Interstellar Ark 703
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."
Or... (Score:5, Interesting)
starwisp (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: Photon gathering (and x-rays, RF, IR, etc.) (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re: Photon gathering (and x-rays, RF, IR, etc.) (Score:5, Funny)
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?
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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.
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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
Re:Or... (Score:5, Funny)
I took some pills & shot some stuff off a few times in the last few years, I'm still praying none of them evolve & contact me.
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Re:The engineering (Score:4, Insightful)
The most likely scenario (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The most likely scenario (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [fordvehicles.com]
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 [wikipedia.org]
vs
How about something related to the topic. Aircraft.
The Hughes H-1 [wikipedia.org] 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
Re:The most likely scenario (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:The most likely scenario (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:The most likely scenario (Score:4, Interesting)
" 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.
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I'm sure most of Slashdot can help with half of this.
Re:The most likely scenario (Score:4, Interesting)
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
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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 cou
Re:The most likely scenario (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
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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.
We could... (Score:4, Funny)
but then again, the resulting mutations might come in handy.
Re:We could... (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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Re:We could... (Score:5, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphans_of_the_Sky/ [wikipedia.org]
Re:We could... (Score:5, Funny)
How about the fact that our chances of getting the entire world cooperating long enough to get the thing built is slimmer than aliens coming here and destroying our planet.
Hell we cant get the ISS built and it's an incredibly small and cheap project compared to the equiliviant of building a death star or a babylon5 station with engines.
the only way to do this is as follows....
1 - achieve world peace.
2 - eliminate starvation.
3 - get all world governments to agree on more than 20 things and be happy about it.
4 - get all world governments to cooperated with each other fully.
5 - find solution to the flying pig epidemic.
6 - solve problem of the earcths core just froze over.
7 - build space ark.
Re:We could... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:We could... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:We could... (Score:5, Interesting)
Ark B? (Score:5, Funny)
So, let's take a passenger manifest...
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Re:Ark B? (Score:5, Funny)
and two guys that are each half black and half white, but on oposite sides of their faces, oh and a big cache guns. The ark arrives empty aside for kryton, an evolved cat, a hologram, a sentient computer, and the last man alive_ a vending machine repair man.
7 centuries isn't feasible for humans (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Re:7 centuries isn't feasible for humans (Score:4, Informative)
Re:7 centuries isn't feasible for humans (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Sorry, that is totally untrue (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps the resident life forms (Score:2)
We can call it the "B" Ark (Score:2)
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Why? (Score:2, Interesting)
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
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Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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Re:Why "Fortunately for the human race"? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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It's because we are white men of European origin. As simple as that. So we
Re: Why "Fortunately for the human race"? (Score:5, Insightful)
And for the presumably black men who first stepped out of Africa...
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They weren't forgotten. The Polynesians and the Native Americans were all descendants of those brave souls who walked out of Africa all those years ago.
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Firstly, your argument could be extended thousands of years back in time to when there were very few humans (we originally evolved in the plains of Africa, IIRC). Why explore/expand? Ditto for many other human civilisations recorded (to be fair, some of them did claim to have deity-assigned missions).
Secondly, population growth. There is a physical limit to the number of people any village, country or even planet can sustain - and b
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So if you can find enough people that want to use their lives in such an adventure, there is no "Why" to ask. They will do it. The only problem, of course, is finding that people. You don't have a lot to offer, really. So a real pressure will b
Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)
thats right i'm not giving your stupid question a seriously reply because it doesn't deserve one.
atheism is a disbelief in god, not the disbelief in basic human nature, which is to explore and learn.
your trying to draw conclusions on things billions of years in the future. people thought in the 1950's we would all have flying cars by now and look how close they were, so how close do you think your uneducated predictions will be?
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
We have seen the Borg
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It will be less reconizable as the traditional sence goes but even without a god, there will be a ultimate power that dictates quite a few things for them. So far, science seems to be it.
Science does not "dictate" anything, and your dichotomy between science and religion is entirely invented. Atheists don't follow "science" any more than religious people do, with the exception of the creationist wingnuts and the like who believe that science conflicts with their religion.
I have noticed this directly when discussing things like Global warming and evolution. The debate usualy goes back to "the consensus says this" so thats how it is, never minding that the scietific process often discusses alternative ideas to come to a different concesus.
Consensus on a subject doesn't prove anything, but if a collection of experts have worked on something for decades or centuries and come to some conclusion based on evidence, and have come to a consensus on the matter, t
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I know science doesn't dictate anything. Well it does to a degree but thats the process making it science. The problem is that other don't know this. Either your not one of the people I was talking about or you were and g
I think you forgot: (Score:4, Funny)
Step one.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Better would be to give the ship a list of target stars likely to have planets
Too many problems (Score:5, Insightful)
What if.. (Score:2)
Doh!
Yeah, but... (Score:5, Funny)
They will all be really bummed out when during their journey of centuries, somebody invents #1 and gets there ahead of them.
Sounds Familiar... (Score:5, Informative)
For an interesting read on what such a ship might be like, take a look at: Rendevous with Rama [wikipedia.org] by Arthur C. Clarke. I read it not long after it came out and thoroughly enjoyed it. Highly acclaimed, too:
Are we doing option 3 now? (Score:5, Funny)
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1 cup cornmeal
1/2 cup water 6 eggs
2.5 cups flour 2 tsp white sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/4 cup cooking oil
3/4 cup milk
Put the cup of cornmeal in a 2 cup bowl or measuring cup and enough water to make 2 cups total and let soak.
Mix flour, baking powder, salt, sugar in large bowl and set aside.
Separate eggs. Beat whites in a large bowl until stiff and fluffy (but not dry) and set aside.
Beat yolks and oil until smooth and beat in milk. (I use a on
maybe I misunderstood but... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Didn't read the article, hmmm ...?
Canned ape (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [accelerando.org]), 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.
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Re:Canned ape (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Have cake and eat it. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Of course, he forgot Number 4 (Score:2)
Who would go ... (Score:2)
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
Lots of smaller arks (Score:3, Insightful)
Humans can handle more than 1 G (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Humans can handle more than 1 G (Score:5, Informative)
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).
Easier way to colonize the universe (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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 tes
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Sending antiques is stupid... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Some Serious Flaws Here... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Some Serious Flaws Here... (Score:4, Insightful)
What you suggest makes the entire ark thing pointless, whatever it is that arrives at the destination really wouldn't be 'human' anymore.
Scott
Before trying to send colonists to another system: (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Before trying to send colonists to another syst (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Economics of interstellar travel (Score:5, Insightful)
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 lousy solution (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it's worse and non-obvious. A few questions:
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.
Are the pebbles charged? How do they keep their charge while moving through the solar wind? How large and strong a system of magnets/induction coils do you need to turn relativistic charged pebbles around?
Marathon, anyone? (Score:3, Funny)
New Age Bible (Score:3, Funny)
You're supposed to measure in cubits, you damned heathen!
Epsilon Eridani?!?! (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Number 3 bears resemblence to Star Trek, as wel (Score:3, Informative)
Per this [memory-alpha.org] 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 Or
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Re:Why rush to get there last? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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