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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."
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
I postulate an intelligent robot and you quibble about the on switch. Somehow, I don't think that would be the problem.
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