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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
So, let's take a passenger manifest...
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>>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?
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:
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.
Yes, because jet fighter pilots only have to endure it for a few seconds and even then require special suits to prevent them from passing out.
That's still too much for humans to endure for months or even weeks.
That would be more realistic over a longer period of time though there may be a lot of medical repercussions.
This helps a bit but extremely high forces still cause damage, even when people are suspended. On the other hand it solves other problems (travel time is less important, no problem with food, biosphere etc.)
What's far out about a relativistic rocket are primarily two things: 1. Massive amounts of fuel are required, we don't even come close to solving that problem yet. 2. Radiation shielding needed to ward off gamma rays resulting from background radiation subject to the relativistic doppler effect and impact of cosmic particle when traveling at relativistic speeds when the ship is in mid-trip (at top speed).
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.
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphans_of_the_Sky/
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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?
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Why create a 'perfect' society? Why not go with the Australian model and send our criminals?
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.)