I doubt the human psyche is capable of such a voyage while being awake the whole time. Even with all the toys and biomes, life will get boring and pointless fast, producing unfulfilled needs, disorder, conflict and revolt. People can't be ants in a colony working for such a narrowly defined goal through a lifetime, especially not multi-generationally. Our existence is based on constant questioning and revolutions. A 400 year travel to an unknown, possibly empty, lifeless target, however historic, is not something that can keep a society running long term.
This feels like the grown-up ideological successor to the International Space Settlement Design Competition for high school students. That was (is? anyone still in the know?) a competition that ran for years out of NASA Houston as a pet project of some engineers and contractors who wanted to engage and cultivate the next generation of aerospace minds.
Teams would submit proposals for the design of a permanent space settlement (sometimes on the surface of a body, sometimes orbiting). Winners from across the world were invited to compete together live in 4 huge multi-national teams to design and pitch another settlement over a long sleepless weekend. As a two-time finalist, I can say it was an incredible experience for so many reasons.
This new competition seems like its goal is to actually take the design/ideation of working professionals as a serious output, as opposed to the educational value of simulating this sort of thing for students, which is what drove the ISSDC.
Follows a classic sci-fi series arc, IMO. Brilliant, enthralling and at times terrifying first book, followed by several tomes of 'meh'. See also Night's Dawn.
What's the cost for getting all that to space? Is it still about $4,000/kg?
What's a rough idea about how much Chrysalis would weigh?
2.4M tons it says. ~2.2B kg = $8.8 trillion dollars just for the launch costs alone?
I also thought this was interesting from the 2nd place booklet. Did not know this.
>The chance of a successful pregnancy in deep space without a geomagnetic field is essentially zero.
>During mitosis and meiosis, microtubules depend on a stable magnetic field to
orient the mitotic spindle and ensure accurate chromosome segregation —
processes critical for embryonic growth. A spacecraft lacking any magnetic field
would halt human reproduction, dooming both the mission and the survival of
the colony.
Why does it say the Chrysalis spends 400 years in inertial age at 0.01c if it accelerates for 1 year at 0.1g? That should bring it to actually ~0.1c and the whole trip would take less than 15 years.
An interstellar ship is indistinguishable from a generational colony ship because there's no way to realistically travel between stars in timelines that don't span generations unless we extend human lifetimes to centuries or longer. That's possible but doesn't change the trael times. It just means you live to the destination rather than your descedants do.
And let's aside the serious ethical issue of you choosing to board such a ship vs the offspring you have who definitely did not consent, some of whom may not even make it to the destination.
So a generational colony ship looks a lot like an O'Neil Cylinder [1]. It can spin to create 1g gravity and support enough people to make it to the destination.
The issue is energy. An orbital can support itself with solar power when around a star and doesn't need a form of propulsion. An interstellar ship will need an alternative energy source and also have a propulsion system that can sufficiently accelerate and decelerate. The energy budget for the propulsion is so large that the life support energy budget is a rounding error.
The only realistic policy I see is solar sails. This avoids the reaction mass issue. You need to decelerate at the other end. Part of that you get from drag in the interstellar medium. You either carry reaction mass for the rest or you go ahead and use automated systems to build the solar sail equivalent on the other end to decelerate you.
This is definitely one way how to do it - but it should be possible to also get fast if you really want to[0][1] + likely also increase human lifespan/hibernate/immortal cyborgs. So there might be whole other class of interstellar ships - much more compact and with its own unique class of moral issues!
Anyone enamoured with this type of stuff should watch the movie Aniara. It's a great movie that illustrates what a delusional fantasy interstellar space travel of this form is.
I am a big space exploration fan, but beyond our solar system, it's probably best thought of as a fantasy entertainment genre.
Aniara is not a good example - the ship was supposed to do a regular interplanetary flight orogonally before ending up on unplanned interstellar trip to oblivion due to drive failure before they could break to their destination planet (+ some apparent strife in the Solar System at the time, so no one could mount a rescue mission in time).
That is totally something that can happen if you have a high performance interplanetary craft that does trips between planets in weeks - any trajectory is likely hyperbolic and if your drive fails before you brake again & no one can catch up with you in time you are kinda screwed.
One thing that I think is fun now that we have embryo freezing is that we can transport absolute masses of genetic diversity into the future, so even a small crew of a generation starship need not worry about interbreeding risk. Social risks abound, of course, but we could easily supply hundreds of thousands of embryos into the far future so that concerns of a minimum viable population are no longer valid.
That eliminates biology as a constraint. What a life for our descendants so consigned, generations to live and die on a ship so that their descendants in turn could one day revolve around a foreign sun. I'm sure at some nth generation they will resent us for sending them away from the happiness of Spaceship Earth.
It would be an amusing result if the only ones with the fortitude necessary to endure this are those religious enough in belief and purpose.
Indeed, the challenge of fixing Earth is much, much simpler than that of constructing a contained self-sufficient habitat that can operate without input from Earth for hundreds of years. And maybe doing the first will produce useful knowledge for if we ever are ready to try the second.
I was hoping the challenge would be about launch or propulsion mechanisms, both with and without human occupants (the design space relaxes a lot if interstellar scientific probes are acceptable, say for parallax imaging of the universe, etc.).
This project has invoked a lot of very interesting dialogue and discussion -
Very fun fit for HN.
Someone mentioned Kim Stanley Robinson's book: Aurora. (There is an audiobook version.)
I recommend it also... It is a bit long winded but presents a lot of detail and thinking on many of the ideas discussed in this comment section. A very fun read. A grand adventure similar to old school science fiction books.
One of the brilliant concluding quotes, went something like;
The earth is an interstellar spaceship too.
One thing I find amusing about generation ships is that the prerequisite understanding of systems ecology, biology, political organization, etc. required to actually make them successful completely obviates the need to actually go anywhere with them.
If you can somehow obtain the knowledge of how to get a sexually reproducing population of n awake behaving human beings to successfully live in a tin can for 500 years then it is hard to see why you wouldn't just make more tin cans and replicate the process.
47 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 43.2 ms ] threadhttps://www.canva.com/design/DAGmr3ubC8E/LHHAeeAIGGQe_TkZVs-...
I hope durable file formats regain popularity before humanity starts embarking on interstellar voyages :)
Is this enough for a healthy breeding population?
Feed them like Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Love the designs, doubt democracy would get them through more than 250 days, let alone 250 years.
Teams would submit proposals for the design of a permanent space settlement (sometimes on the surface of a body, sometimes orbiting). Winners from across the world were invited to compete together live in 4 huge multi-national teams to design and pitch another settlement over a long sleepless weekend. As a two-time finalist, I can say it was an incredible experience for so many reasons.
This new competition seems like its goal is to actually take the design/ideation of working professionals as a serious output, as opposed to the educational value of simulating this sort of thing for students, which is what drove the ISSDC.
What's a rough idea about how much Chrysalis would weigh?
2.4M tons it says. ~2.2B kg = $8.8 trillion dollars just for the launch costs alone?
I also thought this was interesting from the 2nd place booklet. Did not know this.
>The chance of a successful pregnancy in deep space without a geomagnetic field is essentially zero.
>During mitosis and meiosis, microtubules depend on a stable magnetic field to orient the mitotic spindle and ensure accurate chromosome segregation — processes critical for embryonic growth. A spacecraft lacking any magnetic field would halt human reproduction, dooming both the mission and the survival of the colony.
And let's aside the serious ethical issue of you choosing to board such a ship vs the offspring you have who definitely did not consent, some of whom may not even make it to the destination.
So a generational colony ship looks a lot like an O'Neil Cylinder [1]. It can spin to create 1g gravity and support enough people to make it to the destination.
The issue is energy. An orbital can support itself with solar power when around a star and doesn't need a form of propulsion. An interstellar ship will need an alternative energy source and also have a propulsion system that can sufficiently accelerate and decelerate. The energy budget for the propulsion is so large that the life support energy budget is a rounding error.
The only realistic policy I see is solar sails. This avoids the reaction mass issue. You need to decelerate at the other end. Part of that you get from drag in the interstellar medium. You either carry reaction mass for the rest or you go ahead and use automated systems to build the solar sail equivalent on the other end to decelerate you.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_salt-water_rocket
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter_rocket
I am a big space exploration fan, but beyond our solar system, it's probably best thought of as a fantasy entertainment genre.
That is totally something that can happen if you have a high performance interplanetary craft that does trips between planets in weeks - any trajectory is likely hyperbolic and if your drive fails before you brake again & no one can catch up with you in time you are kinda screwed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13VS_klDrio
That eliminates biology as a constraint. What a life for our descendants so consigned, generations to live and die on a ship so that their descendants in turn could one day revolve around a foreign sun. I'm sure at some nth generation they will resent us for sending them away from the happiness of Spaceship Earth.
It would be an amusing result if the only ones with the fortitude necessary to endure this are those religious enough in belief and purpose.
Sort of like sending a cell capable of life and creating more life.
Aliens are always sending such probes here in scifi, so why don't we do it, too?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(novel)
He looks like one guy you don't want to end up cohabitating with you for centuries on a generational starship.
If you can somehow obtain the knowledge of how to get a sexually reproducing population of n awake behaving human beings to successfully live in a tin can for 500 years then it is hard to see why you wouldn't just make more tin cans and replicate the process.