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What would a real-life colony ship look like?


KAL 9000

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5 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Type A.
Refrigerators, refrigerators, refrigerators... Reactor. Alarm clock.

Type B.
Intentionally degraded tribe. Reactor. Alarm clock.

You could have a brood lineage and a liquid helium surrounding liquid nitrogen freezer filled with human embryo's.
The brood stock of females would be replished from the freezer until they reached their destination at which point they would expand the population with males and females.

Cyrogenic storage of post-embryonic is not viable and will never be viable means of keeping humans alive, even coma/cool storage for 5 years like Avatar results in cachexia.

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Somebody should bring the embryos to life and grow them up.
Another thing with embryos: even if they magically born as adults, they hardly would associate themselves with Humanity.

So, Plan A+B: an intentionally degraded tribe believing that they are Night Watch Crew.
200 years later the Computer explains them that they are the Chosen, they grow up the embryo-born babies and assist them while hologram coaches teach the children.

So, the tribe is happy for their Mission, the children count themselves as Humanity, all are happy.

Edited by kerbiloid
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Reactor, computer, resource collection modules, propulsion modules, 3D printer(s). Print humans. Download minds.

We're rapidly approaching an era of 3D printed organs. Before the century is over, I wouldn't be surprised if we could print entire bodies. The only remaining issue is mind downloading.

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21 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

Reactor, computer, resource collection modules, propulsion modules, 3D printer(s). Print humans. Download minds.

We're rapidly approaching an era of 3D printed organs. Before the century is over, I wouldn't be surprised if we could print entire bodies. The only remaining issue is mind downloading.

The human mind is not a computer like any electronic computer. Things humans a good at computers are poor at and vice versa. 

You could probably printout a brood mother for growing frozen embryos to human. 

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30 minutes ago, PB666 said:

The human mind is not a computer like any electronic computer. Things humans a good at computers are poor at and vice versa. 

You could probably printout a brood mother for growing frozen embryos to human. 

Computers are getting better faster than you think. They can make music and other forms of art already.

We have simulated about 1% of the human brain as of today wity supercomputers. These computers will get more efficient and larger at the same time, eventually, and likely before 2050, they'll be able to simulate the entire human brain. By 2100, those computers will be even more powerful. Not likely to be a issue.

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If Moore's Law continues to hold, according to my calculations, an average laptop will be smarter than a human in ~37 years! The technological singularity is closer than we think!

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It will like look a colony ship  

30 minutes ago, KAL 9000 said:

If Moore's Law continues to hold, according to my calculations, an average laptop will be smarter than a human in ~37 years! The technological singularity is closer than we think!

That scares me, honestly.

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35 minutes ago, KAL 9000 said:

If Moore's Law continues to hold, according to my calculations, an average laptop will be smarter than a human in ~37 years! The technological singularity is closer than we think!

that's a big if

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21 hours ago, PB666 said:

You could have a brood lineage and a liquid helium surrounding liquid nitrogen freezer filled with human embryo's.
The brood stock of females would be replished from the freezer until they reached their destination at which point they would expand the population with males and females.

Cyrogenic storage of post-embryonic is not viable and will never be viable means of keeping humans alive, even coma/cool storage for 5 years like Avatar results in cachexia.

many mammals like hedgehogs hibernates during winter, should be possible to replicate this. yes its 34 months not 5 years so you are likely to have to cycle, say 6 month sleep followed by 1 awake than then back again but as your metabolism run at 5-10% stuff muscles will not decay at normal speed. 

 

12 hours ago, KAL 9000 said:

If Moore's Law continues to hold, according to my calculations, an average laptop will be smarter than a human in ~37 years! The technological singularity is closer than we think!

Problem is that cpu speed and also gpu speed increase has slowed down the last 10 years. 
AI improvements is mostly software and specialized hardware, then this is optimized it will face the same problem as gpu and cpu. 
Modern supercomputers are huge as they use an huge number of cheap cpu and gpu modules. 

Yes we will get far smarter probes, something human like is far off. 

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Hmm, for simplicity, I'd say a Large cylinder around 4 km long, .6 km wide, providing 1 g of gravity, and holding 400,000 people initially, and up to 4,000,000 total, and a magsail the size of Texas that can accelerate the spacecraft to .01 c, and be used to brake as well, it would be able to last for 20,000 years.

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On May 24, 2016 at 7:31 PM, kerbiloid said:

In many cases it already is.

Smarter than most in the KSP community.

If you've ever seen something called Watter's World you'd be surprised how ignorant people are. In those cases, a computer is definitely smarter.

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On 5/24/2016 at 7:18 PM, KAL 9000 said:

If Moore's Law continues to hold, according to my calculations, an average laptop will be smarter than a human in ~37 years! The technological singularity is closer than we think!

Good thing we'll be playing KSP on these laptops on Mars in a decade :)

Lets hope they don't find us...

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On 5/24/2016 at 10:18 PM, KAL 9000 said:

If Moore's Law continues to hold, according to my calculations, an average laptop will be smarter than a human in ~37 years! The technological singularity is closer than we think!

I feel like Moore's Law won't actually hold out that far. We're going to hit a physical limitation on what kinds of computers we can build and an economic limit on what the market demands. At a certain point it becomes kind of like manned space exploration, just doing it for the sake of doing it more than any benefit over unmanned. So more powerful computers will only be built to say you can build them, while the real advances will be in better algorithms to take advantage of what we already have.

Back to the topic of this thread, I think it would be a set of maybe twenty humans that replenish through a sperm bank (EDIT: you would want ~ 10,000 samples or more, and since sperm is easier to harvest than eggs it makes sense to not worry too much about mitochondrial diversity and focus on genetic diversity. Men that are born could add to the stock so that it can replenish as well over time, you just want to make sure it gets sent to the back of the line), the intervening generations of which will be born and grow old and die (probably through a planned suicide at 65) on the ship. It will need to be designed to have every part replaced on a five year timeline, no new materials just take the part and melt it down and reforge it. And most of the mass of the ship would probably be materials to create a supply chain once you reach the destination, extractors and refiners etc.

On 5/23/2016 at 1:13 PM, PB666 said:

You could have a brood lineage and a liquid helium surrounding liquid nitrogen freezer filled with human embryo's.
The brood stock of females would be replished from the freezer until they reached their destination at which point they would expand the population with males and females.

Cyrogenic storage of post-embryonic is not viable and will never be viable means of keeping humans alive, even coma/cool storage for 5 years like Avatar results in cachexia.

No need for full embryos, just lots and lots of sperm.

Edited by todofwar
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12 hours ago, Spaceception said:

Hmm, for simplicity, I'd say a Large cylinder around 4 km long, .6 km wide, providing 1 g of gravity, and holding 400,000 people initially, and up to 4,000,000 total, and a magsail the size of Texas that can accelerate the spacecraft to .01 c, and be used to brake as well, it would be able to last for 20,000 years.

An orion drive should pretty easy give you 1% of c and brake again, problem is as you say to keep everything running from 1000-20.000 year. 
Just stress on the habitat who is both under pressure and rotation would be an serious problem over this time. 

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Just Reading Kim Stanley Robinson's "Aurora" which deals with a generation ship on its way to create the first interstellar colony.

Very minor spoilers - the following does include some details from the book, but you only need avoid them if you want to know absolutely nothing before reading it. I'm not gonna spoil the story :)

Spoiler

 

He kinda skims over issues like propulsion, reaction mass, delta-V etc. but focuses mainly on the difficulties of maintaining a small (~2000 people) society for tens of generations (outward leg takes ~170 years) and the social and practical problems they face as their journey progresses.

One of their main problems is the fixed amount of resources they have at their disposal (eg: leaving the ship/opening airlocks must be kept to aminimum, as the slight loss of volatiles each time cannot be replaced, and have to last the entire journey), and how certain substances are locked into various cycles (eg: the Nitrogen cycle) and if a cycle is disrupted in some way (say a crop fails or there is a blight) then it can cause a cascade of problems through different cycles. One way this was approached was simply to have stockpiles of certain elements, or possibly practically all elements.

The ship is also an "ark", containing many different biomes, including areas of "natural reserve" so that a colony can be seeded with various Earth animals as well.

They rely quite heavily on a Quantum-computer AI, and a suite of "printers" which can essentially print anything from elemental feedstocks (see fixed resource supply), including drugs, computer components, other printers etc.

Reproductive genetic effects are also a factor in such a small group, isolated for so long.

 

Its quite a good read so far, Im only halfway through it.

Honestly, a generation ships sounds super-hard, I mean how can you guarantee that the society will even *want* to be on the mission, once the people who were alive to make the choice die out? Sure, you can raise your kids with the mission in mind, but how long can that last? Do you remember any knowledge that has been passed down by your great-great-great-grandparents? Sure, they weren't trying to maintain a centuries-long life-and-death mega-project, but I mean, do you know anything beyond perhaps great-grandparents? Even their names?

 

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3 hours ago, p1t1o said:

Just Reading Kim Stanley Robinson's "Aurora" which deals with a generation ship on its way to create the first interstellar colony.

Very minor spoilers - the following does include some details from the book, but you only need avoid them if you want to know absolutely nothing before reading it. I'm not gonna spoil the story :)

  Reveal hidden contents

 

He kinda skims over issues like propulsion, reaction mass, delta-V etc. but focuses mainly on the difficulties of maintaining a small (~2000 people) society for tens of generations (outward leg takes ~170 years) and the social and practical problems they face as their journey progresses.

One of their main problems is the fixed amount of resources they have at their disposal (eg: leaving the ship/opening airlocks must be kept to aminimum, as the slight loss of volatiles each time cannot be replaced, and have to last the entire journey), and how certain substances are locked into various cycles (eg: the Nitrogen cycle) and if a cycle is disrupted in some way (say a crop fails or there is a blight) then it can cause a cascade of problems through different cycles. One way this was approached was simply to have stockpiles of certain elements, or possibly practically all elements.

The ship is also an "ark", containing many different biomes, including areas of "natural reserve" so that a colony can be seeded with various Earth animals as well.

They rely quite heavily on a Quantum-computer AI, and a suite of "printers" which can essentially print anything from elemental feedstocks (see fixed resource supply), including drugs, computer components, other printers etc.

Reproductive genetic effects are also a factor in such a small group, isolated for so long.

 

Its quite a good read so far, Im only halfway through it.

Honestly, a generation ships sounds super-hard, I mean how can you guarantee that the society will even *want* to be on the mission, once the people who were alive to make the choice die out? Sure, you can raise your kids with the mission in mind, but how long can that last? Do you remember any knowledge that has been passed down by your great-great-great-grandparents? Sure, they weren't trying to maintain a centuries-long life-and-death mega-project, but I mean, do you know anything beyond perhaps great-grandparents? Even their names?

 

They would not really have a choice would they? You'd need enough people active not just to maintain the ship but to create enough of a social group to sustain themselves psychologically, so it would function much like a small tribe does, keeping themselves going for eons until the destination is reached. They would have to understand that they can't make a return journey, so it might not be as much of a burden as you think. In fact, there might be more strife over actually beginning the breaking and landing maneuvers, since that would represent a change and society always resists change. This hypothetical space bound group might decide better the devil you know, not worth risking everything on landing on a planet. Sure, all kinds of rational arguments for why they should land, but if you and the last four generations all lived on this ship it might seem like the safer place to be.

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