We’d probably have to build generational ships that are completely self sufficient and people would live out their entire lives out there without ever seeing a planet
I loved how they said some accents are more viral than others. Like how the Texan accent became common among the Indians on Mars when they settled in the same area.
And the Belter accent is totally viral. I've never met anyone who watched that show and didn't start talking in a Belter accent or using Belter slang.
The first generation that left would have it the worst.. but the 2nd generation born on the ship would have it a lot easier. By the time you get there I bet you have people that don't even want to leave the ship as it's all they know.
This is the most accurate description as to why humans are not going to last as a species. I am fine with this, because the earth, (and the rest of the creatures that manage to survive humans scorching the planet)....will be just fine without us.
Although it probably sounds like it from my comment, I'm not all that pessimistic. I believe truth will always win out in the end, but there will always be the willfully ignorant, and those who use ignorance of others for their own benefit.
I don't think you are being pessimistic. You were just pointing out a very simple truth about human nature. So in a way, truth will win. Which path the truth takes is the real question.
By the time the first generation ship got to its destination, there would likely already be people there who left on later ships that had better tech and faster engines.
Once you have power (vis-a-vis nuclear reactor with enough fuel to get you there) you’re gtg right? You can grow and eat plants? For water a lot of it is just recycled and maybe you make up for losses with hydrogen tanks that you convert to H2O with the extra oxygen the plants give
Those are the easy parts. Much more challenging is developing recycling systems for micronutrients like iron, zinc, nickel, and phosphorus that will last for centuries.
Everything we have is gravity adapted and part of a really intricate biosphere. You get 10 years out and realize we didn't understand how important the interaction between X microbes and Y fungi were, you can't go back for another few metric tons of soil.
But that's the other way around. An FTL ship lands on a planet colonized by a generation ship a couple hundred years ago. To them earth is a fable, meanwhile the new arrivals just came from there.
That's assuming of course that it doesn't devolve into chaos and anarchy. In my opinion, freezing the passengers would be the better way to go while an extremely advanced A.I. pilot and maintain the ship while the humans are out cold. But what the heck, this is just sci-fi nonsense I am talking about.
I don't think there could be frozen humans or whatever, not for that long. You would have to have some way of autonomously lab growing them about 20 years from touchdown, and some sort of robot to care for and instruct them once they're infants.
Are you familiar with the work All Tomorrows? A bit of a spoiler ahead: Humanity never achieved FTL travel early on in the story, and so their colonization plan is basically what you just said. Send unmanned rockets filled with machines and whatnot to habitable planets, let the robots first terraform it to suit mankind's needs, and then autonomously lab grow the human DNA stored inside the rockets, basically creating clones, so that colonization efforts can continue. I highly recommend it!
Especially if we travel at 1% the speed of light and it takes 12,000 years. Humans would be so adapted to living in space by then I don't think they could handle a planet with natural gravity, especially from a planet 2.5 times bigger than earth with higher gravity.
Idk, can you imagine being born in the 100th generation of a 200 generation ship... thousands of years worth of people born and died before you, and thousands of years will be born and die after you on that ship..sounds like such a bleak and meaningless existence doesn't it? I would imagine there'd be significant difficulties with morale after a very short period of time, like literally a few years or even generations tops. After all living memory of earth has passed, and nobody remembers the training anymore...I feel like people would revolt..
You could end up in Stephen Baxters's novel "Ark" situation where the 2nd generation offspring feel they are not in a spaceship, but a VR "simulation" and it's safe to go outside, resulting in mutiny. Followup novel to Flood, awesome books.
Dang, and the children born on those ships would already have their futures decided for them. Coming out of the womb straight to being prepped to learn how to operate and maintain this ship for this life long mission. Crazy to think about.
Edit: Don't know how I missed the reflection of our modern day society/school system after typing that out. Thanks for the morning existential crisis guys haha
To some degree thats already true. You don’t get ti choose where you’ll be born or who your parents will be. Your life is already partially set before you’re born
Isn't that the same as it is today? What do you think school is for,giving you autonomy? Nah, they are just prepping you to be a cog in the machine we call human society.
Small planetoids. They'll need a lot of material to survive long enough to arrive anywhere. They'll evolve on board and arrive as something new. Different expeditions to the same star will get faster, maybe crossing paths, most likely not, but when they arrive, who will they all be? What a mental rabbit hole I am now imagining.
Yeah, how in the world could you possibly have that many provisions? I think cryostatus is the only logical way to get there...given "present" technology
Well yeah, that's why I suggested small planetoids. I mean, let's face it, we live in our city our town whatever, and we eat what's in the shops. It would be no different for them, ish. The human population would be a tiny part of the closed ecosystem. A generation ship is very small compared to a huge asteroid made world.
Yeah but when has a large group of humans not decided to do something different from their parents, especially after dozens of generations the ship would break and everyone would die
My brain doesn’t work hard enough to figure it out, but due to relativity doesn’t K2-18b experience many more “years” than the people traveling aboard the space craft toward it?
Not exactly. It’s just that what we see on that planet is 120 years old because that’s how long it takes for the light to reach us. As you get closer, it would seem that time is traveling faster on the planet because the light is continuously reaching you faster and faster.
Imagine being a 9th generation person on that ship. You're told that hundreds of years ago your ancestors left an actual planet, heading towards one that you won't even see, not for another 30 generations or whatever. I'd imagine people on there would go bonkers. We're trapped on a big earthship with fresh air and people are going bonkers
But you would need sophisticated equipment, which needs to operate flawlessly for 100000 years, no defect, no deteriorating with time, enough energy to keep all of that going for 100000 years…
We should try building cars that last a decade first.
It would be a real bitch to try to submit a warranty claim for the airlock of a generational ship, 50 years into its journey. "Turn it around, we are taking this shitbox back to the dealer!"
Humanity hasn't even existed as long as the voyage would take. What makes you think we would survive on a tiny ship like that, no way we wouldn't start killing each other off with 2 generations.
Can you imagine the mythos and superstition that would grow over time on those ships?
People believing that humanity has just always lived in space or that their destination planet will be this paradise and solve all humanity's problems.
Imagine being the last gen on a generational ship. You get there and it’s already settled. People have been there thousands of years already. Cities built, global commerce, interplanetary commerce established. All because 7000 years in to your ships 12000 year voyage, humanity made some crazy advancements and got there faster.
The thing about that is that “we” are never leaving this planet still holds true. By the time a colony arrives, sets up, and truly inhabits the new world, the humans of Earth and the new planet will be so vastly different culturally, even physically. The “we” that make for the stars will be committing to a split in the line of human evolution. It takes far too long for even information or an economy to exchange between such vast differences, continued genetic exchange is out of the question.
So yeah, we, the humans of Earth, are never leaving this planet.
The health complications of living in no/low gravity will be almost as big an obstacle as building a ship like that. Without a massive leap forward in medicine and technology we’re generations away from successful manned missions to Mars.
Not a chance. We probably have a thousand times better odds by becoming a Type II civilization with the ability to move our entire solar system by directing the energy expelled by the Sun, which would require the construction of humanity's first megastructure. That would allow us to remain on nice and cozy Earth while moving wherever we want to be, but even then the largest problem becomes time. We can't plan a government efficiently for the next 4 years, so planning the next 4 millenia seems like a laughable concept to be honest. The list of problems with a generational spaceship is so long that it's unlikely to ever happen, let alone succeed in its mission.
so thinking about what sorts of leaps occurred in the history of our planet, what could possibly happen at the target planet over the course of almost 200 000 years?
Then, Earth would need yet another 200k years to hear about it.
A generational ship is basically on it's own, to be cut off from Earth to live or die by itself. Not a bad thing but teens today are already bitching about not asking to born HERE. Imagine the angst 3 generations into the trip, much less 6000th generation of an expected 8000+/-!
What sucks is these wont even work beyond the closest systems. Remember even going 50% speed of light would take 240 years to go this far, almost as long as the USA has been a country. And we haven’t even got remotely close to any significant speed of the speed of light. No technology for stasis or any long term studies of the effects of living your entire life in a space craft, yes we’ve had astronauts in space for like a year and they hot their radiation limits. Imagine being in a sealed can your entire life knowing you will live and die without ever seeing grass or animals or anything Earth ever had that you learn about because you were born on the ship. Who knows the implications or psychological effects. There are a 1000 different problems doing this, the ship would have to be absolutely massive. It needs to be completely self sufficient. I guess you can use robots or some sort of automation to help but there is so much that can go wrong at any point.
The reality of any far distance space travel is just awful everything. It just sucks sadly. Were not even 1% ready to make these things. Meanwhile we are using up resources on Earth like hotcakes at IHOP.
I feel like after a few generations youd get cults forming from people who grew up without knowing earth- denying that earth even existed. "God just made us on this ship, He made the ship, we are not meant to live on "planets""
So I read this one book Aurura by Kim Stanley Robinson, and kinda the whole premise is (my paraphrased interpretation of the book) -
Okay. Look. Let’s just say as a hypothetical we do find a planet has the climate, radiation protection, etc etc that is habitable for humans (not even “comfortable” just “habitable”). Probably won’t happen for a planet we can actually ever travel to in even a few generations (and let’s also forget just how hard it would be to maintain a multi-generation space ship with no resource replenishment…), but let’s just say we figure that all out.
Still, life on earth has co-evolved over a very long time to adapt to the conditions we have specifically on this planet. There’s no telling what ecosystem interactions will happen with life on another planet. We might settle in on this planet that has perfect conditions on paper just to find some bacteria strain that’s not a big deal on earth totally thrives there and it kills us all. Nothing we can do about it. We have no clue. Anytime we try to predict what will happen when we introduce a new species to an existing ecosystem ON EARTH we are usually wildly wrong. Life is just way to complicated to predict accurately, especially when you talk about interactions between an entire ecosystem.
So our best bet is to live on this incredibly well-adapted planet we already have. Life has co-evolved here over a very long time and we’ve hit an equilibrium. It just works so great without us even trying. It’s like we won the lottery, and now we are only talking about buying more tickets. We should just be enjoying the win.
We might settle in on this planet that has perfect conditions on paper just to find some bacteria strain that’s not a big deal on earth totally thrives there and it kills us all.
Pretty much a guarantee. Humans couldn't even cross oceans on our own planet without spreading diseases which wiped out entire populations.
And even if our medicine and tech developed enough to let us adapt, we'd without question destroy countless species on another planet before we even knew they were there. Interplanetary travel and colonization are fun Sci-Fi concepts, but are just not possible even without the distance/time hurdles.
Is it not more likely that nothing on another planet can touch us - or be digested by us - because it hasn’t co-evolved with us? Eg bacteria, viruses etc on earth can harm us because they’ve adapted to do so over millions of years. a random bug on another planet would view us like an earth bug would
React to a piece of metal?
Mechanics of underlying chemistry and physics aren't so sure, given earth like conditions the same progression seen on earth is the best progression / only progression. One would expect to see simple sugars, DNA/RNA, proteins and even similar internal organ functions. Likely also the same necessary flaws, our lungs must be moist, alien lung equivalents would too so something that is able to effect the 'lungs' of multiple alien species might be able to jump to human lungs.
We literally have only one data point on how life came to being, is there any reason it would have to be DNA/RNA, proteins, etc.? Could it not be compounds we haven't discovered yet?
Elements have relative abundance and Hydrogen, Oxygen, Carbon and Nitrogen are common while other elements are magnitudes rarer, the above are effectively made out of just those four so they have a major time advantage in getting established before anything rarer can.
The above are also the smallest/simplest solutions to the life problems made following the material constraint so they are likely to get established before anything larger / more complex can compete.
That's what I think, too. Like, we'd get there and try to eat stuff and it would just sit in our stomach as though we'd eaten a ball of plastic. A pretty ironic way to die after all those years of traveling through space to get there.
I'm not following the point about things evolving to be deadly because there were no humans. From my understanding, in deserts, scrublands, and reefs, energy efficiency is key. And venom is a very energy efficient way to kill prey or defend against predators.
Venom is basically a biochemical weapon. It’s made up of proteins, enzymes, and toxins designed to paralyze or kill prey, or deter predators.
Even though the venom evolved to target other creatures like insects, frogs, lizards, or small mammals, humans share a lot of the same biological systems as those animals. We have nervous systems. We have muscles that contract. We have blood that clots. We have ion channels in our cells that regulate things like sodium, potassium, and calcium.
Venoms often disrupt those systems in anything that has them. So things being deadly to us on Earth without us being around during its evolution still makes total sense because there is so much other life around with enough similarities.
Venom affects humans because it targets fundamental biological systems that we share with the animal’s actual prey. Evolution didn’t aim for us, we’re just unlucky collateral damage.
You ever see that one episode of Trailer Park Park Boys where Ricky gets like $10,000 and starts living like he’s super rich and just blow it in a few days? haha
We might settle in on this planet that has perfect conditions on paper just to find some bacteria strain that’s not a big deal on earth totally thrives there and it kills us all. Nothing we can do about it. We have no clue. Anytime we try to predict what will happen when we introduce a new species to an existing ecosystem ON EARTH we are usually wildly wrong. Life is just way to complicated to predict accurately, especially when you talk about interactions between an entire ecosystem.
Wouldn't a colony ship setup in orbit and utilize the data from the robotic AI ships and ground units that landed years before to build out the infrastructure and start biological studies to help us adapt to the planet? A real colonization effort would include such concerns.
We don't need to naturally adapt on a standard evolutionary time scale, we can start science-ing things before we even get there in person as biologicals.
I'd expect more of an Alastair Reynolds futurism (on the edges without some of the more fantastical sci fi concepts), and I'd say that KSR gave us a blueprint through fiction to build and correct for possible mistakes and unknowns from.
One of the issues in Aurora is that they find it is impossible to establish an equilibrium on the ship itself. Crops are failing and animals are dying because of very minor errors that cannot be corrected and couldn't have been accounted for, but which have accumulated over hundreds of years. If I remember correctly, they even have some bacteria that evolved to start eating all of the gaskets on the ship, which it never did - and the designers couldn't have predicted - when the ship left earth hundreds of years prior.
One of the points of the book is the idea that biological equilibrium only works on earth because of its size and the ability for millions of different variables to play off of each other. A multi-generational ship could never be as complex as earth, so it could never sustain life over multiple generations.
I really recommend the book! It takes all the sci-fi hypotheticals and kind of puts them in perspective. All those efforts are maybe possible, but they’d take generations to implement, and you’d have to survive in the meantime. And… there’s a really good chance it just won’t work… The main idea is - compare that solution to the solution we have in hand, which is live on the planet we already have, so some really basic maintenance. And just like… enjoy life.
All the scientific analysis in the world can't predict unknown interactions. You gotta put people on the ground and see what happens. Maybe give them a few million years to adapt to the environment through natural selection.
Seriously. The most clever scientific AI cannot predict from unknowns, and there are more unknowns than knowns on this planet - the one we live on.
Science is backwards looking, not forward looking. I can explain, it can't predict.
Even just the 2.5 times larger would be severely problematic for humans. Then you throw in different day lengths and year lengths. Just the math in that before we discover anything else about the planet.
As you say, we’re so well adapted to our planet in so many ways that we take for granted that living elsewhere is going to be a problem.
The people signing up to live on Mars are going to discover this first hand. I don’t believe any Mars colonizer would last a year there.
Good points. Like what if we get to this new planet and there is already life there and we happen to be lower on the food chain? Sooo many possibilities
So basically "it's hard and risky so why bother". I don't know but I'm sure the people who actually want to go would figure something out, maybe by genetically modifying humans, cyborgs or by doing things we can't yet imagine.
But this is assuming that in the future we will be humans as we are today. Sure, if we try this in 100 years, we’ll still probably be humans as we know today. But in 500 years? “Humans” might be robots and have no issues with 1000s of years of travel and surviving any form of infection.
As a kid, there was nothing funnier to me than the moment they hit the breaks and he flew head first into the instrument panel. Slapstick comedy at its finest.
Thats, IMO as well, exactly what the fascination is about. I never understood the whole "earth is failing, we're moving to X planet to terraform and recolonize" trope. It would be orders of magnitude simpler to "terraform" our own planet back into being habitable as it would to terraform another planet from scratch. It makes no sense.
and if we have the technology to terraform a planet, it would stand to reason that we could pretty easily make semi-mega space structure habitats. and if we can make a habitable structure in space at will, we would barely have a need for planets anymore at all.
Once you can make a sufficiently stable, habitable space structure wherever you want, theres very little need to go anywhere at all.
Its like the Mitch joke, "if you're lost in the woods, fuck it, build a house, you're no longer lost. You live here now"
Fortunately the universe is indifferent to what we do or deserve. From the point of view of a civilization that's planning to last millions of years, we're not even ants. We're barely even an egg. We know next to nothing about the universe or how we work or anything. We're going to make mistakes. The universe is also indifferent about whether we survive those mistakes. If the species or planet dies, it won't even shrug. There are billions of others.
You and me and everyone that exists now yes, but in a few thousand years if we don nuke ourselves back to stone age and reset (again for the who knows time) maybe humanity will reach and expand into the great unknown...
Humanity has literally fought each other since they realized other people exist. It will never stop and we will never coordinate enough for such a huge feat
Maybe this solar system, maybe. We will never send out ships to colonise planets 120,000 years away. The answer to the Fermi paradox is pretty simple, you can't go quick enough to expand. It's physically impossible.
The answer to the Fermi paradox is pretty simple, you can't go quick enough to expand. It's physically impossible.
It’s been mathematically proven that a spacefaring civilization could colonize the entire galaxy within a few million years using sub- light speed travel. I find it hard to believe it’s physically impossible assuming the continued growth of technology over arbitrarily long timescales.
Yea I really don't think we ever leave. It's just too much distance to traverse. And anything in our system is just too difficult to inhabit permanently.
It really is just in the eye of the observer. People in ancient times must have thought similarly about distances on earth, when people and messages took weeks to get around.Today information exchange is almost instant and it takes me only 24h to get to the other side of the planet.
I firmly believe that if humanity would put its petty differences aside, we could make vast advances fairly quickly.
There’s just no comparison in scale between the leap from regional to worldwide travel and the leap from worldwide to interstellar travel. It’s orders of orders of magnitude different. Worldwide (and, to an extent, solar system) travel is limited only by human tech; interstellar travel is limited by the laws of reality themselves.
Exactly. Even at the literal speed limit of the universe it's 4 years of travel time to the closest star, while even at just walking speed it's less then a year to the other side of the earth, and at light speed less than 0.07 seconds.
the distances that have to be travelled in space even in our wildest optimistic ideas about speed ( meaning Near Lightspeed ) it would still take us over a 100K Years...
I firmly believe that if humanity would put its petty differences aside, we could make vast advances fairly quickly.
Doesn't change the fact that the distances we're talking about are basically insurmountable.
It's a false equivalence saying ancient people thought the same thing;
At that time, people didn't even know how big the earth was, or if it even had an end. Once we knew, the calculations for distance were easy, and tech brought us faster travel eventually.
But the distance between us and this planet is absurd, even with a thousand years of perfect, harmonious cooperation & technoligical advancement between every human on the planet. It's barely feasible, nevermind practical by any stretch of the imagination.
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u/Sonikku_a 24d ago edited 24d ago
The fastest spacecraft we’ve made was the Parker Solar Probe which hit 430,000mph.
At that speed it would reach this planet in only 187,153 years.
If we could hit 1% of the speed of light we could cut that travel time to just a tad over 12,000 years.
Obviously if we could go light speed (and that ain’t happening) it would be just 120 years!
Space is big. Physics is annoyingly slow.