Slashdot Mirror
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."
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?
.....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
Bummer. But if, after billions of years, humanity can't figure out a way to expand past/extend the universe itself, then what would have been the point of preserving resources if it all dies anyway?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The goal is to spread the evil tendrils of humanity throught all of space, destroying and/or subjugating everything we encounter. As it has been, so it shall always be.
... and he is us.
We have seen the Borg
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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
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.
I don't mean to be pragmatic about this but why not? There have always been people that have said, "Why? Why go exploring? What's the point? We're all quite comfortable right here, thank you very much." Fortunately for the human race, there have always been those who pushed off into the unknown anyways. Frequently they're never heard from again, but it is surprising how often they succeed, and bring back new discoveries and ideas.
... I say let's take it! That's much better than just sitting here on that cosmic bullseye known as "Earth" waiting for the next cataclysmic event to take us out for good.
This is no different. You don't learn much by sitting in a cave, and there's no telling what we might become, what might happen in all that time. It's worth a shot.
And if a few billion years is all we have
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
and don't forget your towel.
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.
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
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...
Because we're a race of dreamers and we get excited by the idea of spreading beyond the confines of our planet, our solar system, and even our galaxy?
By your argument, why bother crawling out of the ocean? Why bother crawling out of bed for that matter? You'll be dead sometime anyway, and everything you've done in your life won't have mattered one bit.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
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
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
Any group of people so large together for so long would have one over-riding problem, that of humanities prediliction to segment itself by beleif or role.
There has not yet been a succesful attempt to produce a 'perfect' society, with the first attempt being by Plato.
What if the military ship model is used then? Well then you have centuries of one group being in charge, with either hereditary succession or selection by ability (democratic methods have never worked in the military model). Either way you end up with a perception of the controllers and controlled, partition is a natural result of the militaristic method, a caste system emerges.
Then what about the choice of the people who are born to the ship? They may realise that they have no choice, but humans have rarely prospered and worked at their best when their destiny is completelly laid out. The potential for unrest is quite pronounced. Ghandi demonstrated clearly that even non violent protest can be highly disruptive.
And at the end of the journey? Well you have a society which is partitioned already, and the people who were in charge are likely (human nature) to weant to stay in charge, even though the members of the expedition who were not in the ruling class (of whatever form) are now in the position of being able to say they no longer need that control, indeed of demanding it.
War is the most likely result in that circumstance, or at the very least dissent resulting in societal disruption. That's not something a colony could survive, even if it found somewhere to stay when it arrived at the destination.
A bit bleak I know. I think we'd be better off waiting until the participants in the journey could, in whole or majority, or in shifts, sit out the travel time in hibernation. That way they are not born to a society which has experienced centuries of partition.
This reminds me of a scenario someone once brought up at a party (actually, a wedding reception -- there were a lot of geeks there...). It goes like this:
Imagine that you have a really big computation task to perform, and you have a budget of $10,000 to buy the equipment to do the computation. You do some calculations and discover that if you went out and bought the equipment and started it right now, it would take 5 years for your computation to complete. But let's assume that Moore's Law (and/or the popular bastardization thereof) operates very predictably so that at any point in time, the computers you can buy at that time are exactly twice as fast as what was available 18 months before for the same price.
So, what is the optimal thing to do? Buy your computers now, or procrastinate and buy them later? It turns out, if you buy the computers now, your computation will run for 5 years and thus complete in 5 years. But if you wait 18 months and then spend the same $10,000, you will get computers that are twice is fast. Then you will start the computation in 1.5 years and it will run for 2.5 years, finishing after 4 years, which is a year earlier than if you start right away.
So in that case, the optimal strategy is clearly to procrastinate. You may be right that procrastination would be the optimal strategy for the space ark problem as well.
Because we can. And it's damn exciting.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Couldn't decide whether to mod this insightful or flamebait, as it's definitely both... I guess I'll take a third way. The urge to expand comes from far more than our delusions of grandeur about ourselves. It's not some "chosen people" sort of thing--at least not now, not for most people. Eventually everything on the Earth will die, and those humans with the means and desire to avoid this fate will leave. They and their genes will survive, just like those species survived on Earth that branched out and avoided calamities that wiped out their former home environments.
Details of the theory aside, evolution as a concept is the theory I believe in most in all of science--and I'm a physics grad student, so that's no small confession. That is because it follows from logical arguments, irrespective of the world you live in. It is not only compatible with everything we know about science, it is probably true *independent* of the laws of physics. Regardless of the value of the fine structure constant, the validity of string theory, or the response of the oceans to absorbing 10^12J of heat, one can still say, "the organism best suited to its environment will be the most likely to propagate into the future." The independence of evolution from scientific laws and parameters is a very, very powerful concept.
Of course, there's all sorts of fun to be had determining what constitutes "best suited to its environment"--perhaps it's best suited because it can build a giant rocket and get OUT--and determining how something "propagates into the future"--does it live as long as a turtle or reproduce quickly like a bacterium? One could even see how far one could extend the definition of "organism" and still have this statement hold. I suspect quite far. In these questions is where science lives, figuring out the fascinating and sometimes very important details. But however important it may be, it will always be in some sense a "mop-up" operation for figuring out the special cases of the logical necessity that is evolution.
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?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphans_of_the_Sky/
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
A better question would not be "why do civilised people buy cars, motorhomes, and boats ... etc." but why do said people not abandon their homes, and cubicles, and all their other civilized accoutrement and live an ideal existence as hunter-gatherers? For that matter, why buy a motorhome: all they're doing is taking their "civilization" with them! Your presumption is that people buy those things because they have some inbuilt urge to return to a "better" way of life. I disagree strongly: the bulk of us have no problem recognizing that the civilization that you disparage offers us many things that a simple hunter-gatherer economy would not, could not. Be careful of drawing specific conclusions from a (from my perspective, aberrant) subset of the population.
... indeed, perhaps they would have done some of the overrunning. Anything else is just sour grapes.
... or them? Here on Earth, the competition has been for land, in space, it may very well be for colonizable worlds. If our scouts don't find them, others may get there first: they may already have for all we know. I'll put my money on the explorers ... when the big ships come for us I'd like us to have a few colonies elsewhere.
I consider myself reasonably civilized (I don't own a gun and haven't raised a fist since grade school) but after having gotten the whole camping thing out of my system decades ago I feel zero desire to bond with Mother Nature, ever again. She's a bitch, pure and simple, and after she washed me down a hill in my tent into a lake I had enough of her. I also don't watch TV and I don't buy anything from advertising. Admittedly, however, I do work in a cubicle, for now. But you know what? I wouldn't trade my access to medical care, my Internet connection, my work as a software engineer, and my nice, comfortable bed to live in your world. Too civilized, I guess. Oh well, that's my problem.
Now, I'm not entirely sure why you would expect Stephen Hawking (a physicist, after all, not a sociologist or cultural morphologist) to bother coming up with a rebuttal to your view of civilization. Regardless, one might ask how different life would be had other cultures, over the past thousand years, shown the same interest in the rest of the planet that the offspring of a small part of north-Western Europe did. Perhaps they'd not have been overrun
Getting back to the topic at hand, the spread of our kind of life to other worlds, ask yourself this question. If (and yes, it's a big if) there are other civilizations in our corner of the Universe, creatures that might very well see us as a threat (or at least as competitors), would you rather we come out on top
No matter how you look at life in your idealized world, there is always something that wants what you have. That is the nature of existence on this planet: it is the nature of life itself. What you're really complaining about is that, historically, some people showed more aptitude for this than everyone else combined, and part of that aptitude was expressed as a willingness to explore and take measured risks for some perceived gain. Personally, I don't consider that wrong: cows in fields aren't curious, and I know which I'd rather be.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Based on the same predictions made by him, someone during the agricultural revolution would have said. "Wow, we can have all these crops and have extra too! In the next 100 years, we'll be flying like birds". The assumption, if you didn't catch it, is that progress is accelerating all the time, with a constant acceleration. What might in fact happen, is that there are just surges of progress (this is why they are called revolutions) but then progress plateaus.
At first, it was the agricultural revolution, before it was fairly quiet, afterwards, it was just improvement in farming.
Then came the industrial revolution, it was like farming applied to tools and machines. That has created another surge.
Then came the development of the computer, the information all of the sudden became more important than 'stuff'. That is very revolutionary and we don't realize it, perhaps, because we are 'living in it'. But looking at it from outside it is a completely mind blowing thing.
So now we are living probably at the end of another one of those progress surges. It is understandable if we make the mistake and assume that the rate of acceleration will stay just as rapid as it has been in the last 50 years.
But we are already hitting limits. Murphy's law is plateauing in the last couple of years. Otherwise you would not be seeing such a push to have multiple core. Intel and AMD would much rather have a 10GHz Pentium or Opteron, but it is not happening soon enough. The same is true with biology and other fields, we are hitting these invisible walls. That probably explains why String Theory became popular, despite a compeling lack of evidence. There are just certain limits that we don't have any idea how to overcome. So we might plateau for another century or two, improving what we have, mixing and matching, but without necessarily keep making giganting breakthroughs like some authors would like us to believe.
> I venture to disagree, strongly. So far the explorers have only been fortunate, on the whole, for white men of Indo-European origin.
And for the presumably black men who first stepped out of Africa...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
Claiming "scientists can be wrong" is not an argument. Everyone can be wrong. It is up to you to show that they are wrong, despite the evidence to the contrary.
There are several ways to destroy partition as you put it and still have authority.
Have the oldest be in charge.
Have elections for "president" who then appoints a commander (a la battlestar galactica)
In any case, the earth is basically like a really giant ark.
I think that there is an acceptable level of division and if you had a cultural zietgist systematically instilled that you'd need everyone to survive in the colony you could probably grow each generation of humans in the ark with a huge respect for life and teamwork. Humans really do respond well to imprinting so if you choose the values carefully and you setup a social structure that changes power and doesn't implicitly recognize groups, I think its totally possible for them to survive and get there and make a successful colony.
What is most interesting is, what sort of things would we send with them? Waste, water, and everything would have to be rigidly controlled and the there could be very little refuse. There'd have to be a whole bunch of interesting survival techniques thought out because once you put them in the ship, there might not be a whole lot of dynamic adaption possible to these problems.
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.)
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 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.
They seem to have forgotten option 4: wait for robots to take over the world and then send them out to colonize the galaxy. An intelligent robot would not need tons of material or labor to travel the galaxy, not when they can switch off and on at will. They can switch off when they leave the solar system, spend 500 years in deep space, and switch back on when they reach their destination. It's the exact same concept as freezing people to travel, but without the life support and insane shielding.
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.
I consider myself reasonably civilized (I don't own a gun and haven't raised a fist since grade school)
You know, being civilized != being a pussy.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
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.
Actually, you're on the right track for what we really need to be doing.
... well, we all read Slashdot. Multicore, multighz, multiprocessor. Anything we may be reading Slashdot with, including our cell phones, will be faster than anything even 58 years ago.
:)
Look at any technological advances. The first generation (1st model) is rough and inefficient. Each subsequent model gets better and faster.
We'll take your 70 year example
1938 Ford 2 door standard
versus
2007 Ford Mustang GT
Both have 4 tires, 4 seats, and 2 doors.
The '07 Mustang will get you there and back a lot faster and more comfortably.
How about.
1951 - Univac 1
vs
How about something related to the topic. Aircraft.
The Hughes H-1 7 hours, 28 minutes, at 332 mph. Oohh.
versus
Well, book a ticket on the airline of your choice. You'll be exceeding 500mph, at over 40,000 feet.
The running theme here is that they were all built. They weren't the final finished product. They were earlier attempts, which were built on in the future.
If we sit back and theorize about "the Ark", then it'll never get built. If we build the first one, regardless if it will take 70 or 150 years to reach it's destination, at least it was built.
In 10 years, improvements or a better craft can be sent to take them farther on their journey.
In 30 years, an even better one can be sent.
In 60 years, commuter service will already be established to their final destination, with round trips in 10 days.
On the 70th year, that 10 day trip will take 1 day (mostly waiting in line, and filling out paperwork, I'm sure). At the destination, they can celebrate the arrival of the original craft, as it would signify what 70 years of advancements have brought.
We are really slacking at our advancements. We, as a society, are more interested in personal wealth and taking it from others, than advancement of humanity. No? really? But you have your job, so you can get a better car, a nicer house, a hotter chick, better vacations, better benefits, and of course, you're looking for the better job because your job just isn't enough. You'll accept the fact that your country is at war with someone else over their natural resources, because you aren't getting shot at every day. Blah, blah, blah......
We're never going to get off this rock, because humanity will NEVER get it's act together. Even if we play nice (ISS), we'll make it so expensive, and keep it tied up in red tape so long, that it will be an impractical exercise in futility. We will live here, and we will die here. In who knows how many years, another race will evolve and find our ruins, and just wonder who we were.
In the last 30-some years, the only better spacecraft have been kept under wraps by "national security", or cut because of costs (or so we're told). (see Blackstar). But hey, they did finally put color displays in the space shuttle.
We have much better things to spend our money on, dammit. The war in Iraq has cost over $400,000,000,000 (yes, I got the zero's right). The entire cost of the shuttle program (STS) has been $145 billion, but don't forget that cost includes several huge complexes, staff (besides the astronauts), a couple Boeing 747's specially rigged to carry the shuttle around, a BIG tractor to drag it around KSC, etc, etc, etc.. You get the idea. Lots of overhead. Even still, we could have done the space program 4 times over, each generation being better than the last, for what the Iraq war has cost
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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.
I think we'll all have to grow accustomed to the likelihood that generations of our descendants growing up on other planets will evolve, physically and socially, in a way significantly divergent from what we term "human" based on our Earth experience. Even if they lived on Mars or the Moon or other moons/planets here within our solar system, the physical environment would skew them away from the way we developed here, probably in a significant way -- and that's likely to their advantage, and would serve testament to our adaptability over the course of some generations.
I mean, look at the cultural differences we have between continents, much less in between different planets and star systems.
Sure, if you get it to work. But how about a compromise then: a dozen frozen people and a million zygotes, along with many fancy reusable artificial wombs. The initial part of the colonization might not need many people, as it would mainly involve directing robots in making the first on-surface habitat. At this time, all the humans would almost certainly be in orbit, in a pretty crowded ship. If they wanted to set up a human-supporting ecosystem, they'd also have to bring along lots of terrestrial bacteria, flora and fauna (the latter would also gestate in artifical wombs, I presume).
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...
With all due respect, that wasn't the point. The point was to get there and get a settlement up and runnning. For this purpose, caste systems, democracy in charge, or even a "The strongest rule because they killed the last guy" system works just fine as long as the air generators, food-makers, and other technology keep maintained.
Jamestown wasn't founded by the brightest, most hardworking, or even tolerant people; it was founded by the bottom rung of society (Georgia was essentially a prison colony) and religious fanatics. As long as they realize that they have to eat and breathe and what to do to be able to do that, things should work out fine.
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
I postulate an intelligent robot and you quibble about the on switch. Somehow, I don't think that would be the problem.
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.
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.
And once you've read it, stay away from the sequels!
Gentry Lee hopped on and wrote the majority of the next three books in the series, turning Arthur C. Clarke's timeless novel of discovery into a trilogy of bickering, narcisistic characters and bungling political pundits.
Heh... Sorry, I guess I'm still bitter about that one.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
What you suggest makes the entire ark thing pointless, whatever it is that arrives at the destination really wouldn't be 'human' anymore.
Scott
If they can make penicillin out of moldy bread, they can sure make something out of you. -- Muhammad Ali
"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."
A city does not support humans it simply stores them in individual boxes, with current technology each city requires hundreds/thousands of sq miles of arable land to sustain it.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.