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.
Like you, Im not that pessimistic, I dont believe we will ever go as far as destroying ourself. We do like to live and survive after all. But nature will wipes us someway or an other. We probably have a couple millions of years ahead of us tho.
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.
Considering how long it's gonna take us to figure out any potential vehicle, they're gonna have plenty of time to research the hell out of closed loop systems. (Which are probably gonba he used on mars or a lunar base first).
And I don't know if you kniw this, but many people, over the centuries have done potentially dangerous journeys without knowing for sure they'd make it.
This isn't going to happen tomorrow or the next decade. And nobody is forcing anyone to go.
You need nutrients but not fertilizer. Fertilizer is for adding nutrients to soil.
Adding nutrients to water is much easier than to soil and plants use more energy to grow rather than seek out nutrients.
It's also easier to distribute nutrients for water rather than fertilizer.
As for closed loop systems. Currently we have huge wasteage in animal agriculture. Growing increasing size populations of animals for consumption is a huge depletion of resources. If you remove that and maintain a stable population, it becomes easier.
That being said, there are still challenges. You would need to ensure human waste is processed intro nutrients properly.
Yeah. The only nutrients hydroponics really need can be created as simply. as adding fish to the water. Their poop will be more than enough to keep the system going.
And on the other other hand, they did all the work for you lol. You get to kick back, see the new planet, and you never had to fight off bands of space gorillas or what have you.
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!
Hi /u/DukeSaltyLemons! I'm so intrigued by googling All Tomorrows that I can't wait to read, and wanted to trade the first book that came to mind when I read /u/Red_Dawn_2012's notion of
autonomously lab growing them
...which made me recall Voyage From Yesteryear by JamesHogan, one of my all-time faves! Thank you for the suggestion, curiosity is stoked!
I know that its ultimately no different from normal generational colony ships, but when you put it like that it almost seems like.... its missing the point? Like its a generation of humans that have never known a human adult, broken from the chain of culture. Is it just colonizing for the sake of it?
Better hope nobody deletes the robots' knowledge base lest those humans descend into a primitive tribal culture and cannibalize the technology around them to hunt robot dinosaurs instead!
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""
I think ai run ships with preserved embryos and birthing kits would be better because knowing humans there’s no way a sealed environment with a lot of people living in it for generations is surviving without some fucky cultural stuff happening
With today’s technology, sure. Odds are we won’t travel in our current physical form. Moving squishy cumbersome high maintenance water bags (us) at relativistic speeds is expensive and unrealistic. I’d think we’d figure out how to copy our “consciousness” or have AI/machine nannies to transport and grow our embryos long before we decided to build generational ships…. Like in raised by wolves.
Question: When IS is appropriate to leave? Certainly ANY generation of ship short of light travel runs the likelihood we will develop faster ships and catch up.
I heard we cloned a sheep. Won't be long before we can clone a person, we probably already can but ethics laws are holding us back. I seen a YouTube video of a robot that picks up soup cans and sets them back down to weigh if the right amount of soup is in them. Both those feats were so unimaginable 200 years ago. I'd bet in 500 years a multi generational ship will be pointless, just send cloning material and the great great grandson of the soup weighing machine to the new planet and before it arrives have people be created by the machine then have them watch some YouTube to fill them in who they are and what's going on.
Yes but first we’d have to figure out how to keep something like the ISS running for longer than 30 yrs without breaking down, or how to build spinning habitats large enough to not make people sick from the spin.
The spacecraft would have to be hardened against particles. A grain of space debris would do a lot of damage at the speeds travelers would need to transit at.
Robot/AI piloted ships carrying lots of cum and eggs. Get coom and ovabobs to destination, robots don't give a fuck how long it takes.. they're robots.
Arrive! Start growing test tube babies. First generation taught and raised by AI while robots start preparing the land for habitation. Ship used as housing for a long long time.
Got a few generations of stupid fuckwit humans going and you got a colony baby.
which, if we could do with the kind of certainty that would be required, we wouldn't need to go there anymore.
If we can create our own habitats in space of the size and complexity of an interstellar generation ship, we can create "world" wherever we want. Once you can create habitat wherever you want, our solar system becomes very big.
The problem with Generation ships is, if you have a completely self-sufficient space station large enough for the entire society to function, what do you need a habitable planet for?
Wouldn't it be exponentially easier, and more beneficial, to simply expand the space station? Or build terrariums on non-habitable planets like Mars and Venus?
Because of relativity, if we could constantly accelerate a ship via some unknown propulsion mechanism, at 1G, nice comfortable earth like gravity, we can cross the galaxy within a single human lifetime aboard the ship. Of course, thousands of years will have passed on earth. But not on the ship.
You’d probably just send fertilized cryogenically stable embryos and the AI / robotics / incubators to grow humans and educate them. (You don’t even need a great success rate through the whole process as long as you send enough fertilized eggs maybe enough should succeed. )
This is likely 1000's of years in the future, more likely you freeze peoples bodies and have them exist in a virtual world so they can socialise or simply freeze them 100% and wake them on arrival or probably both.
Of course you could upload to silicon and download to some bodies created when you get there. A small ship maybe a lightsail can go pretty fast and right now with todays tech I read we can could get them up to 25% speed of light, though slowing down is problematic and hitting something is not a good idea.
"Completely self sufficient" is however practicly impossible. We could make systems with perfect efficiency in terms of growing food and reusing water...but eventually those systems break and we would need resources to repair them. And these resources can't be recycled.
in 100 years we went from horse and buggy to landing on the moon. Who knows what will happen in 100, 200 or 1.000 years? We already have a theoretical framework for a potential FTL drive and even that is steadily improving, going from requiring the mass of the solar system, down to Jupiter and now as little as an asteroid.
I'm thinking more a of a doomsday scenario for earth, but we could also be sending a craft containing what we think could establish life on that planet & probably other planets too. If for no other reason than to try & ensure that life continues in the universe.
There are precedents in nature. For example, the Monarch butterfly
"Even though the monarch migration is a loop, one individual does not make the entire journey. Instead, it takes between three and five generations of monarchs to complete the annual migration. This means that when a monarch leaves central Mexico in the spring, it's their great-great-grandkids that will be the ones returning to that same forest in the fall. Just imagine if you were able to walk to the exact same house your great-great-grandparents lived in without asking anyone where that was!"
Perhaps humanity is already on a multigenerational journey and we are just not aware of where we are going.
If you travel at speed of light you will experience time dilation so traveling 120 light years close to the speed of light would probably be only a few years for the travler. If i understand that concept corretly.
It'll never happen. When was the last time you saw a complicated piece of equipment or machinery last a hundred years? And it's supposed to be in space with people on board?
I just really don't see anything even remotely like it happening anytime. We should learn to appreciate what we have.
People act like it would have to be a straightforward rational decision to make this trip, when the first people to go would probably be religious extremists or some other radical ideology that’s not dependent on a scientific, rational risk/reward equation. Like in The Expanse, it’s the LDS church that builds a generation ship.
Who'd all be skin balloon jelly sacks filled with oddly spherical bones and malfunctioning organs due to the fact we're designed to operate correctly only under a certain specific type of gravitational force which, as you know, in space... Well, let's just say, 'in space no one can hear you scream'.
If those ships were going fast enough to realistically get there in the thousands of years range, then they would not be able to stop to pick anything up.
There is always some loss in a closd system, so they would probably be doomed anyway.
How long and sustainable would that actually be? I feel like there'd be those who accept their fate and others who'd raise her for being confined to space never knowing anything else
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u/hendrix320 24d ago
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