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)
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 up any traces of our fantastic achievements.
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?
maybe I misunderstood but... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Step one.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Better would be to give the ship a list of target stars likely to have planets, and give it enough reserves to hit every star on the list if necessary. That would take a few thousand years of real-time, but I don't suppose it matters. Nobody that was around when it was launched would live to hear about the first planetfall anyway.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:We could... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:maybe I misunderstood but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Didn't read the article, hmmm ...?
Re:Too many problems (Score:1, Interesting)
Humans can handle more than 1 G (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Too many problems (Score:2, Interesting)
My choice would be to send lots of Generation Ships out from Earth - we have all our eggs in one basket, and it doesn't make sense to only make one more basket.
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.
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.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Canned ape (Score:2, Interesting)
His projections hinge on accelerating progress; one of his key points is that progress isn't as evident as we think. The relative success of economic activity that is 'exposed' to technology(industry that can and does adopt technology quickly rapidly out paces other industry), speaks to this.
Look at computing technology; things are moving so fast that my current metric for buying anything is 'do I really need it right now' because it will be bigger, faster and cheaper in 3 months, 6 months and so on. That's probably a good metric at any time, but for a while, it was worth thinking about whether to get the 40GB disk or the 60GB disk, and it really isn't anymore, the one that fulfills the immediate need for less money is the one to pick. Another example is flash based mp3 players; it isn't real worth spending much more than $100, if you have $200, buy a $100 player and then buy a $100 player again in a little more than 12 months, the second player will be way better than any $200 player that was on the market when you made your first purchase, and so on.
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.
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.
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:7 centuries isn't feasible for humans (Score:1, Interesting)
Antimatter (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why "Fortunately for the human race"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:7 centuries isn't feasible for humans (Score:2, Interesting)
It it doesn't survive unchanged enough to still be part of our culture, why are we bothering to send it?
We'd have to spend a whole lot of resources to send a bunch of Terrans (maybe by this time Solarians, memebers of a system-wide culture) off to colonize another star. Our motivation to bear the expense would be to spread and preserve our culture.
But after seven generations on the Ark, why would their descendants care about that mission? By this time the vast majority of them are quite comfy living on the Ark (or else they've killed each other off). There might be a handful of people interested in a colony, but not enough to make a go of it.
Isolated from Earth, they will have developed their own unique culture, and not care much about ours - and not care about colonization. (In fact after a few generations of isolation and genetic drift, the population might well have formed a distinct species.)
Say you need 1,000 people minimum to make a colony, and one out of a thousand Arkians would be interested and qualified. Then you need a million Arkians, not the 50,000 asumed in TFA. Twenty times the size at the same radius (IIRC, a larger radius on a spinning object makes for structural difficulty, but my physics is rusty and I'm lazy) makes the Ark 200 km long. For comparison, Phobos is 22 km in diameter, Saturn's moon Phoebe is 220 km. We're talking about a ship getting into the range of a large asteroid or small moon. (Yes, yes, cue Obi-Wan saying "That's no moon...")
If we did imagine a MegaArk with a population in the millions, much more likely is that it develops it own unique culture that keeps going across the stars, maybe every so often letting some malcontents off to have a go at their own version of utopian civilization-building.
Nice to imagine, but not a simple matter of spreading our own civilization across the stars. So why would we bother with such a huge expense?
Instead, it would be more practical to build a whole bunch of O'Neill cylinders [wikipedia.org] in the Solar neighborhood, close enough to share culture and keep exchanging people. Maybe in a few billion years when the Sun runs down, all these cylinders migrate in a cloud to a nearby red dwarf.
We will (if we manage to not wipe ourselves out in the next 100 years or so) send probes to other stars. Maybe even freeze a few people and send them out on kamikaze exploratory missions. But interstellar colonization will only happen if new physics and/or new biology (life extension) makes trips possible in a single human lifetime, so that colonies preserve our species and culture.
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:We could... (Score:5, Interesting)
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:We could... (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:The most likely scenario (Score:3, Interesting)
The odds of life forming on earth in the short time period that it did (400-600 million years or so) are astronomically small. Infinitesimally. (Not that I'm a creationist..)
Perhaps instead of embryos they used something even simpler... Which would explain some things about how life formed on earth.
Heck one could even surmise that because they couldn't "teach" life that simple, it was selected because it could eventually evolve to become like them; however that could easily *not* be us. For an even bigger stretch, what if it is "us", and part of the 'code' was an inherent desire to return to space. Seeking out our progenitor's.... (Or to do as you suggest and repeat the process..)
Some food for thought anyway..
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.
Classical Physics - in Star Trek (Score:2, Interesting)
Since they were humans from Earth, the prime directive didn't apply (not that Kirk was very good about that anyway), so it was left to the Enterprise crew to drag them kicking and screaming into the 24th century
That's a common theme in Sci-Fi though, generation ships where the inhabitants believe the ship is the world, and forget the mission. How does anyone keep at a task for 700 years?
Re: Why "Fortunately for the human race"? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
We already have millions... (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't think getting people to live onboard a huge ark ship would be all that hard, and it would be well tolerated if it was large enough/designed with some "great" rooms for enjoyment as an alternative "outdoors", and balanced with the population on the ship after some research. I don't know how much squarefootage per person they would need, but it isn't much given the contentment with crowded cities you can see. No additional evolution required really. Have an ark "replica" on the ground, all volunteers, after initial screening, for the final test, must undergo six months inside of that to weed out folks who just can't hack it. You could probably also get some psych studies from the cruise ship industry and from various navies submarine services, and from Antarctica research colonies to see what problems arise and how they are overcome. Prisons wouldn't be good to study because it is the opposite of voluntary.
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: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