Colony/World/Generation ship Discussion

[Will Fawkes]

OK so I'd revisited an old old OLD story concept I'd had after reading an asimov book about space (forget which but it does go into detail about the concept of a generation/colony ship as means to get Out There.) Basics are a third or fourth generation Generation ship ends up parking in orbit around a star to top off on water, minerals, etc etc.... and finds another ship from a similar era though not built at the same time it was. Cue celebrations, dusting off old 'this language will be preserved because we realized societies would drift in hundreds or thousands of years and want ships that spawn from this program to have a way to talk' protocols.

Unfortunately I haven't had much luck getting feedback. I know it's been done storywise since basically EVERYTHING has been done. Plus there's lots of room for things ranging from silly (one of the ships is full of genetically modified cat people) to Horror (robot servants took over and are now prepping to expand by cannibalizing the newly discovered craft) to... well anything.

The thing is my original notes listed these things as roughly the size of texas in terms of total area with a much smaller habitable/people friendly zone. Thing is that just seems kind of off. I know a lot of area would be needed for things like intakes for scooping hydrogen gas, fuel storage and processing, random machinery needed when you come into resources (oort cloud, orphaned planet, whatever...) but that just can't be right, especially since I don't know the math and was just sort of spitballing a random guess.

Also notes list safe cruising speed at 0.2c with a theoretical upper limit at as high as 0.25c, but the fuel/energy requirements would be... Insane even if you had some kind of exotic propulsion system. The concept was more a prop/window dressing for a D20 game that never got off the ground due to no playerbase. Might revive for NaNoWriMo this year. I dunno.

Since we're all space geeks. Discuss?

Was thinking of calling it 'The Many Faces of Humanity' since well hundreds or possibly thousands of years would lead to interesting developments in the populations even if you ruled out scifi genetic manipulation.

Edited October 15, 2013 by Will Fawkes
Slight grammar tweak. Don't like when two paragraphs begin with the same word string.

[SargeRho]

Fusion Pulse rockets could get you to .2c or so. You'd have to use a two-stage ship tho, using a massive section to accelerate, and later a smaller one to brake. You could combine that with photon sails. Your ship would need a whipple shield against interstellar dust and debris, and better be made of plastics, avoiding metals where possible to avoid secondary radiation.

As for generation ships: If we take to the stars, those would likely be the first kind of ship we'd use to transport people, and they would deffinitely be colony ships. There is an intresting concept for an interstellar round-trip capable ship. Called VARIES, it creates antimatter from the vacuum of space by using high energy lasers, powered by ginormous solar pannels. It produces enough for a trip to the destination and to decellerate into orbit there, deploys the solar pannels, and begings producing fuel for the return trip, while doing lots of science.

I think I posted it before, but here it is again:

[Will Fawkes]

Well the idea is there is no 'going back' because by the time you get 'there' then either 'home' has developed FTL or some other cheat to get around the light speed barrier or by the time you get back not only has the sponsor nation probably vanished but there's a chance humanity (or kerbin) as a species has evolved past the point of recognition or died out.

So there's that I guess. Thanks for the prompt feedback even at this weird to me hour. I'd considered using an O'neill cylinder as the main body since we're taking simulating gravity for millions of people. Granted I was/am tempted to just cheat and go 'you know what, they've developed an artificial gravity system'... except the implication of being able to fake gravity without spin is you could and probably are using that sort of technology and or the principles behind it for other things ranging from propulsion, hull design, weapons, and so on. Propulsion based off that would potentially be a deal-breaker here but considering gravity, so far as I know at least, works at 1c, you'd still need a generation ship to get anywhere interesting, but my brain says 'you can't do that. Even if you use gravity as a propulsion method you can't cheat Enstein and to get into relativistic speeds you're going to still need insane amounts of power'.

I suppose it boils down to 'what can we conceptualize as probable' vs 'what looks cool to the non-technical person'? After all the important thing really isn't 'realism' so much as internal consistency.

[Idobox]

The concept of generation ship, as it is generally shown, doesn't appear very realistic to me.

If I was in charge, I would put a small crew, let's say a few dozens, of women, and a few tons of frozen sperm and eggs. That way, you can sustain a large genetic diversity while moving a minimal weight.

I would restrict the crew to females because you will need to breed several generations, and you don't want to waste life support on males. It also allows each woman to bear less children, and limits the consequences of infertility risk. If you have artificial wombs, or metahumans, the sexual segregation is not useful anymore.

With a small crew, rather than a heavy cylinder, you can have a smaller habitat at the end of a tether spinning around the main ship.

How much machinery you'll need once you're there depends on your technological level. You would need a few furnaces to process metals and other raw elements, some reactor tanks and general chemistry equipment, and finally a microchip foundry. If you combine that with a vaccuum-chamber 3D printer that can print several types of materials, you have pretty much everything you need to kick start a colony once you're there.

I think you could fit all that into a modern ship. Of course, it relies on you building tools once you arrive. If you want to carry all the tools of modern industry with you, you're looking at a town or city in term of scale. Think Hong-Kong, but with every thing in storage, all housing and service infrastructure removed, and 200 technicians to keep it in a good state.

[K^2]

Personally, I'd look at variations on the Bussard Ramjet for interstellar travel. Direct ramjet would not have sufficient thrust to overcome drag of the scoop, but a system with a partial bypass can significantly increase thrust to drag ratio, albeit, limiting top speed.

At any rate, interstellar space is very far from empty, especially at a healthy fraction of light speed. An interstellar ship should be making use of that.

[-Velocity-]

Personally, I'd look at variations on the Bussard Ramjet for interstellar travel. Direct ramjet would not have sufficient thrust to overcome drag of the scoop, but a system with a partial bypass can significantly increase thrust to drag ratio, albeit, limiting top speed.

At any rate, interstellar space is very far from empty, especially at a healthy fraction of light speed. An interstellar ship should be making use of that.

I haven't paid much attention to this idea since I thought that they had figured out long ago that the scoop size would have to be impractically large? Like thousands of kilometers? Or did they figure out some way around that problem? It's also not like a light sail where it has to be like thousands of square kilometers in area but only a few microns thick either... the scoop has to be rather thick.

[Kryten]

The idea is to have a magnetic rather than physical scoop, but that means you've got to ionise all of the material beforehand somehow, usually with a laser apparatus IIRC. Although I thought bussard ramjets were pretty much completely impractical in our region of space, due to the sparsity of interstellar material, again IIRC.

[K^2]

Most of the interstellar hydrogen is already ionized.

[-Velocity-]

Honestly, I think the idea colony ships may forever be a fantasy. Maybe it will one day appear as antiquated as the idea of being launched to the Moon in a giant gun appears to us today (or maybe even more so).

IMO, if you want to see the most likely futures of our technological civilization, ask yourself this: what technologies today have the greatest room for advancement? I see 1) Computing, robotics, machine intelligence and 2) Genetics. 3) Maybe MEMS/NEMS (though honestly, as someone who works in MEMS, I see biological cells as being already-existing, wonderfully complex, MEMS/NEMS systems, and I think that artifically engineered life forms are more likely to fill the roles that some science fiction writers see as going to MEMS/NEMS).

Reconsider now the question of the colony ship, with highly advanced computing, robotics, machine intelligence, and genetic and biological technologies.

Why send live humans?

Isn't it just easier and cheaper to send a small, slow ship that is tended by a few machine intelligences? The machine intelligences can subsist on nothing more than the electricity generated by the ship's reactor. Once they reach the destination system, they utilize local resources and begin to produce the in-system infrastructure necessary for sustaining biological life. Once the habitats for biological life are ready, the machine intelligences start up the growth vats and grow the first generations of biological beings.

The ship can be rather small, as you don't have to waste tremendous space, mass, and energy on inefficiently supporting and sustaining the life functions of a huge biomass. Maybe the biologicals are simply stored on on-board databanks, as DNA and RNA sequences, though that might be a little overkill, maybe frozen embryos would work just as well and be easier.

Edited October 15, 2013 by |Velocity|

[Vaebn]

^ That, although I'd go so far as to say that the regrowth bit at the end won't be needed by then.

The whole ecosystem with trees and water and praires right now exist to support this weirdly complex life thing, which in turn supports brains, which in turn supports what is going on inside them. But clearly all of it, is just a fancy way of converting collected sun energy, into radiated heat energy from metabolism, "thinking" being something that happens inbetween.

It is probably worth it, before thinking about anything interstellar, for a civilization to simplify the whole thing to high energy state -> thinking -> lower energy state.

Aka "brain uploading" if you so wish to call it. Then you can put the entire crew in a nice solid state box or something, with a nuclear reactor on one end, and a radiator on the other.

Not only this is going to be smaller than carrying a whole bunch of wheat fields, and chickens, and mitochondria, just to break down ATP just to make the electrochemical reactions in some fragile neurons. Its is probably going to be a whole lot more comfortable as well. Living inside a tiny universe of a cylinder sucks. Simulated environments on the other hand can be near infinite in experience.

Of course all this has huge implications for everything. From not really wanting to colonize "planets" any more, to such ships no longer having to be "generational".

[Will Fawkes]

Re 'Operation Baby Factory' while Logic might hold that as a better idea to send people across you'd effectively have a crew that has to stay pregnant with the REST of the crew, then train them. Even without looking at any of the other issues this is an ethical nightmare.

Re 'Robotopolas' again Logical. However I sorta just don't see that ending well. Then again I'm one of those idiots that want human hands involved even if a robot would be steadier the whole trip through. Effectivly the same as'operation baby factory' that was mentioned earlier but neatly sidesteps the whole 'any woman aboard would have to be preggers while repopulating/populating the destination.'

I like the idea of a giant magnetic scoop. After all wouldn't the thing have to have it's own magnetic field anyway to act as a radiation shield? Since said field would funnel anything towards the pole ANYHOW why not make it useful for something? My worry is at .2C interstellar space would effectively shotgun apart the ship. While a whipple shield would be one of the lines of defense I'm not sure it'd be enough on it's own given just how energetic everything hitting would become. One of the advantages of star wars/trek shielding, you can tell all the things to buzz off.

[-Velocity-]

Re 'Robotopolas' again Logical. However I sorta just don't see that ending well. Then again I'm one of those idiots that want human hands involved even if a robot would be steadier the whole trip through. Effectivly the same as'operation baby factory' that was mentioned earlier but neatly sidesteps the whole 'any woman aboard would have to be preggers while repopulating/populating the destination.'

Ah, so you are a racist. Anything that is "not human" is untrustworthy, soulless, and evil, is that it? Gee, if get those NdFeB magnet implants in my finger tips so I can physically feel magnetic fields, I sure hope you don't consider me no longer human! I don't see that worldview ending well, not if we ever create or encounter another intelligent race. Yes, I am teasing you a little... or a lot.

Even if the "robots" were simply people who had had the structures of their brains scanned and copied down to the level of the individual neuron and synapse, and then uploaded to a powerful simulator... would you still distrust them?

Unless you're trying to write your own science fiction novel, in which case the future is yours to do with how you please, you should trust in logic over what will probably end up being considered antiquated prejudices one day.

Edited October 15, 2013 by |Velocity|

[AndrewBCrisp]

If I may recommend a couple of sources:

There are some real life groups looking into the challenges of interstellar travel. The British Interplanetary Society has been conducting a number of case studies over on its Icarus Interstellar website, including Project Hyperion, which has been looking into world-ships in question: http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/projects/project-hyperion/.

Covering a wider field, the Centauri Dreams blog examines several areas of starflight, from exoplanet research to propulsion concepts to more exotic science and technology and even the philosophical perspective: http://www.centauri-dreams.org/ Since there are a lot of topics, I'd recommend using the site's search function for "world ship" and that should give you a fair bit of material.

As for my personal opinion: I suspect that - if you want exploring and colonizing the target system to remain the goal - you should probably plan for a travel time of roughly 2-3 generations, with a dedicated culture centered around completing the journey and seeding a new home for humanity. 2-3 generations should help to keep cultural "creep" to a minimum. For the nearer stars, this would work out to a maximum velocity of around .1-.2 c for the ship in question. I would also recommend a small crew (~200) with a sizeable gene bank as an insurance against inbreeding, with room aboard the ship to grow. Don't count on the ship's livable space being very large - a cylinder roughly 100 m across and 500 m long should be sufficient, given the travel time (I'm doing a quick-and-dirty calculation here, so check against the above sources for better numbers).

I'm personally against the idea of "uploading" - whether or not the result is sentient and self-aware, I'd rather see flesh-and-blood humans seeded across the stars to evolve and diverge into a million new civilizations, than have something that remembers being human and perhaps decides to discard its heritage wholesale.

Final note for now: many world-ships in story and film make the assumption of on-board cultures and governments that make concentration camps seem like vacation spots. I would caution against such an approach - if we want people to travel aboard world-ships, they should be appealing to some extent. We've had some sea-faring cultures in our past - I'm thinking of the Vikings and Polynesians in particular - and I would expect that future world-ship cultures might be similiar. A spacefaring people with adventure in their hearts and songs on their lips, who's hands are never idle... you get the picture.

Just my thoughts - all errors remain my own.

[Will Fawkes]

I actually think this is the most viable idea, but you're not going to, at present, get people behind this one. Plus it'd be a ways off for the sort of machinery to make that level of automation viable.

Then again it'll take a long time for ANY of this to be viable and hopefully by then we'll have sorted out the ethics and responsibilities when AI is created. Though personally if you're sending robots, why bother with 'recreating a biosphere'? If they're smart, let them have their own world to settle and have a go at things hopefully with the knowledge of all the mistakes we've made so they won't be our electric bogaloo. If it ins't that smart of a system... maybe i'm just hidebound but I'd rather somebody, preferably several somebodies, in the loop in case a machine glitches out, which is why you end up with all the life support anyway.

As for the 'matrix' solution. On the one hand I kinda like that since you can maintain a population for a long time that way without needing that much space but personally if we're going that route we already have enough computing power and knowledge of the human mind, probably, to make AI. So just send the AI out as our children.

But yea this was originally setting material which sortof depended on humans going out. However with that said the 'crisis' that causes it to be interesting is one ship meeting another and seeing how they adapted and evolved while giving enough shared language and other bits to be able to handwave how they'd be able to understand each other and interact.

So if I actually bothered writing any of this... why not try 'all of the above' and just show different ships meeting at different times?

Even if you were trying to poke or make playful Jab Velocity then it's a good point to raise. Assuming we don't collectively destroy ourselves then a ship full of smart machines would be simpler to send out.

Re Andrew: The thought was to actually have a large civilian population with public places, high value on entertainment and the arts since there's no point in going 'there' if once 'there' you have a military culture hat is radically different than what spawned the ship in the first place. Think of it less as a 'get there with all luxuries removed' and more 'space colony that happens to be heading somewhere.'e

But again part of the setting's appeal, at least to me, is to explore all the possible what if's involving both ships that are sent out to settle, and others that decide to remain in the stars harvesting what they need. I can even see more than a few that park around a habitable world and then after the colony has been established for ten or twenty years the ship itself gets patched up, topped off, and goes on it's merry way to some other system.

Edited October 16, 2013 by Will Fawkes
Added Stuffs.

[Tommygun]

I always liked the Fission fragment rocket myself. It's not as fast as some of the other proposed propulsion ideas, but it looks workable with near future technology.

I think generation ships are to expensive and future medical technology will make then unnecessary. They are already theorizing about DNA printers and bio-printers to make body parts.

If you add that to self-replicating nano machines and artificial intelligences, why bankrupt a nation making a generation ship? Just send a robotic Garden of Eden Creation Kit on a small probe and make millions of them.

More of a high tech Panspermia that allows you to target all possible stars near yours multiple times if the first attempt fails.

Fission-fragment rocket:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission-fragment_rocket

[WestAir]

Hypothesis:

Medical science will eventually, given enough time (decades, centuries, what have you) become sophisticated enough to make aging and death from the process of aging an antiquated concept.

If, given the elimination of age-death, a colony ship were created then, how would that change your opinions on such a ship? If 200 years of age were just "meh" to people in the future, and a Journey across the stars was "just a way to alleviate boredom."?

[Tommygun]

Well cruise ships are popular with the elderly, there is still the issue of the expense of such massive ships.

Hundred of years is still very local at 10 to 20% of light too, so many place I think will be too far for this unless you have sleeper ship technology.

[Matt]

Medical knowledge that enables extremely long life, or the technology that would allow virtual living, will probably have more of an impact on society than the ability to send of a colony ship of any of the discussed designs.

Colonizing the stars? Awesome. But the the technology to do so is going to change the way we live on a fundamental level.

Population control, wealth, risk assessment, individual drive and knowledge will be different from any society before, the stable outcome is interesting to predict.

Using a generation ship or two is a fine platform for exploring those changes, and I think that is more meat for a story than the purely technical side of things - although still important!

[Seret]

Re 'Robotopolas' again Logical. However I sorta just don't see that ending well. Then again I'm one of those idiots that want human hands involved even if a robot would be steadier the whole trip through. Effectivly the same as'operation baby factory' that was mentioned earlier but neatly sidesteps the whole 'any woman aboard would have to be preggers while repopulating/populating the destination.'

It may well be possible in the future for those machine intelligences to be human. If it's possible to digitise a mind it would make sense for the first explorers to shift themselves into a machine rather than a meat matrix for the journey. I think the distinction between human and machine intelligence will become pretty blurry in the future anyway. Biologically we're all cyborgs already, and the AIs we create would be designed to be as similar to our minds as possible. I think eventually AIs will have rights and be considered human themselves.

It's highly unlikely that human bodies would be in any way suitable for life on another planet anyway. Humans are only ever going to be suitable for life on Earth, or in space habitats made to be as Earth-like as possible. So any long term explorers on another planet are going to be using machine bodies or adapted versions of indigenous life anyway.

[Idobox]

Another issue with typical generation ships, is that you build a self-contained colony, that can sustain a limited number of people. So for a few generations, you need to have strict birth control, and basically build a culture centered around equilibrium and stability, with the goal of ultimate expansion.

I don't see the people willing to embark on a centuries long journey to expand the human race being very strong on the growth control thing and the idea of living in a supersiezed tuna can.

I don't see their descendants breeding like rabbits once they arrive either.

Ending with a generation ship in orbit of another star full of people content with barely replacing their population and not interested in exploration is not desirable.

Anyway, any type of slow travel will imply some form of social engineering (brainwashing) to keep the crew focused on the initial goal generations after the launch, and forcing generations to come to cope with your choices. It's an ethical nightmare no matter what solution you propose. Requiring the crew to breed is probably one of least unethical things in this context.

[Seret]

Ending with a generation ship in orbit of another star full of people content with barely replacing their population and not interested in exploration is not desirable.

Actually current western nations all operate at about equilibrium (or even slightly under) when you look at birth rates, and I don't think we suffer from excessive problems with ennui. Eventually the whole world is expected to reach a steady state of about zero population growth. So the explorers wouldn't be doing anything that those who stayed at home weren't.

[kahlzun]

I know it's incorrect, but whenever I hear 'generation ship' i can't help but think of a ship that builds other ships, like a Von Neumann machine.

[-Velocity-]

I actually think this is the most viable idea, but you're not going to, at present, get people behind this one. Plus it'd be a ways off for the sort of machinery to make that level of automation viable.

Then again it'll take a long time for ANY of this to be viable and hopefully by then we'll have sorted out the ethics and responsibilities when AI is created. Though personally if you're sending robots, why bother with 'recreating a biosphere'? If they're smart, let them have their own world to settle and have a go at things hopefully with the knowledge of all the mistakes we've made so they won't be our electric bogaloo. If it ins't that smart of a system... maybe i'm just hidebound but I'd rather somebody, preferably several somebodies, in the loop in case a machine glitches out, which is why you end up with all the life support anyway.

As for the 'matrix' solution. On the one hand I kinda like that since you can maintain a population for a long time that way without needing that much space but personally if we're going that route we already have enough computing power and knowledge of the human mind, probably, to make AI. So just send the AI out as our children.

But yea this was originally setting material which sortof depended on humans going out. However with that said the 'crisis' that causes it to be interesting is one ship meeting another and seeing how they adapted and evolved while giving enough shared language and other bits to be able to handwave how they'd be able to understand each other and interact.

So if I actually bothered writing any of this... why not try 'all of the above' and just show different ships meeting at different times?

Even if you were trying to poke or make playful Jab Velocity then it's a good point to raise. Assuming we don't collectively destroy ourselves then a ship full of smart machines would be simpler to send out.

Re Andrew: The thought was to actually have a large civilian population with public places, high value on entertainment and the arts since there's no point in going 'there' if once 'there' you have a military culture hat is radically different than what spawned the ship in the first place. Think of it less as a 'get there with all luxuries removed' and more 'space colony that happens to be heading somewhere.'e

But again part of the setting's appeal, at least to me, is to explore all the possible what if's involving both ships that are sent out to settle, and others that decide to remain in the stars harvesting what they need. I can even see more than a few that park around a habitable world and then after the colony has been established for ten or twenty years the ship itself gets patched up, topped off, and goes on it's merry way to some other system.

It's possible that any machine intelligences we create will be mostly content to just sit around in the solar system, maybe sending out explorers and just making small, science/exploration-focused colonies. It might be biological creatures that most want to expand.

It CAN be dangerous to create a race of intelligent machines, capable of self-improvement and reproduction, that can survive in space, just mining asteroids to reproduce. However, it should be relatively safe, if the machines are given a strong set of morals, that perhaps includes, some kind of moral inhibition against further expansion that starts kicking in once they expand outward to a large enough degree to ensure long-term survival. We don't want to make any other civilizations feel threatened we might try to start expanding into their territory, and it also seems fair to leave a large number of unsettled places for new civilizations to settle into. I know we would feel pretty bummed out to get all ready to go expanding across the stars only to find out that all the good spots are already taken. Why do you really need to try to expand across the whole galaxy?

Some might say that expansion is a biological imperative, but the whole point of civilization is to rise above our biological imperatives! Survival of the fittest and maximizing the spread of your genes means raping every woman you can find, stealing from and/or killing those competing against you, infanticide against any baby that is not yours, etc. Civilization is about telling natural selection and our biological impulses to go take a hike.

Anyway, I know this is all highly speculative, but I tell you what is MUCH MORE speculative: trying to imagine interstellar travel and colonization using TODAY'S technology and societal norms. That's exactly what you are doing when you imagine this giant colony ship with like 1000 humans on it that need to survive for a few hundred years and a dozen generations before they reach their destination. It's unrealistic. We can't even make a manned spacecraft that goes to Mars yet, only like 50 million km away. To make a manned spacecraft that can go to the nearest stars, we need to go about ONE MILLION TIMES more distant than Mars. It is going to take a LONG TIME before we reach that technology threshold. To imagine such a ship, but using the computer technology, biology, nanotechnology, genetics, and societal norms we know today, is absolutely ludicrous.

Thus, if you want your predicted future to have a chance at being at least CLOSE to the mark, you need to do what I did- look at what technologies today have the most room for further development, and make crude projections as to what will be possible when those technologies become mature. With those potential developments in mind, then completely re-evaluate what a colony ship could look like. What you end up is something close to what I project- a small ship, tended by very smart machine intelligences, that simply grow the biological beings when they finally arrive at the system targeted for colonization, and the targeted system is ready for the biologicals. It simply makes the most sense, it is the most efficient, and it is the option that most takes into account likely future technological breakthroughs.

The unstated assumption in what I say above is that the biological beings will want to expand, and the machines will be willing to help. If we stay as racist and elitist as we are right now (which I find unlikely, though) and treat the machines like inferior, slave laborers, they might have no interest in helping biological beings. Certainly, we will always have "slave" machines, but at some point, as a machine intelligence gets smarter and more independent, you should stop treating it like a slave and start treating it like a person, or there could be trouble.

Edited October 17, 2013 by |Velocity|

[Will Fawkes]

To be fair while you will get a large segment of the population with racist/speciest attitudes towards new life (either genmodded/uplifted or synthetic) there will also be large chunks of the population that will want them to have the same standing anybody else does.

[DJEN]

Even after 30,000 years of civilization, we haven't changed that much.

However, with the invention of human rights and its application, many things have changed.

Still, there are many who are treated as machines.

What can we expect of the future? Are we underestimating or overestimating it?

We'll never know.