Colony/World/Generation ship Discussion

[Axder]

Interesting many of you suggested sending just females, or males with woombs etc. Although I agree that sending bunch of frozen embryous would be nesesity for genetic differation. There would be many practical problems. I dont want to offend ladies, but they are pretty much useless last third of pregnancy cycle and then for 6 weeks after birth, when woomen is in serious trauma. So this only female colony would have many problems regarding who will build the houses, farm the fields and otherwise cultivate the land. (Well the cheap solution is robots) but after that we are facing the civilization which will have big Oidipus complex for next few hundreds years since new born Males would have no faher role models (or any male role models to speak off) So i think we will need to send Males as well as females on this trip.

As for multi generational ship, I see a problem that the third generation would have realy big issues adapting to new enviroment. Imagine you were born in the box in which you never new hunger, desieses, falling from hights, meeting wildlife predators (hence even Canada has bears) So this generation which never saw anything other than ship would have realy big issues adapting to this world.

As for my ideas how can we reach the stars without breaking speed of light.

1) We can use sleeper ships. Seems probably like the best option since the people which gets on the ship sees the place. (I cannot imagine adventurer which goes onto the jurney with idea that his whole contribution is make those brats that see the place you want to see)

2)My Other idea requieres us developing technlogy of storing personalities and persons on the hardrives, than we could send a ship full of frozen eggs and artificial woombs, and when the ships reaches its destination people would just download their personalities into the new bodies (pros are certanly the facts that every single colonist is young at the time of arrival) Or people from earth could send there personalities wia some sort of data stream to the ship once it conformed over habitable planet (you probably woudlnt mind traveling as data stream in speed of light) ..... to be clear this sort of exploration was covered in Richard K. Morgans books. Where people stop dying and were just reuploading there conciosnes into new bodies.

[Seret]

they are pretty much useless last third of pregnancy cycle and then for 6 weeks after birth, when woomen is in serious trauma. So this only female colony would have many problems regarding who will build the houses, farm the fields and otherwise cultivate the land.

The obvious answer to which is: don't have everybody give birth at the same time.

I don't see a colony as needing to expand its population rapidly. They'd want (and probably have to) to expand very slowly, a birth rate of only about 2.2 per woman would be sufficient. Even if each woman took a whole year off after each birth you're still only talking about less than 3% of their lifetime (assuming 80-ish years). Not a big issue in terms of lost productivity, given the long-term payoff.

[magnemoe]

Would be easier to make a sleeper-ship then.

Some magnitudes easier, one issue with an generation ship is that it would need all the life support systems working for generations or be totally repaired.

This includes hard to repair stuff like microchips and nuclear reactors.

Yes the same would be true for an sleeper ship however the life system would just weight an fraction of the generation ship so you could reach far higher speeds.

Also most of the ship would be powered down during cruise, an hibernating crew would not use much resources.

[Idobox]

Actually, during flight, you only to replace your population, and with an all female crew, that means 1 child per woman on average (slightly more actually to account for early deaths and other issues).

The lack of a father role for the males might not be a problem, depending on the culture. There are many cultures where the concept of father doesn't really exist, and many people (myself included) consider that propagating such gendered models cause a lot of sexism.

Even if you really care about father figures, you don't absolutely need living ones. Movies, books, or whatever replaced them can still serve as the base for a male archetype for kids.

[Moon Goddess]

I dont want to offend ladies, but they are pretty much useless last third of pregnancy cycle and then for 6 weeks after birth, when woomen is in serious trauma. So this only female colony would have many problems regarding who will build the houses, farm the fields and otherwise cultivate the land.

Ok, firstly let me say I'm not offended, and that even I think it would be silly to send only women on a long spaceflight and I'm gay (though it would be fun).

I do want to say the idea that women are "pretty much useless" for 19 weeks of and around pregnancy is even more absurd than the idea of sending only women for long term space flight. I've never been pregnant yet, but many women I know have worked often strenuous jobs up until the day of labor or even in one case for 5 hours after labor began. And back when all there weren't even houses or farms back when everyone survived on what they could hunt that day, do you really believe women simply sat around for 6 weeks without hunting after giving birth? God I wish my grandmother had written down the stories she told me of working on a farm with a newborn on her hip, so I could show you. Her husband was useless and always gone and she did everything herself. Trust me, humans (male and female) are much more adaptable than you give them credit for. Which also relates into your assumption that without a father figure with automatically give children an Oedipus complex. Humans adapt very very well.

[Will Fawkes]

Alright then.

Making a couple assumptions:

Each ship is of a roughly standardish design (docking ports, similar engines, or at least everyone has archived copies of the 'original' engines in library even if they or their predescessors had made improvements over time, a root language that is learned/accessable even if neither ship actually speaks it day to day anymore.)

Now for the specifics. This is all just me planning right now so feel free to jump in.

The point of view ship (Let's call it the KGS Manley) pulls in after fifty or eighty or however many years into a star system and finds signal traffic pointing at other ships, or maybe just one ship, within a year's travel time based on their own engine performance backed by the fact the transmissions are in (Basic/Common). There's excited rumors, First time since the Manley was built that they've had contact with another ship.

From there probably going to have the story branch out depending on what the other ship is like (Yay CYOA writing software! So much easier to write with/for when you aren't having to constantly put 'go to page x'.)

Frontrunners for first contact scenerios:

Monogender population (either women, some amalgimation of the two genders, or something.)

Robots (tending to a sleeper ship, sent out on their own, or 'evolved' descendents of one of the older generation ships.)

Metahumans (people with different traits making them possibly not quite human (able to process sunlight and CO2 for a little extra energy (wouldn't be MUCH but still,) different physical features, blending of animal and people (not nessicarily petting zoo people, the additions could either be subtle, internal, or only detectable at a genetic level.)

Dead (nobody home and hasn't been for ages. just a ship on an automated course.)

Each of these would be short stories with minor internal branching, but the major split would be what the relate-able to us ship is actually contacting.

[Idobox]

The idea of sending women is useful only for small crew, and as a sure way to control population. If you have a mixed crew, unintended pregnancies can happen, which can cause tragedies on limited life life support. Also, to avoid consanguinity, artificial insemination is required.

With a small crew, let's say 10 people, if a member dies early, you just lost 10% of the work force. In a mixed group, you also lost 20% of your women, and about 40% of your women in age to bear children. If 2 fertile women die in a short time, there is a serious risk of mission failure. With an all female crew, the consequences would be much less dire.

From a practical point of view, men are a waste of resources: women can perform the same tasks, plus carry children, for the same use of resources.

Actually, since women are smaller on average, they should require slightly less resources, giving you a little more margin for the life support, although not much.

An other option is to select crew members with specific genetic traits, like small size, or slower metabolism than average. A crew of female midgets with hypothyroidism would be optimal in terms of life support.

[Seret]

Also, to avoid consanguinity, artificial insemination is required.

IIRC the minimum population size you need to avoid a really unhealthy genetic bottleneck is about 100-120 people. So you'd need to have banked enough genetic material to represent that may people. It would be something small seed colony would have to pay careful attention to.

[Moon Goddess]

I think for genetic purposes you really shouldn't send a generation ship with fewer than 1000-2000

Personally myself when I envision a generation ship I see a solar sail hooked to a hollowed out asteroid,

Inside the asteroid would having living facilities using the rock for radiation protection, we'd need some sort of nuclear power plant though. A good third of the asteroid would need to be devoted to tanks of algae grown under artificial light, this would be used to restore the air.

And could probably spend many years of the trip mining more of the asteroid for mineral needed

[Seret]

I think for genetic purposes you really shouldn't send a generation ship with fewer than 1000-2000

Well, since genetic material is pretty dense there's no reason you couldn't send millions packed away in storage (assuming you trusted your storage system to keep it viable for the duration). The actual living breathing crew would likely be kept as small as possible, I'd imagine the actual crew level would be determined by the number required to effectively respond to an emergency such as a fire, similar to a maritime vessel crewing levels.

If you were going to establish a space habitat capable of supporting thousands I don't really see what the point of making a journey to a planet would be. You're obviously talking about a civilisation with a confident grasp of operating large space habitats. Planets become a bit superfluous at that point.

[PrivateFlip]

Some ideas/inspiration for your story:

The point of view ship has is a generation ship. It left earth first so its population resemble us to an extend we can readily identify with them.

They have lived on the ship for generations, and although its a lot bigger and spacious than the more rational ideas brought forward in this thread suggest, they do experience some of the issues and peculiarities raised. Maybe they are not all female but have a very small man to woman ratio, which might lead to tensions strive and be tied in to a romance subplot. They tried to keep population steady, but this was not completely successful and they are dealing with an overpopulation.

The other ship is not just hanging in space but it is in orbit near the only habitable planet in the system. Maybe the planet the first ship also set out for. Slowly we find out the other ship is a lot more advanced. It could have left a long time after the first ship and overtaken it. Like many in this thread suggested this is actually a sleeper ship. We find out it is already put some people on the planet (in habitats, terraforming is just starting up).

The AI's of the second ship started artificially gestating humans twenty years before reaching the system. These humans have been raised on the ship by the AI's and despite their best efforts it turns out not being raised in the presence of grownups does have a huge impact on your mental makeup, they are off, weird, distant, in some way. Maybe the AI has difficulty in understanding what it did wrong. In addition to these artificially gestated humans the sleeper ship also has a giant batch of cryogenic frozen humans.

These humans are interesting because, aside form being from a much more technological advanced society, they are humans who have not lived on a ship for any amount of time. Unlike the people on first ship they do not have the strong communal spirit necessary to life together on the ships or in the habitats on the planet. They even want to have a democracy! Due to all these factors the second ship is in disarray with the colonization stalled and many still on board the ship. Because the ship cannot sustain such a large active population the AI's feel there is no other choice than to temporarily refreeze a big portion of the humans in order to keep them alive. The humans aren't all cooperative. There might be an open rebellion against the AI's by the cryo-humans. The second ship also turns out to not have left from earth but from a secondary colony, where the humans have had some genetic modification to life there.