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."

We could...

[gcnaddict]

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.

but then again, the resulting mutations might come in handy.

Ark B?

[Speare]

So, let's take a passenger manifest...

• telephone sanitizers
• American Idol contestants
• MPAA lawyers
• CowboyNeal
• ...
• profit!

I think you forgot:

[amrust]

* Decode and activate appropriate chevrons on that Stargate-thingy.

Yeah, but...

[kerrbear]

They will all be really bummed out when during their journey of centuries, somebody invents #1 and gets there ahead of them.

Are we doing option 3 now?

[rohar]

When I skimmed over the article, 2 things popped into my head.

1. The relativity principle that gravitational and inertial mass are equal when they don't have to be makes me think that possibly there is no such thing as gravity and we are just accellerating in a 4th dimension at 1G and when this is presented to us in 3 dimensions the effect appears as gravity.
2. Corn meal waffles would taste good on a Sunday morning.

Re:maybe I misunderstood but...

[flyingfsck]

Hmmm, after 1400 years - impact at 0.99999 C, due to a minor imperial to metric conversion error...

Re:Ark B?

[goombah99]

or more likely...

• 2 jihadists

• 2 crusaders

• 2 revolutionary marxists

• 2 trilateralist capitalists

• 2 illuminati

• 2 merivingian roylaty

• george jefferson

• archie bunker

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.

Re:7 centuries isn't feasible for humans

[Anonymous Coward]

> How many human societies have survived 7 centuries unchanged?

Chinese culture has. But why are you adding a requirement that the society on ark is impervious to change? As long as they don't get a culture of punching holes in their shielding they should be OK.

Re:Or...

[Anonymous Coward]

they wouldn't find anyone, as the earth is already too hot for higher life forms by then.

Maybe for higher life forms, but what about the rest of us?

Re:Or...

[itsdapead]

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.

Meanwhile, first contact with alien life has taken place on a farm in England, but tragically the message: Gobblegobble wark! gobblegobble, gobblegobble, cro..aaaa...kkkk..."* was not translated in time to prevent the entire landing party from being turned into turkey twizzlers.

* Trans: "Greetings Earthicans. I/we come in geese. I/we am H5N1 from the planet Phlegm. Hurry, this host is weak. I/we must meet with your great leader Jamie Oliver before I/we arrgh..."

Alternatively

[bytesex]

We could just fill the spacecraft with coca cola and mentos tablets, and keep popping them into a bottle every minute. I mean, that's free energy.

The most likely scenario

[passthecrackpipe]

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.

Re:The most likely scenario

[BRUTICUS]

Haha.. actually they would probably be pretty excited and glad to meet up with their ancestors. But it would have been nice if they at least picked them up on the way.

Re:Are we doing option 3 now?

[rohar]

My Waffle Recipe:

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 one of those Tupperware shaker things and shake the yolks, oil and milk together).

Add yolk mixture and cornmeal to flour and stir. I add milk or flour as needed to this to get a pourable batter consistency (about the same a pancake batter). Fold this into the egg whites and stir as little as possible to get an even mixture without losing all the bubbles.

Re:Linux or Windows?

[Fzz]

Plan 9, surely?

Re:Or...

[Joebert]

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.

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.

Re:We could...

[Lumpy]

Hell with the possibility of the crew killing themselves.

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: Photon gathering (and x-rays, RF, IR, etc.)

[Lumpy]

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?

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?

Re: Photon gathering (and x-rays, RF, IR, etc.)

[pintpusher]

Why ever turn such a system off?

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.

Re: Photon gathering (and x-rays, RF, IR, etc.)

[Daetrin]

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.

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 there in patheticness with having your planet demolished to make room for a hyperspace bypass.

Marathon, anyone?

[Jesus_666]

Come on, Mars has more than enough moons; nobody would miss Phobos if we were to carve it out and turn it into a giant colony ship...

robot nannies on strike

[GovCheese]

Any robut smart enough to rear children is simply going to refuse to do so.

New Age Bible

[Tablizer]

by building a gigantic Ark of several miles in radius

You're supposed to measure in cubits, you damned heathen!
     

Re:We could...

[ChrisMaple]

8 - Profit!

Re:7 centuries isn't feasible for humans

[RealGrouchy]

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.

Evidently, this "dictionary" concept needs further refinement.

- RG>

700 years

[Anonymous Coward]

You guys are missing the important point. The only thing worse than spending billions of dollars on building a giant spaceship which won't produce any results until another 10% of recorded history plays out, would be for it to arrive with too few humans to establish a viable gene pool.

What does that mean to the average geek reading this on slashdot? EVERYONE who sets sail on this 700 year voyage will have to get laid!

Re:Using your argument

[ringbarer]

I think the Iraq war is much less like trying to land on an alien world, and more like trying to land on the sun.

Then we go at night - duh!