Is this enough for a healthy breeding population?
[1]https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article-abstract/229/1/iya...
[2]https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/42/2/msaf041/8005733
[3]https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.03.25.586640v1
Aside: The biblical story of the Ark and the flood in ripped off wholesale from Sumerian and Akkadian narratives.
Well, that, and how do you ensure that the people 400 years from now would know what they are for or how to implant them?
Lots of unknowns. Would make for an interesting story though
A ship travelling at 0.01c for 400 years could get 4 ly away. They'd still be able to be coached. More likely: their computers would still be able to be updated.
Like do you really care how long it takes to get somewhere if it subjectively happens in the blink of an eye? Would you even necessarily be likely to lose your own peer group if you all spent significant time in hibernation travel between meetings?
Or those people of the past who would for generations not leave their village/county doing the same thing generation after generation.
(small case in point - back in USSR we were happy that we were born in that wonderful country USSR and not in those decadent dangerous inhumane capitalist societies of the West where people were forced to struggle everyday to avoid becoming one of those numerous hungry homeless filling to the brim the dirty decaying cities of the West which they were showing us on the Soviet TV while we were supposedly on a mission to build better/higher/ideal society consisting of a new better entity "Soviet man" - "The Soviet man was to be selfless, learned, healthy, muscular, and enthusiastic in spreading the communist Revolution." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Soviet_man - note how the first 4 qualities work for interstellar, and they are pretty common among various other ideologies and religions, and the specific target for the 5th - for the enthusiasm - is just adjusted according the specific ideology or religion, and "spreading human civilization" wouldn't be even half-bad like some others out there)
The human population fell to fewer than 10,000--possibly under one hundred--in the last Ice Age [1][-1]. There were almost certainly bands of fewer than 1,000 individuals who had to migrate for generations.
> life will get boring and pointless fast
Maybe on v1000. The first tens could expect a constant war footing against entropy and the unknown.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/h...
[-1] Possible counterfactual: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44818098
Nature produces a truly unlimited amount of novelty, especially if you’re moving through it.
I'm sure it was a lot of fun, in the Dwarf Fortress sense.
Medieval builders built Catherdrals that they knew wouldn't be finished in their lifetime.
Heading off on a multi-generation mission with no guarantee of success is not for most people. But there are billions of us. I'm sure they would easily find enough people to crew a mission.
Having said that I worry about the sustainability of these projects. If these are not indefinitely sustainable on arrival, then future generations are doomed to die out with no hope of survival. I’ve no problem with a carefully judged risk, there are no guarantees in life, but there has to at least be a reasonable chance.
What makes an object unique then is the specific configuration of the particles that make up that object. This configuration is a form of information.
Fortunately, we already know how to transmit information at the speed of light; no new physics required. This then reduces the problem to transporting the ‘printer’. No generation ship required. You need something that harvests particles locally and can receive a stream of data with what to print. You can bootstrap this, send a tiny particle harvester/printer that can print a slightly larger printer, etc.
It also remains to be seen if you can 'print' a complex biological object, like a human.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_(physics)
A particle spins on any number of axes
> You need something that harvests particles locally and can receive a stream of data with what to print
You cannot obtain that data because this spin is impossible to measure)
I mean think about what we do all day. We stay in our little rooms, pushing some tasks we're told to do, and cherish our friends, spouses, and kids, and then we die without seeing 99.9999% of the spaceship we're already riding (Earth).
All it takes is one short-sighted group to break something important to protest real (or perceived) injustice.
It already happens in the real world all the time.
Love the designs, doubt democracy would get them through more than 250 days, let alone 250 years.
Would such a project be particularly volume constrained?
> doubt democracy would get them through more than 250 days, let alone 250 years
I don't. You'd be selecting for extraordinary individuals and educating them. These sorts of societies propagated for hundreds or even thousands of years in antiquity just fine.
The colonists be in a life-or-death system in a community small enough that everyone knows of everyone else personally. To the extent humans are almost uniquely exceptional at one thing as a hominid, it's exploration and colonization--I woudn't be surprised if this group winds up more functional due to scratching an underlying human need to explore and push boundaries.
It would be mass constrained because of the sheer cost of getting it all into orbit, even with advanced tech such as space elevator. And more volumne = more mass.
There is a saying in aerospace design along the lines of 'weight breeds weight'. Heavier components necessitate stronger, and therefore heavier, supporting structures.
As for democracy "These sorts of societies propagated for hundreds or even thousands of years in antiquity just fine" - I don't know of any that practised the consensus driven democracy that almost all these proposals use. Ant if you're reaching into antiquity then not even normal democracies. Unless you're talking about a Athens with their slaves and adult male citizen population having a vote. In which case sure, I can get behind that but that's not what those spaceship designs propose. They all assume all decisions will be unanimous and no one will ever break the law.
In actual fact history proves the opposite and all exploration and conquest is driven by strict hierarchical organisations and the idea that you can fly a spaceship across light years without a captain who can condemn people to death is laughable.
At the point that we're building 60 km spaceships, yes, I think that's a possibility.
> you're reaching into antiquity then not even normal democracies
The further back we go the more consensus-driven small societies get. I'm also reaching back due to familiarity. There are plenty of small island communities that did fine for generations on their own.
> They all assume all decisions will be unanimous and no one will ever break the law
Sorry, I missed this in the winning design. Where does it say that?
> all exploration and conquest is driven by strict hierarchical organisations
If you need to bring an army, yes. I don't think we know how hierarchical Polynesian settlers were.
I didn't notice any prisons included in the design, so that assumption seems fair.
Does it?
You don’t need dedicated prison space as you won’t have a permanent prison population. (Depending on labour requirements and resource availability this may not be a choice.) Nothing about not having a prison implies no hierarchy. And you don’t need prisons to “condemn people to death.”
Teams would submit proposals for the design of a permanent space settlement (sometimes on the surface of a body, sometimes orbiting). Winners from across the world were invited to compete together live in 4 huge multi-national teams to design and pitch another settlement over a long sleepless weekend. As a two-time finalist, I can say it was an incredible experience for so many reasons.
This new competition seems like its goal is to actually take the design/ideation of working professionals as a serious output, as opposed to the educational value of simulating this sort of thing for students, which is what drove the ISSDC.
Coincidentally, it has been exactly 10 years since and my photos app resurfaced some of the memories. Good times.
While it’s interesting, the only things that sell trips to space are cheap ways to get additional resources (information or materials), steady flows of income (from recurring tourism, travel, services), or war/defense.
Long, expensive one-way trips that require incredible amounts of money to pull off will never, ever make business sense.
The only reason explorers were funded hundreds of years ago was the promise of vast amounts of gold, magical life-extending water, mysterious new jewels and materials, wild native art, new sources of food, beautiful mostly naked natives that would look to you as gods and be your slaves willingly, and a shitton of fertile land to farm and colonize; and it must benefit the homeland within a reasonable time period, preferably not more than a year or two.
I bet that their descendants would find the idea of seasickness amusing, since they would probably be nearly immune to it.
I know Interstellar did not ignore the spin, but do movies like Star Wars just ignore the entire concept?
What's a rough idea about how much Chrysalis would weigh?
2.4M tons it says. ~2.2B kg = $8.8 trillion dollars just for the launch costs alone?
I also thought this was interesting from the 2nd place booklet. Did not know this.
>The chance of a successful pregnancy in deep space without a geomagnetic field is essentially zero.
>During mitosis and meiosis, microtubules depend on a stable magnetic field to orient the mitotic spindle and ensure accurate chromosome segregation — processes critical for embryonic growth. A spacecraft lacking any magnetic field would halt human reproduction, dooming both the mission and the survival of the colony.
That seems wrong to me. The last time I calculated it out, the Earth's magnetic field isn't that strong, and for someone on earth's surface is dwarfed even by high voltage power lines. This is due to the Earth magnetic field radiating out from the iron core which is much farther away at the surface compared to the power lines, and declining by the square root law.
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5h9is2/why_does...
It makes sense because if any of what they said was true we would have to constantly be worrying about magnetic fields around us, which are much stronger than the earth's, affecting our mitosis and meiosis. Your sperm would be completely screwed up if you had a magnet in your pocket when they were created.
Speaking as a biologist that's not true.
And let's aside the serious ethical issue of you choosing to board such a ship vs the offspring you have who definitely did not consent, some of whom may not even make it to the destination.
So a generational colony ship looks a lot like an O'Neil Cylinder [1]. It can spin to create 1g gravity and support enough people to make it to the destination.
The issue is energy. An orbital can support itself with solar power when around a star and doesn't need a form of propulsion. An interstellar ship will need an alternative energy source and also have a propulsion system that can sufficiently accelerate and decelerate. The energy budget for the propulsion is so large that the life support energy budget is a rounding error.
The only realistic policy I see is solar sails. This avoids the reaction mass issue. You need to decelerate at the other end. Part of that you get from drag in the interstellar medium. You either carry reaction mass for the rest or you go ahead and use automated systems to build the solar sail equivalent on the other end to decelerate you.
Controlled fusion has a fundamental problem: neutrons. Even if you solve the problem of container destruction (ie neutron embrittlement), which is significant, you still face the problem of significant energy loss to the system through high-energy free neutrons.
Stars solve this problem by simply being really large so a free neutron can't really go that far without hitting another nucleus, particularly because fusion happens at the core.
The hope with commercial fusion research is that we can somehow avoid the container destruction issue and have sufficient energy generation (given the energy inputs) despite the free neutron energy loss but it's unclear if that'll ever happen.
I am a big space exploration fan, but beyond our solar system, it's probably best thought of as a fantasy entertainment genre.
That eliminates biology as a constraint. What a life for our descendants so consigned, generations to live and die on a ship so that their descendants in turn could one day revolve around a foreign sun. I'm sure at some nth generation they will resent us for sending them away from the happiness of Spaceship Earth.
It would be an amusing result if the only ones with the fortitude necessary to endure this are those religious enough in belief and purpose.
Sort of like sending a cell capable of life and creating more life.
Aliens are always sending such probes here in scifi, so why don't we do it, too?
Solar sail or nuclear?
How big would the payload be?
Given that the payload would be tiny compared to a generation ship, I expect the powerplant would be able to get it there much faster.
> Solar sail or nuclear?
Solar sail won't work outside the solar system.
> How big would the payload be?
We cannot build it yet. But I expect the technology to do it seems possible.
codeulike•7h ago
https://www.canva.com/design/DAGmr3ubC8E/LHHAeeAIGGQe_TkZVs-...
virgildotcodes•6h ago
kylecordes•6h ago
JumpCrisscross•6h ago
The winning proposal coasts at 0.01c. Propulsion systems--not the speed of light--and thus engineering, not phsyics, are the relevant limitors.
jvanderbot•6h ago
Cathedrals were built over 100s of years. Imaging just living in a massive one and your whole holy purpose is to survive and thrive and spread.
It's entirely reasonable we'd have the will to make it happen, and pretty reasonable we'd be able to build it with planet scale effort, but sadly quite difficult to imagine it surviving even dust impacts for 400 years.
JumpCrisscross•5h ago
Whipple shields [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield
privatelypublic•4h ago
JumpCrisscross•2h ago
Everything is consumed on such a voyage. If we can send a generation ship at 0.01c, we can send replacement parts quicker and probes ahead to verify our estimates even faster.
jvanderbot•3h ago
Vs
> 0.1c
Off by quite a bit
JumpCrisscross•2h ago
Apocryphon•5h ago
os2warpman•3h ago
“The indefatigable spirit of exploration” isn’t the answer. People, as a mass, only explore to find new resources due to scarcity.
There are exceptions, but they tend to be thrill seekers or publicity hounds seeking to capitalize on a measure of fame upon their return and dying on a spacecraft 1/5th of the way through its journey isn’t thrilling and no ticker tape parades await your return.
If you can build a spacecraft capable of sustaining 1,000 human lives for multiple centuries, you’ve solved all local resource scarcity problems. You could just mine the solar system and build billions of habitats that lazily circle the sun.
Hell, you wouldn’t even care about habitable planets anymore and a likely endpoint for any interstellar efforts would likely be a long-lived star with large orbiting gas giants you could turn into solid materials in order to build trillions of habitats orbiting that star, not an insignificant earth-like boulder.
Imagine turning all of the methane in a gas giant into carbon strands, using its hydrogen to do it and building a near-infinite number of habitats, each perfectly suited to human existence.
An earth-like planet with its quakes and tsunamis and seasonal cycles would seem pathetic.
JumpCrisscross•2h ago
Empirically totally untrue as to be trivially disproven by like half of wealthy social media.
> thrill seekers or publicity hounds seeking to capitalize on a measure of fame upon their return
Everyone on these ships would be a celebrity on Earth. (Ideally, if they so chose.)
Again, a simple reading of one-way trip settler-explorers across history similarly rejects this notion.
> If you can build a spacecraft capable of sustaining 1,000 human lives for multiple centuries, you’ve solved all local resource scarcity problems
The first several of these ships are likely to end in catastrophe. The first to succeed will be breaking down on arrival. If we learn to build luxurious space habitats it will be through these endeavours.
os2warpman•2h ago
A week in Bali is not the same thing as interstellar travel…
JumpCrisscross•2h ago
Are you genuinely unfamiliar with the folks who launch off on their own into the deep wilderness for years on end. Not only for vanity, but largely to do groundbreaking research?
munificent•3h ago
We couldn't even reliably get people to put a piece of fabric over their face to stop killing their own relatives. Even if we could build a generation ship, it would turn into an Event Horizon hellscape if we don't figure out better cultural, communication, and sociological tools to enable us to get along and work together effectively.
JumpCrisscross•2h ago
Rural Americans couldn’t. But I don’t see anyone proposing we put high school dropouts and polio patients in space.
China, India and Japan managed to pass that test just fine. I imagine one of the former two will be the first to colonise deep space.
mighmi•1h ago
aeve890•43m ago
>Limiting Factor
I see what you did here.
scythe•3h ago
My guess is that we will colonize the asteroid belt (Palladium! So much palladium!) and send lots of interstellar probes long before we try to send humans outside the solar system. Right now we're like a village that lives by a river and has never reached the mouth talking about sailing across the ocean. There are a lot of intermediate stages.
andrewflnr•49m ago
qingcharles•1h ago
I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but it's kinda boring out there. We'd certainly not want to make the trek until the robots had scoured the galaxy looking for a fun place to visit. And by that time we'll all be living in some post-Singularity holodeck and won't give a hoot about some empty rock 600 light years away.
Send the bots. I'll watch the highlight reel from my pod.
jvanderbot•6h ago
AtlasBarfed•4h ago
Are all of these handwaving propulsion? They seem to all be habitat designs.
Ok I'll take my shot at propulsion:
Pulse nuclear BUT:
For acceleration, we have a launch gun that fires more fuel at the ship, and the ship catches the fuel, imparting momentum from the catch, and more fuel for acceleration.
For deceleration, we have pellets that it catches up to and uses the catching to slow down with, AND gains fuel to decelerate.
If the catch can be done like an ion drive in efficiency, then you get ion drive efficiencies while gaining fuel for the pulse nuclear accelerations/decelerations.
The real problem would be timing the deceleration "catches", and a HELL of a railgun.
We aren't really doing this in current physics without a massive and functional orbital/planetary economy that gives cheap nuclear fuel and materials. We'll probably need solar wind antimatter harvesters as well, if those are actually a thing.
vl•3h ago
In your design how is it going to catch up to pellets if it's decelerating? I.e. pellets need to be pre-decelerated for this. Which raises the question, would it be cheaper just to bring all deceleration fuel onboard.
amenhotep•3h ago
fuckinpuppers•4h ago
vl•3h ago
Power provided by toroidal nuclear fusion reactors in the outer shell of the living module, but why do you need such reactors if your primary propulsion is provided by Helium 3 - Deuterium Direct Fusion Drive? If you have direct fusion technology, you don't need toroidal reactors.
Rotating inner shells mechanically for 400 years is terrible design, it's much easier just to rotate entire structure. Once it's going it keeps rotating inertially!
Another comment points to error in speed calculation - at declared acceleration they should go at 0.1c, not 0.01c!
And what is missing of course is the calculation of how many years of current world's GDP is required to complete such project event if all yet-to-be invented technologies exist.
nn3•3h ago
Regarding the GDP needed once you have a working "mine from the moon and send to orbit" economy it doesn't seem to be too bad. The assumption would be that a lot of technology is already developed for other projects. Launching it all from earth obviously wouldn't be possible even with vastly cheaper launch. That's why they put the build into the moon-earth L1 lagrange point to be easily reachable from the moon.
For propulsion and reactors, but there are multiple projects today working on all of this. Building a life support system for 400 years is still an unsolved problem however.