy as black holes swallow up any traces of our fantastic achievements. We can exploit the fact that there is an imbalance between matter and anti-matter in our universe, with matter totally dominating. Just as you can flip a Flatland quarter from heads to tails by a 180 degree rotation through the third dimension, you can flip a left shoe into a right shoe by a 180 degree rotation through the fourth dimension, and every particle in that rotated shoe will have opposite spin and charge...in other words, it will be an antimatter shoe. Put the two shoes together in a closet and you'll release far more energy than it took to do the flip trick. This can give us another few billion years. Of course, the result will eventually be a universe where matter and anti-matter are thoroughly mixed, and if you grab any quantity and try your flip trick the result will be indistinguishable from what you started with. But this will give us the time we need to think of something else.
"Today, however, there is little to no unexplored-untamed areas available. Young men particularly have no outlet for their wanderlust."
So what places have these "young men" wandered to? Africa? Russia? New Zealand? To my knowledge, most of you just sit on a sofa playing XBOX.
And that's also a very sexist comment.
Build a relativistic rocket powered by antimatter and go there in 22 years by accelerating constantly at 1g, provided that you master stellar amounts of energy (so, nothing realistic until now)
Not realistic at all. Do the calculations - 1g acceleration for 22 years requires *much* more antimatter than the ship has matter.
For those of us computer addicted, there is also a decent PC computer game about it, at least if a few math type puzzles don't put you off.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
Apparently, wikipedia doesn't like trailing slashes at the end of URLs. Try: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphans_of_the_Sky.
Hey, TFA may go deeper into the math, but the generation ship is one of the oldest premises in science fiction.
rj
Yes, there are sects in Islam that are absurd and want to "return" to some nonexistent past, but how is that not true of Christians or other religions as well?
We could send gigantic space telescopes. As soon as we detect a gas giant there, we know it will get some place for a stable orbit. After that it may of may not detect a telluric body (Earth-like planet) but once there it will help us a lot. It won't be far enough to see stuff that local space scopes won't see but it will be far enough to use parallax and find accurate distances of the stuff outhere.
Why are we bothering to leave the solar system, anyways? We've already scouted large chunks of the solar system, and we're smart enough to build artificial environments that would keep us nicely in many places.
I'm all for waiting for the human race to develop FTL, AND WE WILL, and exploiting the resources of this solar system. I want to see orbital factories, solar power satellites, and other developments which will actually benefit us on this planet. My great-grandchildren can go to Tau Ceti and Sirius Alpha C. I'm happy to see technology put to work improving life on this planet.
I believe that people who are absolutely committed to spreading humanity elsewhere are afraid that there is no way to stop us from polluting or nuking ourselves out of a planet. If that's the case, is our race really worth saving?
You can do all the observations you want from many light years away, but until you actually get there, you won't know if it will be able to sustain life.
What if "we" get there, and it won't support life? Will they then have to do a "Battlestar Galactica" turn around and try to make their way home?
Wasn't there a movie some time ago about this very thing?
A group was sent into space with everything they would need to be "self replicating" until they reached the destination...but as time went on, technology got better and later travelers arrived at the destination first...then when the first "ark" of people arrived they found a fully developed civilization that had meen there for at least a hundred years...
Wouldn't it be better to just wait?
--E--
The concept of using an ark to get to the stars is almost as old as science fiction. The technology has been evaluated in depth for many decades.
...but we need similar advances like those in Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs books. Digitise minds, have artificial bodies for these minds, build ark, let it travel few hundred years on autopilot and then let it resurrect us by uploading digitised minds to artificial bodies at the destination. :)
A retired "rocket scientist" and sometime sci fi writer who is a regular at an annual convention we attend recommends beaming the energy.
.62 light speed, he thinks the gain in reduced weight exceeds the loss in beaming the energy.
Sure, you're talking about hitting a moving target light years away. But you are also probably talking about a civilization that has colonized the inner planets and has the means in place to convert large chunks of matter into energy. Because it'll need it. To maintain the sweet spot of about
Comments?
Why is there this fasiniation of putting people in such expensive high risk environments. If you where a gamer and had to concure a distant planet the fastest way. Then try robotics, no need for water and never lazy and dont need sleep. Our civilization is much closer in technology to create something like that.
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
We don't even have to wait that long. All we need to do is build a space telescope with sufficient resolving power - which is simply a function of size (and not even continuous size, necessarily... see the various multi mirror / multi antenna designs we use now) and precision - and we can look and see what the conditions were ten years ago (for D=10 LY) and then decide if we want to send anything at all. No need to launch anything out of the solar system; the information has been coming our way all along. We're just not (yet) capable of resolving it, but it doesn't even depend on new technology - just lots of materials, and space-based manufacturing to make it practical. Even if something is 500 LY away, we can still see what was happening 500 years ago. Much faster turnaround than the fastest light-sail technology could provide, which is transit time + message back time - at least twice as long. And of course it would benefit us in many ways to build such telescopes.
It seems to me that the optimum method would be to start an automated system that just keeps making the telescope bigger using materials culled from asteroids, comets and so forth. The longer it runs, the more detail we cold resolve. Why ever turn such a system off?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
a) Find a better/cheaper way into space than chemical rockets. Space elevator / maglev launch system / whatever. As long as it doesn't involve strapping huge amounts of volatile chemicals to our payload.
b) Colonize some of the non-Earth objects in out own solar system to gain insights into how to live best on asteroids (plents of 'em out there, a dime a dozen), rocky worlds that need major terraforming (Venus/Mars), moons of gas giants, and dwarf planets. The chances of our would-be interstellar colonists finding any of the above at their destination are almost infinitely higher then the chance of finding another Earth. And, hey, there's plenty of real estate in our own solar system to spread to. One step at a time - not colonizing our solar system before heading to another would be like Columbus trying to get to the moon instead of sailing west.
c) Manage to send an unmanned probe to another star system, to get the kinks in the propulsion/astronavigation/etc systems worked out.
d) Get energy-positive fusion working. Seriously. Without it, doing anything major outside the orbit of Mars is going to be a royal pain in the ass.
Also, we should not:
a) Totally trash Earth before we're ready to haul our collective asses to some other place. Once we need to spend the majority of our resources on just surviving, our chances of getting to anywhere outside our solar system are about as good as finding an ice cube on Venus.
b) Get wiped out or wipe ourselves out.
I'm not sure where you get 1400 years, but here's the real scoop: to travel 10.5 light years, accelerating for the first half of the trip and decelerating for the second half, it would take less than 5 years - for the person actually on the rocket. Meanwhile, a little over 12 years would have passed on Earth.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
It seems to me that the optimum method would be to start an automated system that just keeps making the telescope bigger using materials culled from asteroids, comets and so forth. The longer it runs, the more detail we cold resolve. Why ever turn such a system off?
do you really want that big of a magnifying lens to exist? let alone have it's focal point you planet?
Are we trying to figure out what the ants feel just before they get fried?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
A generational ship is not really feasible in my opinion until we have the knowledge necessary to engineer a strain of the human species for space travel, as well as engineered for the target destination. The cost savings would be immense and chances of success much greater.
Does anyone think we can afford that? The U.S.'s manned space and Moon/Mars initiative is strangling NASA and forcing it to shut down many of its science programs (here, here, here, here, here). It hasn't even started to get into the real spending for a Moon mission, let alone a Mars mission.
An interstellar mission would cost orders of magnitude more than an interplanetary mission. Who would ever fund it? Even an international collaboration would be hard pressed to put together much more than the currently planned Mars mission. And governments wouldn't be too keen to start a mission that can outlive entire nations before we hear the results.
"Frontier spirit" just doesn't cut it against those scales of money and time.
The only thing that likely could spur a manned interstellar mission, barring drastic improvements in technology, is the impending destruction of human civilization — and who would see that coming in time, with enough certainty, to spur the development of a crash program like that? (Especially given the wars likely to ensue if people are that sure of the annihilation of the human race.)
No, I don't see it happening unless we get much, much better technology. It costs enough just to lift things off Earth, let alone build and launch a working intergenerational starship. (The economics of space development given launch costs and the absence of space industry is an extra can of worms... and I am also not economically optimistic of the development of orbital factories or space elevators or the like.)
The Starlost http://imdb.com/title/tt0069638/
A group of humans must find a way to save a vast space ship from destruction.
OK folks, we've all seen this before. Arthur C. Clarke used the very same premise for his notion of interstellar travel when he detailed the craft depicted in his popular Rama series: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama Unfortunately, not everyone cooperates over a span of several centuries, so this doesn't sound likely. Personally, I can;t even handle a weekend at my parents... ;)
This is good material for a reality show - at least some TV producer will think so. As media conglomerates get more powerful, eventually they will have enough money to try a space ark purely for entertainment value. Continual broadcasting will be ensured by a policy of "if you turn off the cameras, we turn off the laser / pellet stream".
from Douglas Adams Restaurant at the End of the Universe (also part of the TV series"Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". That ship included people with the most useless jobs such as telephone sanitizers, hair dressers and realtors.
Of course, your description also fits the planet Earth.
http://www.snowcrest.net/fox/star.html
/. automatic anonymous comment demoting system.
If you're not reading this, that's because of
Eugenics suck.
Why ever turn such a system off?
That will be answered by our returning descendents when all they find is one big telescope floating in the space that used to be our solar system.
man, I feel like mold.
All I can say is "Thank God for the vastness of space".
It's the only thing that keeps us from destroying every other garden spot in the universe.
I firmly believe that it's not accidental that the technology needed to travel great distances is not attainable in the same era that nuclear and biological weapons were invented.
I have no doubt that we would bring massive destruction to any new planet, regardless of our good intentions.
Maybe in another few thousand year we'll begin to be ready.
Never, gonna, happen.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
Not that they stand a chance. 2+ people in a box for 700 years, yeah, that will get bloody sooner or later. But beyond that, last I checked, we don't have fusion down. Last I checked, we just recently got America to agree to caugh up a check for the remainder of ITER, which won't produce energy, only validate models. So in short we don't have fusion, and so this is mute. I'm surpised noone else noticed this little problem. Now IF we overcome that however, (maybe ITER will rock, who knows?) then we're set. Because really, fusion reactors, they're really pretty simple. Not like building a magnetic plasma confining device that operates without a glitch for 700 years under heavy load will be a technical challenge, puh-shaw!. I mean, the human race is full of examples of machines that have worked for 700 +years! Look at the pyramids! they're still, triangular. Or the.. Well, it doesnt matter, we can do it, 700 years isn't that bad! Or we could sit down, STFU, and try fixing a real problem on the ground first. How about a stable society that can sustain intself without accelerating rapid expansion, just one, any of them. We have yet to do it. Right now, relativity protects the universe from germs like us, we process energy and raw materials so fast, that concerns about watching the universe fizzle are unfounded. We'll process the last of the stars down for fuel for SUV's and starbucks cups long before the black holes get them, c'mon!
For a good I.F. version fromthe late great Infocom
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
This is a technologically lousy solution, even considering the 'classical' case. I wrote an article a while back on a FAR better, obvious approach on usenet. Will link if anyone is interested.
.9c, because beyond that blue shifted photons would start to destroy any conceivable spacecraft.
Essentially, a much better approach is to leave one's entire engine behind and electromagnetically accelerate 'smart pebbles', pieces of matter with enough nanoscale smarts and nanoscale engines to adjust their course slightly. These pebbles would enter a long ring of magnets in the spacecraft's engine, be deaccelerated to rest relative to the spacecraft with their energy stored in accumulators. This energy would then be used the accelerate the pebbles the opposite direction, doubling the momentum transfered.
Advantages - no rocket equation, you do not carry fuel with you
- far more efficient than a laser sail because the spacecraft has a MUCH narrower cross section (a few square meters) and most of the pebbles make it, instead of wasting their energy.
For deacceleration you throw away half the spacecraft and have it fling back the pebbles.
Top speed would be a target of about
You don't carry human crew, but self replicating machines. Quantum teleportation (a practical technique, demonstrated in the lab) would be used to transmit the key memory state molecules of a human brain.
Suppose a ship travels for seven centuries, you can expect about 30 generations of people to be born in that time. Apparently, kids today are using text messaging abbreviations in their school papers, and the teachers have a hard time understanding them.
Will the people on earth be able to decipher a message sent by the travelers by the time they get to where they were going? If we desire to ever become an interstellar civilization, I think spelling and grammar nazis will have an important role to play.
Lets start loading up the animals, two by two.
"I'll see you next time." - LeVar Burton
Man. you have issues. Seek medical advice. Fast.
Your ad could be here!
What would it matter if we screwed up some sterile rock somewhere else in space?
Now, if we screwed up a planet that had indigenous life, then it'd be bad, but if we terraform a sterile planet and colonize it, and screw it up, I see no reason to feel sorry about the planet.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Absolutely correct. There's enough material in our solar system to support hundreds of trillions of human beings. Thinking about sending giant arks to other star systems over several hundred years does seem to be putting the cart before the horse.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Man. you have issues. Seek medical advice. Fast.
Seek medical advice for what?
For having seen a lifetime of man's stupidity, cruelty and disregard for every living entity on the planet, including all the animals and other humans?
For knowing that in less than a couple of hundred years man has dumped so much CO2 into the atmosphere that we have brought the planet past the tipping point and will not be able to stop catestrophic climate changes and mass extinctions in the near future?
Colonizing uninhabited worlds is OK with me, but I would have deep misgivings about letting humans set foot on another unspoiled planet similar to Earth. If we want a nice place to live, we should fix the one we have right here.
The best self-loathing post for today!
damaged by dogma
By the point in time in which travel of this type is plausible, don't you think lifespans would be longer? not 750 years longer... but overcrowding might be an issue. and what about suspended animation?
For some reason this kinda reminds me of Battle Angle Alita.
Especialy the new ones coming out. Check it out
Money is the root of all evil?
but I sort of enjoy the idea of travelling to the stars in a vorlonesque mutant space potato turned into Rama. You could even eat it on the inside, as long as you don't stick your fork all the way through into the hard vacuum outside!
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
Does anybody else find the article difficult to read? Towards the end it really starts to degenerate into a Babelfish-like mix of French and English.
That's got to be the crappiest return on investment for a Berserker scenario ever. If you get wiped out by hyper-intelligent super-efficient warlike AIs you can console yourself that at least you just lost out to something more advanced on the galactic level food chain. But being annihilated by a badly programmed telescope construction project has got to rank up there in patheticness with having your planet demolished to make room for a hyperspace bypass.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
To build an ark and fly 10.5 lightyears with it is not an easy task. Right now we have problems sending people to Mars, due to radiation problems, cooling problems etc. I've read an article about required technologies for a Mars trip in the German version of the Scientific American (Spektrum der Wissenschaft) . They discussed several techniques for the shielding. None of them was really applicable. The energy supply is also a big problem. You cannot use nuclear fission (or fusion if it will work some day) because they produce heat. Heat, in space, can only be radiated. So a classic heat sink will not work, as there is no air which can mode the heat away. Every quantum of energy, produced on such ark must be radiated. This is quite tricky. Nowadays satellites are low power systems, which have to radiate only small amounts of energy. Therefore simple foil-based emitters are enough.
The next problem is. To get everything up in space. This is a very energy intensive task. As the ark must be really big. Bigger than a pleasure cruiser. Far bigger. Beside the cost, this will have a significant impact on the ecosystem on earth.
The last big problem is the life support. Projects like Earth II failed tragically. So there is work to do on this end also.
To sum it up. We need some real technological advances before we can start to build the ark. And one is to implement a working energy support for this space ship (earth), which works and cooperates with the life support system. Also we have a resource problem in other areas as well. So this has to be solved too.
This could lead to low power technology, which would at least solve problem one of the ark.
Sending such huge ark does not make sense. Realistically (unless some magic drive gets invented) it cheaper and more reliable to send some ship filled with lots of sperm and eggs. When it arrives to its destination , some automated womb factory will start producing babies in batches of say 100. These newborns will be raised by robots that behave more or less like people. In addition babies can be fed with soap operas, movies etc so that are not complete weirdos. You need some gravity for raising kids but it can be achieved by either landing the factory on some planed or spinning it. In the later case you dont really need big volume of habitable space because there would be planets around where these first guys can travel to take a brake. The advantages of this approach is that you need much smaller ship and that during the coasting stage very few systems will be on (pretty much none, just a timer to fire an engine at the right moment). Eggs and sperm must be kept at subfreezing temperature anyway. So the only technical problem would be is awakening all systems after say 1000 years of inactivity. It is difficult but not impossible. The disadvantage is that the first batch of babies would have to grow without contacts with grownups. You can get around this by loading up ships with educational movies (carefully selected by scientist) and life like robots that would be able to emulate humans to some extent (AI is bad at the moment but i believe it will become better). More important is that later generations would become more and more normal. Of course the people of a new colony around some other star will be different but they will be humans to some extent anyway. It is not even clear who would be more different from us a society of people that lived in a closed space for 1000 years or a bunch of babies raised by machines but infused with our current culture. To select educational programs it is even possible to do experiments in solar system by starting baby factory on a moon and making experimental babies believe that they are alone. It is cruel but universe is not a nice place. There is no way humans can travel through space unchanged. I believe the guy who will colonize another planets are going to be very different from us psychologically and probably physically.
It is better not to attempt anything significant with a nation full of whiny obstructionists. Wait a few years and somebody with a WILL will pick up the torch we've dropped. It is too late for us.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Come on, Mars has more than enough moons; nobody would miss Phobos if we were to carve it out and turn it into a giant colony ship...
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Any robut smart enough to rear children is simply going to refuse to do so.
"He's using a quantum encryption scheme! That'll take hours to break!"
by building a gigantic Ark of several miles in radius
You're supposed to measure in cubits, you damned heathen!
Table-ized A.I.
Read The Songs of Distant Earth, by Authur C. Clarke. Though the book is more about what happens when a fast ship from Earth finally visits a "grown" colony such as this one, it is one of my favorite sci-fi books.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Why would you make the focal point the planet, get all that atmosphere involved? I mean, for normal operations? The focal point would be way out in space, I would think. And if a significant portion of the system lost focus on the sensor array, one could certainly disable - or destroy - the system. Such a thing would be pretty fragile, really.
Weapons use would be something to consider, but I don't think it is a critical flaw in the idea. Most people would hesitate at frying the planet. That's why we didn't nuke the caves in Afghanistan; we don't even like the idea of frying a little chunk of the planet, even when it would be really, really convenient and the objections are more about hysteria than practical issues.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
FTA "It is not indeed necessary to find a livable planet but simply a system including a star of a spectral type not very far away from the solar type (K, G or F) and abundance of small bodies. Of course, the presence of a planet offering a practicable surface, of Martian type for example would be very appreciable."
so... if this "ARK" really just needs to find a sun like ours - well hot damn there's one right here!
What we should probably do is build an ark and put into stationary orbit around the sun on the same path as earth. Maybe practice maintaining one for a few hundred years first before shooting one off into the interstellar void.
Your special pleading is based on a science fiction view of reality. "Scouts...explorers..colonies". You may not have noticed that we can currently just about put reasonable unmanned probes on the nearest planet with an atmosphere that is not too hot. The conceptual jump from where we are to where you fantasise about is being is literally astronomical. You make so many US-geek-male assumptions in your post (good for mod points though) that it might do you good to read some of the history of your own country, including the truth about what happened in the Westward expansion, and not the sanitised version you get in school either. (A subject which interests me because my family tree includes people who trekked with Brigham Young.)
Pining for the fjords
What would it matter if we screwed up some sterile rock somewhere else in space?
That's what they once said about the "vast" United States.
Anyhow, any place worth our time probably has microbes on it already, creating a big philosophical and biological dilema. We may have no immunity from them, and visa versa.
Table-ized A.I.
I would think a better method would be either Hibernation or After creating sufficient AI and assorted technologies, have the ship grow some humans in artifical wombs startin 30 years from arrival. Seems a lot easier than trying to take an entire biosphere.
What Daetrin said, plus, if the system is set up to mine asteroids in zero-G, that's entirely a different capability than being able to mine in a gravity well such as earth's, or even the moon's. Take an entirely different set of lifting capacities, which, at least at this point in our sciences, don't come without an energy cost that one would have a heck of a time paying from, for instance, the asteroid belt.
Though I do see some humor in our epitaph as a species being "Our Telescope Ate Us" rather than "We Blew Ourselves Up."
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Didn't you watch "Star Trek: The Motion Picture"? It would just come back and try to kill us all.
1. Stop all wars.
2. Stop all productions of weapons.
3. Destroy all stockpiles of weapons.
4. Abandon armies and navies.
5. Tax the huge profits of banks and corporations.
6. Limit the production of consumer products (there is no need for 2,000 kinds of chocolates to exist, for example).
7. Abandon the huge government institutions which spent millions of dollars each year (in meetings and trips) in favor of small organizational units, one for each task.
8. Use alternate sources of energy.
With the huge amount of money gathered (we are talking about more than 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 dollars per year), it would be quite easy to built not only one ark, but several of them.
But for this to happen, we need to set aside our differences and co-operate. Is it sooo important to enforce our beliefs in other countries? isn't it more important to colonize space?
The United States wasn't a sterile rock.
Divide the crew's genome into two inbred groups, isolated from each other by killer robots and implanted superstitions. Each leads an ignorant agrarian life with an inbred low IQ. For arrival, the computer has the two populations interbreed and hybrid vigor produces an intelligent generation which will crawl over themselves to reach the teaching machines.
Isolated farming villages where nobody asks awkward questions can be stable for centuries. Social control is tight and effective.
Vinge's idea is a lot better. The self-repairing computer carries easily freezable cargo. It's supposed to have a complete university and trade school worth of teaching material, but even if it loses that to unanticipated memory rot it still has an amergency backup ROM that says "mix and wait nine months".
Numerous occurence of such themes in the science fiction.
...and given the fast rate of discoveries, this is very likely to hapen, unless we all go extinct before.
Isaac Asimov's Nemesis novel as such an exemple (first a team of colonist is sent to the red dwarf using slow "hyper-skipping" transport mode, then faster than C "hyperjump" is discovered and a second team catch up the first).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
A quick read through this article will show you that ice CAN exist on a place like venus given the right enormous pressures and a bit of water. ;-)
...Duke Nukem Forever will finally be released.
Actually, like most Sci Fi things, Heinlien has already thought of this. Read "Time for the Stars".
Zapp: Hmm? 198 billion babies in a few weeks. We'll need an army of super-virile men scoring 'round the clock! I'll do my part. Kif, clear my schedule.
... or at least socialist.
Otherwise one guy will hijack the oxygen supply and sell it off in exchange for the rest of the parts of the ship. He'll need to let most of the population die first to get his price up though.
>>> "we have no way to assure that the culture of such a small population in isolation could survive"
Nor a large one for that.
I'm sure there are several instances of populations of under 1000 surviving nearly independently on small islands, in remote forest or mountain regions (&c.) before the advent of time efficient long distance travel.
Welcome to embedded programming hell...
In fact the teaching of Latin to children who were expected to go on to professional jobs did not cease to be general (in the UK at least) until the late 20th century. By then it was largely symbolic, but it shows how long these things persist. It was also advantageous in that it made the learning of the Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian) so much easier.
It's also worth noting that Chaucer lived around the 700 years ago mark and it only takes a few weeks for an English educated person with a little Latin to be able to read the Canterbury Tales in the original. I can also read Dante in the original with a little help from a crib, also about 700 years ago.
Pining for the fjords
You guys are missing the important point. The only thing worse than spending billions of dollars on building a giant spaceship which won't produce any results until another 10% of recorded history plays out, would be for it to arrive with too few humans to establish a viable gene pool.
What does that mean to the average geek reading this on slashdot? EVERYONE who sets sail on this 700 year voyage will have to get laid!
This is nothing new, we actually have had the technology to build Intersellar Arks since the late 50's:
l ear_propulsion%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuc
If you read the article, a lot of the discussion is based on how long it will take to actually *build* this monsterous ark. From my (I'll admit somewhat limited) knowledge of the progression of science in the area of building something like this, it seems more realistic to sink money initially into the construction of such a vehicle regardless of the propulsion, etc. Thus, we could have a large man-made space-station/vehicle that is constructed using progressively newer and newer technologies (since it is relatively close by), but is not tied to earth's gravity, making it easier to maintain and possibly to launch.
When the time comes to add propulsion, we will have progressed much more in terms of the physics of star-drives. If we haven't progressed enough? Leave it there, have a space colony, send it to mars and back, whatever -- it's not like it's going to be a waste... Think of the sheer magnitude of the construction effort to build this thing and how much easier it will be in the future to design an ark if we already have a gigantic shell to work with.
Think about star trek when they first develop the warp engine. What comes next? The enterprise wasn't built in a day for sure...
How many new moons have been discovered lately around the gas giants?
-FL
You don't really have to build one huge telescope. As has been previously discussed, we could build multiple small ones. Distribute them over our solar system, and integrated their signals (like some current radio telescope arrays). And voilà, one gigantic telescope.
Store with salt
1 Congress will not fund anything they can not tax of take control of.
2 Congress has cut the NASA budget so much there is no replacement for the shuttle fleet costing us yet another seven astronaut's lives.
3 We can't not even build and complete a space station right now just above us with in 10 years and use it with out something breaking down needing replaced. I doubt the occupancy size is any bigger than a nice 2 bedroom apartment.
4 The Biosphere project has already shown there is major problems trying to set up a sizable place to grow fruits and veggies as well as have insects separate of our natural environment.
5 There is no feasible way to produce power for that long of a time with out external resupplies.
6 For such a project to work we would need space factories, molecular resequencizers, replicators, Zero-point power source, the will of the people behind the project, researchers and scientist.
These devices would have to be made to do a cradle to cradle recycling. There must be Zero waste.
7 Then you must fight Complacency if you had all this tech Why would you want to leave home? people are lazy and they do not like to work at living life.
8 Then there is the problems of the great unknown it self that we have not encountered.
But we can dream i guess.
TSS
When did the idea of a multigenerational ship become "new" speculation? Science fiction writers have been writing about this for many decades.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
Did anyone read the part about the ark weighing 25 gigatons? with an escape velocity of 11.2 km/s do you have any idea wehat kind of momentum that would need? Forget about building the ark, stabilizing the environment indoors, all of that crap, how on earth would you get it OFF earth? 280000000000 KG*M/S!!!!!! the force required to overcome gravity is approximately 245250000000 Newtons, or in terms of NASA's STS space shuttle (mass 2,029,203 KG) 12332 times the amount of force it took to launch NASA's Space Shuttle (STS). Unless someone has 13 thousand space shuttle engines lying around to strap onto this thing, i don't see this happening any time soon.
I Bleed Scarlet
Yes, that's what I said. Same thing. :-)
You want aperture, and you get that from spacing the elements; but you also want significant signal gathering, and you get that from area. So you do both.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
You accelerate until you are half way there. Then you decelerate until you arrive, at rest relative to your destination. TV never shows it that way, but that is how it will really be done, if we ever get a power source that large.
I do have some problems envisioning a ship with an engine with a power output that rivals the Sun. I'm not sure I'd want to spend a few years being just 50 meters from the center of that. Too many things can happen to make it go boom. Just a small leak, relative to the total output could vaporize most of the ship.
At that rate, (1 G constant accelaration) ANY journey could be done in less than 2 years relative time. at 10 Meters per Second acceleration, you reach the speed of light in less than a year (3 X 10^7 seconds). Most of the trip is spent near the speed of light, so the time folks at home think you spent getting there just didn't happen for you. Of course, when you get back you find that like Rip Van Winkle, you missed 20 years, but that's the price you pay in a relativistic universe.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
Wait for nanotech to enable Transhuman technology and thus Transhumans by end of this century.
Transhumans don't NEED to go anywhere in any given time frame. They don't age, they don't need food and water, and they don't breed (although they might reproduce themselves.) They can live anywhere as long as they have five things: energy, materials, nanomass, knowledgebases and computing power.
And if they DO want to go out there, they can do it with technology developed by brains which think a million times faster than human brains, using "virtual science and engineering" simulations that develop technology a million times faster than humans can. Which means if it's physically possible in this universe to get there in five minutes, five minutes later they'll figure out how to do that.
Issue is now irrelevant. Problem solved.
People need to stop speculating about this sort of crap and get on with the main issue - developing nanotech.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Ever read "The Galactic Whirlpool"? One of those Star Trek stories set just after the original series. The Enterprise stumbles across a "generation ship" which had left Earth only just before they discovered warp drive, but had escaped attempts to locate it. The inhabitants had forgotten they were on a ship, to them it was "the world". They had collapsed into a primitive society.
...
Since they were humans from Earth, the prime directive didn't apply (not that Kirk was very good about that anyway), so it was left to the Enterprise crew to drag them kicking and screaming into the 24th century
That's a common theme in Sci-Fi though, generation ships where the inhabitants believe the ship is the world, and forget the mission. How does anyone keep at a task for 700 years?
I'm probably not the first one to point this out. There's room in the solar system for several thousand years of unchecked human growth. Let's fix up the house first before visiting the neighbors.
The A's and C's died of a disease created by unsanitary telephones.
No, it just feels like one ;)
..of humans-serious urbanites- who spend the vast bulk of their entire lives inside of man made rooms, voluntarily, and actually pay money for that privilege. So what's the diff if the "city" is nailed to the ground or floating around yonder space?
I don't think getting people to live onboard a huge ark ship would be all that hard, and it would be well tolerated if it was large enough/designed with some "great" rooms for enjoyment as an alternative "outdoors", and balanced with the population on the ship after some research. I don't know how much squarefootage per person they would need, but it isn't much given the contentment with crowded cities you can see. No additional evolution required really. Have an ark "replica" on the ground, all volunteers, after initial screening, for the final test, must undergo six months inside of that to weed out folks who just can't hack it. You could probably also get some psych studies from the cruise ship industry and from various navies submarine services, and from Antarctica research colonies to see what problems arise and how they are overcome. Prisons wouldn't be good to study because it is the opposite of voluntary.
many generations of men and women
The theory fails right here, before you even consider the technologies and supplies needed to make a 700 year trip. The problem (and please pardon my elitism) is that maybe 1% of people born are capable of being trained to do the jobs that the ark environment requires. That's fine in the first generation when you can populate the ark with choices from the top 1/100th of a percent of the billions of souls on the planet but grown children who still live in their parents' basement is one hell of a problem for the ark in generation two.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Call me crazy, but I don't think the purpose of life is to be an utterly expendable cog in a highly efficient inhuman machine. Nor do I think that human beings are nothing more than fully programmable robots who can be instructed to behave and feel in whatever fashion is most profitable to society at large. I believe that any social planners who mistakenly make these assumptions will be doomed to watch their planned societies quickly crumble before their eyes. In fact, history has provided us with many examples of this happening. When are we going to learn our lesson? Planned societies don't work. Civilization can only thrive when people are free to be human beings instead of mindless worker bees.
Namely, send a robotic probe accelerated to at most 50% of the speed of light. Screw relativistic speeds, and carrying extra fuel to make up for increased mass, and then extra fuel to carry that extra fuel, and so on. We waited several years between the launch of interplanetary probes and the payoff in reams of scientific data, we can wait a little over 30 years for the first up-close images to start filtering in.
Manned space exploration is frivolous and more wasteful than we can afford to be. When we're actually able to establish self-sustaining colonies in orbit and throughout the solar system, presumably after we've mastered active radiation shielding, then there will be a point to putting human beings in space. And even then only after our vanguard of little construction robots has built the settlement in advance. NO RETURN TRIPS allowed.
this sound familiar, maybe we should reference ray Bradbury or Isak Azmanoth.
Send a message to them in as many formats as possible. Use only open formats, so not .doc format ;-)
Wait for instructions on how to build an efficient propulsion system (something we wouldn't know if we fell over it).
Kinda like in 'Contact'.
OTOH, if my lifespan were on the order of 100k years, I'd be planning it. With a little prudent investment and planning over several thousand years, I should be able to visit at least several dozen star systems in that period of time - on my own dime. For example, one could hitch a ride on Wolf 424, a binary red dwarf system as it passes near Earth (within two lightyears at closest approach) over the next 10,000 years. This system travels at roughly 1.8 lightyears per 1k years relative to Earth. So I could travel roughly 160 light years away from Earth without leaving the system over the course of my lifetime. But such a fast moving system would likely approach closely enough to other systems to arrange probes and short excursions to these other systems. Dozens if not hundreds of flybys.
"propulsed by nuclear fusion and featuring artificial gravity, oceans and cities, for a travel of seven centuries -- where many generations of men and women would live ? This new speculation uses some actual physics and math ..."
...
New speculation? let me be the 42nd person to severely chastise the editor
Poor Groff Conklin, spinning in his spindizzy...
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
Not clear if he was talking about the land or the gov't.
Table-ized A.I.
September 13, 1999... A nuvclear explosion on the moon sends moonbase alpha hurtling out of orbit into interstellar space, looking for the planet meta in order to recolonize.
I'm suprised you have't heard about it. It was in all the papers!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WZW4groJro
Do #3. On the way, if we get to #2, send them the details (they are not travelling the speed of light, so any message will catch up), and retro-fit en route. And if we get to #1, once again, retro-fit, except this time, you'd be able to catch up and take the parts/details to them!
Even better, with #1, you could simply STOP the arks where they are, and use them as relay points. Turn them into science stations, livable habitats, places for negotiation, whatever.
I do agree though the idea of using one big ark is rather silly, eggs in one basket and stuff. Lots of smaller ones, but not TOO small.
Humanity, as a sentient species needs to redirect resources wasted on terrestrial wars to ever-escalating space battles and arms-races which will foster the space-faring civilization-destroying armadas we all know humanity is capable of;then and only then will they really have a chance of playing with the other galactic kids.
If someone decides to pay Humanity a visit they need something better than just nukes..pfft, nobody's going to want to know about Humans unless they come up with some novel way to destroy entire clusters of galaxies. Until Human weapon-tests create a local nebula they're nothing more than annoying pets.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
I thought the fact that the B-Ark was a ruse to get rid of a bunch of people perceived not to contribute to society and the plague spread by unsanitized telephones killed the people not on the B-Ark was widely known. And that we, the humans of Earth, are descendants of the B-ark colonists.
The word is propelled. I'm not usually a grammar Nazi, but I just couldn't let this one slide.
Just junk food for thought...
Also, if you want the quick and dirty version, a couple radio dramas from the 50s did adaptations of "Universe," the story in question. You can find one here.
S ingles/Dimension_X_1950-11-26__31_Universe.mp3
http://www.archive.org/download/OTRR_Dimension_X_
1 is the square root of all evil.
I would say we've wandered off the topic, except that this thread goes to the heart of the credibility of the premise question in TFA. This is not my grandfather's America. There are no more grand achievements like TFA within us, and you are an example of why. Americans have given up their great ambitions. There are dreamers yet but they are so few they can be weighed down by the mass. There is no hope they might achieve anything requiring this much prolonged coordinated effort before they're incarcerated, expatriated, debudgeted or sued into ineffectiveness.
It makes me sad to write it, but I calls 'em like I sees 'em. Our day is done. Who's got next? I, for one, welcome our new determined overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted slashdot personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil on their interstellar ark.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You guys are having trouble with this concept so I'll say it again slowly.
No American is going to achieve anything near this scale again, ever in history. It's over. It's done. There is no more "Great America". Get over it. We have traded our energetic, optimistic overwhelmingly adventurous spirit to 5th Avenue Marketing wizards for Pergo floors and SlimFast; to Microsoft and the RIAA for self-expiring entertainment we can buy over and over again. We have surrendered it to the serial drama that is electoral politics. We gave it up because we swallowed the notion that it is wrong to win. We don't have the focus to make it through a two hour movie, let alone a seven year plan. We are cattle. That's not going to change.
Even if some dreamer got a good start at something big, he would still be shut down before he achieved it, no matter how much help he got at first.
That's the tragic thing. It still looks like we can meet lofty goals, but before they're within our grasp they will always be shut down by lack of public confidence or failures of leadership or another new reform administration, waning popularity, budget shortfalls, economic changes, an infestation of lawyers or some other reason.
It makes me sad, but it's time we accepted our passive role and quit wasting time and money on trying to do things we are no longer capable of. We've reached our dotage and it's time for a fresh spirit to shoulder the load. Barely two hundred years, too. That's not long in national age. We burned out fast. Well, it was ever the "grand experiment". It went well for a while I think.
Who's got next?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Monkeys were born to climb trees--
Men were born to climb _mountains_.
Crap. What did the new CSS do with the "Post anonymously" option??
Because eventually the mass of the lense would become gravitationally significant. But it might be neat having a second moon which is a bigass eye. Cool!
I think we should put lots of smaller animals on the ark and ship it out with computer systems to maintain and land it. Then wait and see what species evolves into intelligence first this time around :)
Looking at the nearest star systems for a decent system to visit or colonize, it is a tough call. There are only 7 star systems within 10 light years of ours. Four of those (Wolf 359 at 7.8 light years, Lalande 21185 at 8.3 light years, Luyten 726-8 A and UV Ceti at 8.7 light years, and Ross 154 at 9.7 light years) are red dwarf flare stares, which produce very little heat and emit frequent (hourly, daily, monthly) extremely high radiation flares that would kill any known living creatures close enough to derive energy or warmth from them. Also, the red light from these stars would not be conducive to photosynthesis for plants as we know them.
One near star system (Sirius A and Sirius B at 8.6 light years) seems a bit more promising. Although the system is fabulously more rich in heavy elements (metals, etc.) than our own star system (or any other in the area), Sirus B went nova a couple hundred million years ago and probably sterilized any nice planetary systems of atmospheres, water, or life (that's an educated guess, but . . .). Also, at 8.6 light years away, it is quite far.
Barnard's Star (at 6 light years) is a red dwarf, but not a flaring one. It's one of the oldest systems in the area, and quite calm. Of course, as a red dwarf it puts out little energy. Still, at the second closest star system it might be a potential place to visit or find rocky planets around.
The last and most promising star system within 10 light years is actually the closest--Alpha Centauri A, Alpha Centauri B, and Proxima Centauri at 4.2-4.36 light years. Proxima is a red dwarf, and a flaming/flaring one, but is far away (one-fifth of a light year) from the other two stars and is therefore negligible. The other two are yellow or orange stars, a bit less or a bit more powerful than our Sun, with good light for photosynthesis. Although a dual-star system, planets within 2 AU of either star (about the distance from the Sun to the Asteriod Belt past Mars) would not greatly be affected by the gravity of the other star. Liquid water could exist within about the orbit radius of Venus for the smaller star, or Earth to Mars for the larger star. The system has twice the heavy element content of our own system.
At 4.36 light years, and the closest neighbor we have, why not try going there instead of Epsilon Eridani at 10.5 light years? You'd save well over half the time, whatever method you used to get there! G-forces aside, if you could average 10% the speed of light, it'd take about 50 years one way.
A quick look at a phase diagram of water shows me that the possibility of water being ice at temperatures above 0.01 degrees celsius is pretty much zero, regardless of the pressure. Also, the freezing point of water gets lower as the pressure increases, which is one of the many things that can be considered an anomaly of water.
http://encarta.msn.com/media_461541579/Phase_Diagr am_for_Water.html
I rekon that before we start to annoy other worlds, we should learn to spell our own language!
An anime OVA in which they send a small ark with genetic samples of earth flora and fertilized human eggs into space, it ends up that while it is on the way humanity advances space travel and ends up sending terraforming equipment that gets there before the original ship. Also, due to doing lots of space travel as soon as near-lightspeed travel became available, the original donor was able to see them shortly after they landed...
Actio personalis moritur cum persona. (Dead men don't sue)
I think the psychological/sociological engineering would be the biggest challenge for this voyage. Not the tech...
Offtopic in response to a troll, yes, but I can't resist.
"You" (meaning americans, I presume) haven't nuked the caves in Afghanistan because it wouldn't have been practical, from a number of viewpoints (lack of intel as to which caves to nuke, lack of an effective vector, fallout patterns, certain political backlash from everyone and their dog, possible accidental nuclear response from Russia if ICBMs/cruise missiles are used, possible nuclear retaliation from non-state actors), not because it isn't a nice thing to do. Realpolitik, baby, and stop pretending otherwise - no-one is buying.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
As soon as the system starts considering Earth the next addition to the telescope, I'd say we pull the plug while we still can.
For the world is hollow and I have touched the sky.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
"propulsed"? In English we write "propelled".
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
I've been reading this "busythink" for decades now. Seems every generation has to do it all over again. End of all the analysis: We ain't goin nowhere. We are going to live our pathetic little species-life here. Period. Go make a peanut butter and and jelly sandwich. It'll do more for you. The universe is a barren womb.
E Proelio Veritas.
This whole interstellar travel thing become much less of a problem when we can make people (not exactly humans, but people) who can live for a few thousand years, who are physically capable of living in low G and repairing their own radiation damage and are psychologically capable of spending centuries on a spaceship. Hibernation would be pretty useful too. At this point a 22 year trip would be peanuts, and a 700 year trip starts looking plausible.
I know this doesn't break any laws of physics, and AFAIK it's not biologically impossible either. So, why isn't this the focus of our hopes and efforts? Fear of social upheaval?
By Arthur Clarke is a book that deals both with the subject of seeding planets with humans by using dna reconstructing machines(can't really recall if this is the idea but something like that) and with millions of humans migrating in a huge ark just before earth gets destroyed. Clarke's idea is that humans are kept in suspended animation while traveling and will wake up when they will reach their final destination.
I don't really think that's a "practical" issue. They knew the area down to a few square miles for a short time. A few baby nukes, and the odds favor having gotten the target.
What are you saying here? A vector, in common parlance, is a direction. So you are saying... ?
Very little fallout from throwing a small nuke into a cave; and given the hundreds of nuclear tests in the fifties, most far larger than anything I'm talking about here, right in the middle of the US, fallout isn't, in fact, a significant issue. There would be some, of course, and most of it would be in Afghanistan. I don't see how you can make a case that Bush cares about the people of Afghanistan from the evidence, though it might be amusing to see you try. :)
Again, we're talking about the reign of King-Emperor George Bush, Master of the World, Ruler of All He Surveys, Maker and Breaker of Laws, High Justice to Removal of Rights, The Decider, and Speaker To God Almighty Himself. I just don't think you can make a case that the finger presently on the button is in any way sensitive to other people's opinions. Including opinions in his, and my, own country.
No, no. You just tell them what you're doing. We did that when they were well armed - which they aren't now. In the 70's, you'd have had a point. Currently, they know that we don't care to nuke a democracy, which they sort-of are, and they have a much smaller arsenal. They'd be annihilated, we'd survive. Not much point in getting into a serious contest under those conditions. But again, channels exist to inform them, they'd be informed, and no one would do anything untoward. I don't buy your assertion here for a moment.
If they had nukes, they would have already used them. Ergo, they don't. Nor do they need a reason to use them; they're ready to nuke us right now. They're ready to carry them in their jockstraps and set them off as carried. Any silly idea you might have that doing anything would "incite" them to want to nuke us is purest fairy tales. They already want to nuke us to the point where every nerve ending in their bodies sings at the very idea. However, the actual folks being nuked have a tendency to be slowed down. Just ask the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were a little pre-occupied after their experience, don't you agree? Might not be so bad to have Osama and/or his lieutenants so preoccupied.
(A) it doesn't matter if "you're buying" because it's old George Bush at the helm, and he doesn't care what you think. He's not "selling", ok? He's telling. (B) The reason people don't buy is because they really don't understand nuclear weapons. Death by radiation isn't in any way worse than death by cholera or nerve gas or systemic disease from falling on a Pungi stick. Death by nuclear blast isn't in any way worse than death by MOAB or SMART-PIG. Cancer from fallout isn't any worse than cancer from agent orange. Death by nuclear flame isn't any worse than death by napalm. Fallout is an issue, but then again, show me a country that's all healthy-like after having a war conducted on its soil and I'll be quite surprised. You'll note that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been rebuilt and are thriving; and those bombs were not relatively clean modern tactical weapons - they were truly filthy 15kt and 20kt atte
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Maybe we're ALREADY part of an interplanetary expedition - if you have a Matrix-like system that holds a load of human minds / consciousnesses and keeps them occupied during the 1000 year voyage to the next planet, maybe it would keep them occupied by making them think they're living our their lives as internet geeks at the start of the 21st century?
Maybe we're all just ghosts in a big machine, jetting it's way across the galaxy.... maybe one day we'll all hear "System Wide Message - planet approaching, simulation will end in 60 minutes. Please finish any business in an orderly fashion." and next thing we know, we're waking up in orbit of Omicron Persei 8?
Dude......
I think an important question is whether or not a closed community of people could survive long enough to make it to the destination without destroying each other or the ship they're on. A lot of people have discussed this already (so many unread posts here!) but I am reminded of an interview I once read about how to keep people away from a plot of land that has been radioactively affected. The answer was not signs, or fences, as those things will eventually disappear, but was to form a religion, stick a priest nearby and make people fear the land. I think a similar idea could be used on the Ark -- you build an all-encompassing religion that doesn't discriminate from color, gender, class status, etc. Give the people a purpose, and also give them fear: breaking the windows would be a very bad thing, not just because they'll die, but because the quest that God (or whatever entity) sent them on would be ruined, or something like that. I think solving this problem is more important than solving any technological problems, but that's just my opinion.
It seems everyone reading and replying to this discussion understands the risk factors of venturing away from Earth. Risk is something every child must learn from their parents, teachers and peers in order to survive to adulthood. Regarding risk and looking at automobile, self-induced cancers, falls and suicide, I cannot help but ask, "How are we doing with that?"
Regardless of how we go, who should go, or when they will arrive, the best reason to go in my opinion is to insure the survival of the human species. Yes, the travelers may be passed by another crew using better technology, but what if they are not? Yes, there could be political factions that will arise leading to in-fighting and other human tragedies like "murder". Yes, they might have limited resources depending on the size of the ship and its renewable and sustainable "natural" resources.
But what if they turn out to be the only "survivors" of Earth? What if no technologically more advanced ship EVER catches up with them? Hopefully they will be able to avoid the disadvantages of our current limited political systems, and are able to set aside their religious differences in favor of sharing in a common goal.
The idea of casting our hopes upon an interstellar sea, without knowing the eventual outcome of those efforts, would be a great act of faith. It is, or would be, the equivalent of trusting in all the technological resources invented up to the date of departure, fully trusting all the faith-based beliefs suggesting G-d will decide their (our) fate, and hoping that as a "insurance plan" it would be worth the cost and effort to replicate our species elsewhere.
How many tens of millions, hundreds of millions or billions of dollars are spent each year saving lives that may contribute little to society as a whole? It is a bit "harsh" to ask, but it is the sort of question Ark Builders would need to consider.
If humankind is ultimately worthy of being saved from itself, has created "good works" the sum value of which outweighs its atrocities, and has (at least in part) continuously strived to reach the ideals (highest standards) possible. If we have met all this perhaps we should build a Space Ark and send it to the stars even without completely knowing the children of man would survive. Perhaps the greatest challenge will not be the technology, the faith or the "shielding" such a craft would require, but the cooperation necessary of the builders to construct it.
For myself, I would be the first in line to sign-up for such a mission if it existed as it seems there is no place really worse than or less risky then here on Earth today.
When can I go, "from Virginia to the stars?"
I found squirrels!
http://xkcd.com/c167.html
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(define (.sig) (cons 'my (list 'other 'car 'is 'a 'cdr)))
http://4horsemen.net
Generation Ships are not a new concept. I remember doing a paper on them in high school and my conclusions were it was not feasable until we developed reliable fusion power. Which according to the industry is always "20 years away".
Probably, but I don't think this is a binary thing. Terrorists don't live in isolation, and there aren't terrorist robots that all follow the same program. It may be that the idea of using nukes is unsettling even to those who are terrorists or who would otherwise help terrorists, and this might hinder efforts for nuclear attacks. If the US decides that tactical nukes are on the table, then the terrorist front (and the fringe community around them) as a whole would feel equally justified in using them.
People are rational enough to know that radiation is a nasty thing, nastier than bullets or conventional bombs. Chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons are taboo for good reason.
Secondly, let's do the math, and say they can get there in 70 years with an ark. If you could come up with something that gets there in 35 years, with technology that takes 35 years to develop, they would arrive at the same time.
If technology can be developed that satisfies this:
(time to develop new tech) + (speed of new tech)*(10.5 light years) less than or equal to 70 years
Then obviously, it would be better to wait. If $ is taken into consideration, that could also be a different story. How much would the extra supplies cost for another 35 years? How much would the new technology's development cost (which, unlike the supplies, could be reused or done regardless)?
It only seems to do this if new technology will not significantly surpass the equation above.
From today's news (New York Times) (bold emphasis mine):
Now, I ask you, if these chumps are convinced that blowing themselves up with C4 or Semtex or TNT or even black powder is going to get them to paradise, or some other outcome they think is better than living, why is it you resist the idea that they'd be pretty happy to strap a nuke on?
You see, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Your statement - and I'm not trying to be abusive, really - is absolutely, 100% wrong and displays a complete lack of understanding of what havoc "standard" weapons normally wreak. There are people surviving today who have had some pretty severe radiation burns. People survived such burns in Japan. Radiation, like everything else, comes in degrees, and it isn't cut-and-dry that it's "nastier than bullets or conventional bombs", that's just hysteria. My sweetheart is in the middle of a seven-week long radiation regimen at >20MEV for breast cancer; and its not the radiation we're worried about, let me tell you.
You tell me which you'd rather experience: A 50 caliber machine gunning across your torso, or too many rads such that you have symptoms? I'd take the rads without question; no matter what the level of exposure was. Until you've seen the damage a single 50-cal round can do, you're not qualified to say radiation is worse. Once you have, you should know better. That goes for all manner of other ways to catch it from "conventional" munitions. You should get a look at an after-action photo of the crew of a tank after a depleted uranium SABOT round has its way with them (and let me give you a hint - it's not a hard radiation issue at all.)
Nuclear weapons are the boogieman because incompetents have enormous trouble understanding and comparing the effects of these weapons, and because they confuse the stories of world destruction when the superpowers were facing each other down with the effect of a few nukes here and there on specific limited battlefronts.
Nuclear weapons are very large explosives with side effects of radiation. They do lots of damage; that's the point. however, I don't think you can argue such that (for instance) the people who died in the Tokyo, Dresden or Hamburg firestorms died any more pleasantly, or that those who survived with severe burns were any better off than the survivors at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. To say that they are "nastier" than something else is to say nothing. You need to put some facts on the table to back that assertion up, and I don't think you can find any such facts. Within the last 50-60 years, about a thousand nukes have been set off between the US, USSR, UK, France and a few others. The largest was about 50 megatons IIRC (Tsar Bomba, USSR) and the smaller ones went all the way down to fractions of a kt. To say "nuke 'em" means something in that range, almost certainly the low end. Those tests did not destroy the world or even cause much of a problem, as long as you don't count the hysteria, or the intentional damage in Japan. They've gone off in space, in the atmosphere, underground, on the ground, under water, on the water... pretty much everywhere they could think to try them. And we're just about all still here, again, barring those who were actually targets.
Of the group, the only one to fear more than a gun or other conventional ordinance is biological. The others all have limited zones of effect; if you want real fear, that's the place to look. Execute biowarfare on your enemy, die at home on the other side of the planet next year. Now that stuff you can legitimately call nasty.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
You ignored the whole argument I made about terrorists and the community around them not being binary. The guy who is willing to blow himself up is not the same as the people who are necessary to help a terrorist acquire and use nuclear weapons. Such people may be ok with a conventional explosion to make their point. They may not feel ok with nuclear weapons. However, if the US starts using tactical nukes in their backyard they may feel encouraged to help terrorists do the same in ours.
How about neither? I don't want to be anywhere near an attack. However, if a war is to be fought, I'd rather it be done with bullets and bombs that don't leave silent, invisible radiation lying around once the activities are over.
Rather than build on the existing code, they want to start a new civilization from scratch--"and do it right this time." *sigh*
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Oh, sorry. So I did. I didn't mean to, I actually missed what you were saying there, my bad.
Well - personally - I think of myself as a realist. I don't see what you are describing there; I think your view may be born of optimism, rather than of examining the facts. Judging by the magnitude of the WTC event, I don't think killing a few thousand or a few ten thousands, is a difference that would do much more than make terrorists cheer. But - I hope you're right. Really, I do.
Personally, I fully expect them to get, and use, nuclear weapons. What happens then will test a lot of things about our society.
Well yes, of course - but that doesn't really address the issue of your imagining that wounds from nukes are worse than wounds from conventional weapons. My point was, they aren't. And of course if you die, you die, so that's kind of a moot point. As for leaving radiation around, really, it's not as bad as all that. Remember, we've blown off all manner of nukes; you can go visit ground zero at Hiroshima if you like, no risk at all. And for when it happens, a geiger counter and some planning is all you need to stay safe. Radiation is only invisible if you don't prepare. The tools are cheap; I've had a good set for decades. This stuff was all figured out during the cold war (which is why I own the stuff... I'm old...).
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If I were to speak of Islamic society, i.e. the people who live in the swathe of land from Pakistan through to North Africa, who generally abide by similar customes and practices (repression of women, for example) everyone else would know what I mean.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"I don't really think that's a "practical" issue. They knew the area down to a few square miles for a short time. A few baby nukes, and the odds favor having gotten the target. "
Do the math. "A few" - say ten or so in the 10-25 kt range, airdropped - is not nearly enough to crumble a system of mountain caves a mere five miles across and half deep. What odds?
What are you saying here? A vector, in common parlance, is a direction. So you are saying... ?
Sorry. Old-time eastern bloc terminology, not common parlance. A vector is a means of delivery. Those soldiers didn't actually get to the mouths of those caves so some form of missile or bomb would have had to be used - and the RNEP only exists in budget appropriation wet dreams.
"I don't see how you can make a case that Bush cares about the people of Afghanistan from the evidence, though it might be amusing to see you try."
I won't try. Would you accept the idea that Bush's minders are trying their best not to lose Pakistan to the globalist Islamic movement, for instance? It doesn't matter if the fallout is a real threat or not - the pakis would be shaken by it no end.
"No, no. You just tell them what you're doing. [...] I don't buy your assertion here for a moment."
Do they believe you? Does their aging, mostly automated, severely underfunded early warning system believe you when you actually do launch, at a target which is actually (literally) next door? Russia has expressed concern over not being able to tell nuclear-warhead-carrying sub-launched ICBMs from the proposed tungsten rod dropper thingys. Willing to make a bet that the Topol-M (which, make no mistake, *would* be dispersed and possibly alerted, simply as a matter of common precaution) will not find their targets if a cock-up occurs? Good luck.
"If they had nukes, they would have already used them."
No. "They" (or their constituencies) may have morals (far-fetched, I know), or "they" may have only one and no means of getting another. I can build a dozen scenarios where a threat is a more valuable political tool than the actual use (including the real-world scenario we call the cold war) but I'm sure you're intelligent enough to make up some of your own. Why you don't is beyond me.
"The reason people don't buy is because they really don't understand nuclear weapons."
You misunderstand, possibly in order to build a straw-man argument. What I am saying is that real-world political concerns stopped GWB and his cronies from pushing that big red button, not some pie-in-the-sky notions about what the American public would "accept" after the fact or fear of the bomb itself.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
THis would be the "B" Arc, we are talking about... Yes I see... ... hint, remember ... Douglas Adams's Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.
I'm talking about dropping them into the cave openings. Not just pounding on the ground above the system. I completely agree otherwise. Massive over-pressure travels along tubes in a fashion very unfavorable to tube dwellers, though, unless you have blast doors in place. Thinking of your average Afghan, I don't think that's likely. And of course, after the over pressure, there will be widespread collapse.
US fighter-bombers can put air-launched weapons into openings with an accuracy measured in inches, not feet, as long as a straight line exists to the opening from the launch platform. Videos as far back as the 1st gulf war show weapons being dropped down exhaust vents on Iraqi buildings and then detonated at a particular floor. No one need be on the ground for this; typically there is one aircraft serving as a designator with a laser, and another, appropriately downrange for the required glideslope, carrying the weapon(s). GPS controls are similar in capability.
No. I think it would directly serve their purposes - that of building an ever-stronger military industrial complex, selling a great deal of fuel - to have Pakistan go completely Muslim and become an enemy of the non-Muslim world. No one here is worried about Pakistan (or India) except programmers and tech support folks. Look at Iraq: Clearly, every day we spend there, we increase the Muslim resentment against us on multiple fronts. We should leave, if that was our concern. But we don't, because our actual concern - not the crap they put out for public consumption, but the actual concern - is providing a funding mechanism for Haliburton and every other downstream company involved in perpetrating the war. It's borrowed money, true enough, but it is still money. Every day we stay there, we spend an amazing amount of money on our own industrial infrastructure and products. This is at the cost of a few young, relatively unskilled men a day; to the administration, this is more than equitable.
One thing is for certain, and that is, we would launch from a stealth platform because that reduces the risks. Given that, they would know we were going to do it because we tell them, and they would know we had done it because their seismic detectors would say "thump", or, possibly, they wouldn't know at all. They certainly would not see us coming. So no ICBMs, no cruise missiles, no problems.
No. They don't. They have zero respect for human life; they've established this beyond any capacity to doubt. They are perfectly willing to kill huge numbers of innocents without targeting a single person in the actual chain of responsibility. These are established facts.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.