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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.
Actually, the odds of something like that happening would in fact be pretty slim (similar to the probability of the earth getting destroyed by such an event). I think the odds of the "crew society" destroying themselves = 30 years into the mission would be much higher. Didn't Douglas Adams have something like this in one of the Hitchhiker's Guide books?
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!
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 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.
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.
The fundamental question of Existentialism - Why didn't you already kill yourself?
Who is John Cabal?
No, latin was a dead language for quite a while. This is why it was used so much. It was already a translated language and before we had a dictionary every other word could change it's meaning in a short time.
Once the dictionary concept was created the need to rely on latin for describing things of importance dropped greatly. It was sometime in the late 1600s and at oxford university I think. The traditions in science and medicin to go back to the latin roots words still remains. This is probably because of the heavy reliance on it from the early days of the feilds and alot of modern science and medicle inovation is related to earlier concepts that used the latin style wording.
But the reason the chuch used latin was two fold, It ment whatever the language, the same message was being sent and you could go to any church on earth and understand the sermon. Or at least any chatholic church. But the dictionary is the reason for it's decline. It basicly took what was working and made it modern.
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
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.
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.
Why create a 'perfect' society? Why not go with the Australian model and send our criminals?
The logical "crew" of an ark like this would be a dewar flask filled with frozen human embros. They can travel for centuries with no bordom or aging, would weigh almost nothing, and need no food or water for the trip.
The ship would keep travelling until a suitable planet is found, then thaw a few thousand as a test group. If they are happy in their new home, they could thaw the rest, or send them on to the next place.
Of course, this would involve a highly automated ship, with AI-based nannies and teaching robots to raise the thawed kids. I think this should be achievable within a thousand years from now.
Of course, this raises the Fermi paradox: if we can do it, other more ancient civilizations in the galaxy could also. So where are they?
" The logical "crew" of an ark like this would be a dewar flask filled with frozen human embros. They can travel for centuries with no bordom or aging, would weigh almost nothing, and need no food or water for the trip.
The ship would keep travelling until a suitable planet is found, then thaw a few thousand as a test group. If they are happy in their new home, they could thaw the rest, or send them on to the next place.
Of course, this would involve a highly automated ship, with AI-based nannies and teaching robots to raise the thawed kids. I think this should be achievable within a thousand years from now.
Of course, this raises the Fermi paradox: if we can do it, other more ancient civilizations in the galaxy could also. So where are they?"
Gee ... never heard of Adam and Eve? At least the alien seed ship explanation is a lot more plausible than "God did it!"
You don't even have to send embryos - just dna.
Well I may have an answer to your question:
The odds of life forming on earth in the short time period that it did (400-600 million years or so) are astronomically small. Infinitesimally. (Not that I'm a creationist..)
Perhaps instead of embryos they used something even simpler... Which would explain some things about how life formed on earth.
Heck one could even surmise that because they couldn't "teach" life that simple, it was selected because it could eventually evolve to become like them; however that could easily *not* be us. For an even bigger stretch, what if it is "us", and part of the 'code' was an inherent desire to return to space. Seeking out our progenitor's.... (Or to do as you suggest and repeat the process..)
Some food for thought anyway..
My rantings, only longer and with better spelling..
As long as you're extrapolating technology, go all the way. There's no reason that uploaded human-level entities (or beyond) are running on a nano-machine-based self-replicating substrate. Remember, our human bodies are nothing more and nothing less than a machine for running a human-level intelligence on a self-replicating substrate, so it's only a question of how much better we can make such things, not whether we can make such things.
The idea of sending out huge spaceships populated with actual, factual meat-bodies is as out-of-date as expecting to meet Venusian swamp dwellers. The whole space travel situation improves when you're sending a ten-or-twenty kilogram seed package containing a few million beings and enough self-replicating machinery and knowledge to turn the entire system into a Matrioshka Brain within a thousand years, possibly much faster.
The only thing physically implausible about this scenario is the Fermi Paradox (that is, if intelligence is anything less than almost impossible, why hasn't our system already been eaten by an intelligence?). Otherwise, the only real question is how quickly this could be done to a solar system, and how thoroughly, not whether it could be done.
2007 - still nothing better than Saturn IV to get people to escape velocity.
Give it only a few years and a Russian heavy launcher will be available, but for now there's nothing else that has been shown it can do it. At the current point US manned efforts are rhetoric meant as a distraction - you can't have a major effort like this with less resources than unmanned exporation.
The formation of life isn't as unlikely as it may seem. If you put all the necessary chemicals for life together in a soup pot and let it sit for a day then, yes, it is extremely unlikely that a living organism will form. But if you have an entire ocean's worth of the chemical broth, with various energy sources (solar, lightning strike, geological) to drive some of the necessary exothermic reactions then the likelihood approaches 1 that some self replicating aggregation of chemicals will eventually arise. Once a chemical replicator is formed, evolutionary forces come into play producing the wide array of life that the earth sees and has seen.
If the formation of life is so likely, then the question arises of why we haven't seen definite evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. That's because the vast expanses of space make it very unlikely that separate alien cultures, or even instances of biogenesis will meet.
1)It is possible (even likely) that a body (such as a planet) with conditions that allow for the formation of life are very rare, and thus locations like The Earth is a very rare commodity.
2)If there are other planets (or other bodies) capable of biogenesis, it is possible, even likely that they are simply scattered so far that any civilization expansion would not reach us. It is likely that intelligent civilizations have arisen which we will never be able to learn of because they are past the light speed horizon, that is they are so far away that the time it would take for light to travel from us to them is longer than the entire existence of the universe.
3)The horizon is drawn even tighter when looking for evidence of an industrialized society. We must be looking at a patch of sky where the society exists, and be looking at a time when the society existed there and is transmitting a signal strong enough for our equipment to receive and appropriately identify.
4)The same exists for E.T.s looking for us, and they would then need to be able to send a reply at a time that we are listening, and hope that we are looking for a message from the patch of sky they send the message from. If it is not feasible to open up a space/time wormhole big enough, stable enough, and directed enough to send a living organism through, then any manned delegation to our planet would be constrained by the speeds of classical (or mildly relativistic) speeds. The energy required to accelerate a craft large enough to support complex lifeforms to true relativistic speeds is likely incomprehensible in terms of our entire industrial energy output. And even if the E.T.s were traveling at relativistic speeds, the timeframe of travel from our perspective would be stretched to the point where our society will have likely crumbled by the time the E.T. delegation arrived at Earth.
5)The requirement also exists that the message/probe/delegation or whatever arrives intact and on target. It is foreseeable if not extremely likely that the journey of something sent from an E.T. civilization will be interrupted by some cosmological phenomenon, whether collision with asteroid, damaged by the gamma burst of a dying star, or a manned delegation finding a more interesting place to explore. This greatly increases the chance that different alien civilizations will not meet us.
6)There is also a necessity that the alien civilizations would want to meet us. If their technology is good enough to provide for interstellar travel, it is likely their technology is good enough to provide evasion of our senses and sensors. It is possible that they indeed have come and observed us, or even interacted with us in a way that they covered their tracks for the most part. Although it is more likely that a civilization from outside of our solar system would simply not find us interesting enough to spend the vast resources needed to send anything more than an electromagnetic signal (radio, light... whatever frequency they choose.) And if that is the case, we get back to the horizon presented by the speed of light and the
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman