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."
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?
Step one.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
We have seen the Borg
Too many problems (Score:5, Insightful)
I think we have to face option 4 ... (Score:1, 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
Re:Ark B? (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Lots of smaller arks (Score:3, Insightful)
O'neill (Score:2, Insightful)
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:7 centuries isn't feasible for humans (Score:2, Insightful)
The human problem is likely just as big as the technological problem, but the people that walk off the ship don't actually have to speak the same language as the people who walked onto the ship(if they read a lot they will speak a roughly similar language anyway).
Re:I think we have to face option 4 ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway under that assumption lets really view the time frame. The last 30000 years have been boring on the sea if you were in a boat with only limited jumps forward until 4000 years ago when the jumps really started to pile on top of each other and suddenly boats really started moving forward. Overland travel saw this event over the last 300 years from horse back to maglev trains. Powered planes didn't even exist at the start of last century and within a century of existing they have already reached scramjet abilities (some thing books I've read from the sixties joked about as never happening in their life time or even ever). Which leaves us with space flight...From the Germans flinging rocks around in WW2 to landing rovers on Mars and exploring it in well under a century. The advances have been insane so really as long as there are advantages to the general population and adventures like this don't detract from needing issues I believe the question becomes why not?
As for the time scape between now and when black holes wipe out everything it isn't worth thinking about. Many generations will have hopefully had a bit more fun while living as a result of exploring everything...Heck there may even be life out there that gives the question to the great answer.
Only possible route for interstellar travel (Score:2, Insightful)
Humans are incredibly fragile (both physically and psychologically), live short lives, and space is immense and utterly hostile.
Years ago I worked through a lot of numbers for fusion ramjets, antimatter, laser-powered sails et al.
The only interstellar travel I can see us ever doing is as frozen embryos.
Generation ships would be bloated tombs. There would be a serious shortage of funding and volunteers. People won't consign themselves to die without reaching a destination, after years spent inhaling each other's BO.
Self-reproducing intelligent robots, OTOH, could crawl along between the stars at 1% c happily. 1,000 years of travel is nothing to something that can turn itself off and then back on.We could travel with them, in the aformentioned frozen embryo form, to be gestated in artifical wombs on arrival.
Interstellar ships will never be built by humans. No return on investment and no glory in a lifetime = no deal. Self-reproducing robots are the way to go.
Re:O'neill (Score:3, Insightful)
Venus looks really good from a distance (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:7 centuries isn't feasible for humans (Score:2, Insightful)
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: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.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Details of the theory aside, evolution as a concept is the theory I believe in most in all of science--and I'm a physics grad student, so that's no small confession. That is because it follows from logical arguments, irrespective of the world you live in. It is not only compatible with everything we know about science, it is probably true *independent* of the laws of physics. Regardless of the value of the fine structure constant, the validity of string theory, or the response of the oceans to absorbing 10^12J of heat, one can still say, "the organism best suited to its environment will be the most likely to propagate into the future." The independence of evolution from scientific laws and parameters is a very, very powerful concept.
Of course, there's all sorts of fun to be had determining what constitutes "best suited to its environment"--perhaps it's best suited because it can build a giant rocket and get OUT--and determining how something "propagates into the future"--does it live as long as a turtle or reproduce quickly like a bacterium? One could even see how far one could extend the definition of "organism" and still have this statement hold. I suspect quite far. In these questions is where science lives, figuring out the fascinating and sometimes very important details. But however important it may be, it will always be in some sense a "mop-up" operation for figuring out the special cases of the logical necessity that is evolution.
Re:7 centuries isn't feasible for humans (Score:3, Insightful)
So, we probably aren't going to go until we can have the same crew that left be the one that arrives. Then, as others have pointed out, if we can build a habitable environment capable of traveling to E. Eridani, Tau Ceti, or any of the other nearby possibly suitable stars, we can build environments which don't travel, sit in orbit in our own solar system, and are simply lived in. By the time we're worried about our own sun going nova, necessitating our leaving for elsewhere, we'll have long since gone extinct, and been replaced a few dozen times.
Re:7 centuries isn't feasible for humans (Score:2, Insightful)
If we can build an ark... (Score:1, Insightful)
If anything goes wrong, it's possible to get things fixed in a somewhat reasonable amount of time. You are also staying near a source of power (the Sun), and aren't throwing the dice by risking all those lives and all that technological investment compared to travel between stars.
The "Ark" would thus be put to practical use, while we wait for propulsion technology to mature. Let's say we send the Ark, and it will take like 100 years to get there. What if we have a breakthrough 30 or 40 years after it leaves? What do you do then? Let them keep going, and meet them at their destination with a fully built settlement?
Re:We could... (Score:5, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphans_of_the_Sky/ [wikipedia.org]
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.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re: Why "Fortunately for the human race"? (Score:5, Insightful)
And for the presumably black men who first stepped out of Africa...
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:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Claiming "scientists can be wrong" is not an argument. Everyone can be wrong. It is up to you to show that they are wrong, despite the evidence to the contrary.
Re:We could... (Score:1, Insightful)
Have the oldest be in charge.
Have elections for "president" who then appoints a commander (a la battlestar galactica)
In any case, the earth is basically like a really giant ark.
I think that there is an acceptable level of division and if you had a cultural zietgist systematically instilled that you'd need everyone to survive in the colony you could probably grow each generation of humans in the ark with a huge respect for life and teamwork. Humans really do respond well to imprinting so if you choose the values carefully and you setup a social structure that changes power and doesn't implicitly recognize groups, I think its totally possible for them to survive and get there and make a successful colony.
What is most interesting is, what sort of things would we send with them? Waste, water, and everything would have to be rigidly controlled and the there could be very little refuse. There'd have to be a whole bunch of interesting survival techniques thought out because once you put them in the ship, there might not be a whole lot of dynamic adaption possible to these problems.
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.)
Arthur C. Clarke - Rama - Revisited (Score:2, Insightful)
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:The engineering (Score:3, Insightful)
Interstellar communications (Score:1, Insightful)
Suppose a ship travels for seven centuries, you can expect about 30 generations of people to be born in that time. Apparently, kids today are using text messaging abbreviations in their school papers, and the teachers have a hard time understanding them.
Will the people on earth be able to decipher a message sent by the travelers by the time they get to where they were going? If we desire to ever become an interstellar civilization, I think spelling and grammar nazis will have an important role to play.
Re:Why "Fortunately for the human race"? (Score:1, Insightful)
You know, being civilized != being a pussy.
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.
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
3 is no option right now (Score:2, Insightful)
The next problem is. To get everything up in space. This is a very energy intensive task. As the ark must be really big. Bigger than a pleasure cruiser. Far bigger. Beside the cost, this will have a significant impact on the ecosystem on earth.
The last big problem is the life support. Projects like Earth II failed tragically. So there is work to do on this end also.
To sum it up. We need some real technological advances before we can start to build the ark. And one is to implement a working energy support for this space ship (earth), which works and cooperates with the life support system. Also we have a resource problem in other areas as well. So this has to be solved too.
This could lead to low power technology, which would at least solve problem one of the ark.
Re:Easier way to colonize the universe (Score:3, Insightful)
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 testament to our adaptability over the course of some generations.
I mean, look at the cultural differences we have between continents, much less in between different planets and star systems.
Re:Easier way to colonize the universe (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Economics of interstellar travel (Score:2, Insightful)
I think you (unintentionally) put your finger on it. That sounds like a very realistic scenario of what would have to happen. Problem, reaction, solution.
That asteroid supposedly coming near earth in a few decades could be an excellent pretext, or problem. Even if it didn't hit the earth, it could probably be simulated with enough hydrogen bombs in the middle of an ocean. The populace could be effectively prepped by a few movies like Armageddon. Tsunamis take out a few ocean cities.
People clamor for humanity to be saved, and are willing to face outrageous taxes etc to fund the ark.
At that point, either the ark gets built, or it gets a movie made about it and various politicians / ark contractors pocket the funds.
Stages (Score:2, Insightful)
When the time comes to add propulsion, we will have progressed much more in terms of the physics of star-drives. If we haven't progressed enough? Leave it there, have a space colony, send it to mars and back, whatever -- it's not like it's going to be a waste... Think of the sheer magnitude of the construction effort to build this thing and how much easier it will be in the future to design an ark if we already have a gigantic shell to work with.
Think about star trek when they first develop the warp engine. What comes next? The enterprise wasn't built in a day for sure...
Re:We could... (Score:2, Insightful)
Jamestown wasn't founded by the brightest, most hardworking, or even tolerant people; it was founded by the bottom rung of society (Georgia was essentially a prison colony) and religious fanatics. As long as they realize that they have to eat and breathe and what to do to be able to do that, things should work out fine.
New speculation? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The engineering (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's go someplace else in the solar system first (Score:2, Insightful)
Your idea is nonsense (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sounds Familiar... (Score:2, Insightful)
Gentry Lee hopped on and wrote the majority of the next three books in the series, turning Arthur C. Clarke's timeless novel of discovery into a trilogy of bickering, narcisistic characters and bungling political pundits.
Heh... Sorry, I guess I'm still bitter about that one.
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
Re:We already have millions... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Good luck with that (Score:2, Insightful)
You guys are having trouble with this concept so I'll say it again slowly.
No American is going to achieve anything near this scale again, ever in history. It's over. It's done. There is no more "Great America". Get over it. We have traded our energetic, optimistic overwhelmingly adventurous spirit to 5th Avenue Marketing wizards for Pergo floors and SlimFast; to Microsoft and the RIAA for self-expiring entertainment we can buy over and over again. We have surrendered it to the serial drama that is electoral politics. We gave it up because we swallowed the notion that it is wrong to win. We don't have the focus to make it through a two hour movie, let alone a seven year plan. We are cattle. That's not going to change.
Even if some dreamer got a good start at something big, he would still be shut down before he achieved it, no matter how much help he got at first.
That's the tragic thing. It still looks like we can meet lofty goals, but before they're within our grasp they will always be shut down by lack of public confidence or failures of leadership or another new reform administration, waning popularity, budget shortfalls, economic changes, an infestation of lawyers or some other reason.
It makes me sad, but it's time we accepted our passive role and quit wasting time and money on trying to do things we are no longer capable of. We've reached our dotage and it's time for a fresh spirit to shoulder the load. Barely two hundred years, too. That's not long in national age. We burned out fast. Well, it was ever the "grand experiment". It went well for a while I think.
Who's got next?
Re:This is a lousy solution (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? (Hint, bigger than "a few meters"). If they're not charged, are they magnetic? (In that case, they'll be sucked INTO the field, DEcelerating the craft). If they're neither charged nor magnetic, why do you think they'll be affected by a magnetic field?
You don't carry human crew, but self replicating machines.
Now, that's a good idea. But not a new one.
Quantum teleportation (a practical technique, demonstrated in the lab) would be used to transmit the key memory state molecules of a human brain.
And why would you use quantum teleportation for that? How do you get at the "key memory state molecules" inside a brain, and do you intend it to operate afterwards? (If you do, and if quantum state is really so necessary to "uploading", have you considered the no-cloning theorem?). And when you have transferred the state to photons, how does the transmission work across light years? (Remember, you need single photon efficiency, or someones memory will end up jumbled...)
To be blunt: You don't know what you're talking about, and neither do those who modded you up. Take a couple of physics courses.