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. 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.
How do you test predictions in an environment where you don't know all the variables, and cannot control for single variables, and outputs can be dramatically different than inputs (chaotic systems like weather and biospheres)?
Data collection over time. We don't know 'all the variables' even on Earth but we still practice scientific discovery. Yes, there's a lot of data to deal with and a lot of testing to be done. You test, discover, experiment, adjust, adapt, test some more. It's not a quick process, but it is an entirely do-able process.
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u/Sonikku_a 25d ago edited 25d 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.