I am increasingly certain that culture is by far the biggest limiting factor when it comes to large-scale problem solving now and in the future.
We couldn't even reliably get people to put a piece of fabric over their face to stop killing their own relatives. Even if we could build a generation ship, it would turn into an Event Horizon hellscape if we don't figure out better cultural, communication, and sociological tools to enable us to get along and work together effectively.
"Europeans" is kinda broad brush. Norwegians around me had little trouble following the safety instructions.
Still not sold though that the cohesion in an small, resource constrained, artificial community can hold over a few generations. Huge risks of it degrading into some cult/dictatorship.
I don't see why smaller societies should not be able to thrive. My grandparents said once that back in the day you could identify what rural village someone was from by their accent. Meaning populations inside of villages changed very little. And most of these villages did just fine with populations as low as 200.
They all existed within the greater (regional, national) social context. There still was freedom of movement even if at much greater cost. There were avenues for delinquents and outcasts to seek fortunes in the cities or even overseas. There was no overarching purpose imposed on their life other than the religion.
This is not to say that generation ship societies are doomed to fail but chances are decent.
The real question is what stops them from declaring independence and cutting ties with Earth. Especially after generations of people? They'd need strong ... propaganda, for lack of a better word.
One of the primary causes of our cultural disfunction is our seemingly intrinsic compulsion to separate ourselves into groups of Us and Them, and have no limit to the amount of disparaging, scorn, and dehumanization we are willing to dump onto Them.
Covid went really well in all the intellectual bastions of liberal democracy right? NYC, SF? California famously no downsides from their policy choices at all.
And then to top it off, you compare response to China - the government that lied through it's teeth about covid from the beginning, jailed journalists and destroyed evidence.
Oh, nobody managed Covid well. The question was capacity to sacrifice for the common good.
New York is a bad example to call out since it was one of the first places to get hit, locked down hard after a delay, and yet came out with lower per-capita deaths and a stronger economy than most red states. (Speaking as someone who lives in one of the reddest states in the union.)
Maybe the issue is that people assume that a randomly selected population would consist of US citizens. What if you picked Japanese? They did well during covid. An they are know for having a strong communal responsibility. Maybe the average US citizen is just a bad choice for a generation ship? Then again given the choice between sending foreign citizen's or sending no generation ship would probably result in no generation ship bring launched.
People from latin america might be a good match - last time the fleet of generation ships not only reached the destination in sufficient number, but one of them even ahead of schedule[0]!
> The question is "Could we create a cadre of 400 highly effective people that could sustain a colony on a spaceship?"
For a generational ship, the question becomes even more complex because you would have to build a culture of expertise that can sustain itself over multiple generations.
> The question was capacity to sacrifice for the common good.
COVID didn't test for capacity to sacrifice for the common good. Sacrifice is voluntary. It tested for capacity to submit to authoritarian control for the common good.
Yeah. Entirely failed to lock up and isolate the vulnerable for their own good. Which really would have been the altruistic choice. If we are not even ready and capable to do the most obvious and reasonable. How can we expect anything better?
That's why the community has to survive 80 years in the Antarctica without any contact, and only the surving generation may start the travel then. 2400 people on the ship, plus 20% who will not make it. Or maybe 90%?
Are you opining from the outside or did you live here during the pandemic?
If you entered a bus or any public space during that time, most people were wearing masks. And bus schedules were heavily adjusted to decrease density of people. Society did a lot to fight the virus, just not based on mandates but based on getting people to voluntarily do what was necessary because they in majority used common sense and an undertanding of what's the danger and what is needed. Similar to what an intergenerational space ship would need.
So, if your argument is "you can solve big problems without coersion" then I'm with you. You need a high trust society.
Though if your argument is "the mask stuff was just BS, just look at Sweden, they didn't use any and turned out well" then you just don't have a clue what you are talking about.
Here in Buenos Aires we had a complete lockdown for 6 months, I coud only go walking only up to 1/4 mile and only to buy food. For longer trips I needed a writen authorization.
Most people used mask, even in the street, nobody complained, but a few morons used it in the chin that is not very effective.
Anyway, we got more death per million than Sweden.
Relativity isn't the problem. The problem is that hitting a grain of sand at 0.1 c delivers the energy of several tonnes of TNT.
My guess is that we will colonize the asteroid belt (Palladium! So much palladium!) and send lots of interstellar probes long before we try to send humans outside the solar system. Right now we're like a village that lives by a river and has never reached the mouth talking about sailing across the ocean. There are a lot of intermediate stages.
It's not only about palladium or any other kind of ore. It's that you can launch from there to Earth orbit and spare most of the costs of lifting mass from the surface of our planet. Then you build habitats and ships with that stuff because it's much cheaper. Too bad we don't have neither mining nor factories in space yet. Two not trivial technologies to develop.
The book Delta V [1] explores that scenario, with an asteroid on an orbit close to Earth to minimize the delta v to ship things back home.
> Right now we're like a village that lives by a river and has never reached the mouth talking about sailing across the ocean
And that’s an enormous understatement. Let’s say the villagers have travelled a meager 10 km of the river. Then, the ocean is, ballpark, at most 1,000 times as wide as the distance to the sea.
A thousand times the distance between earth and moon (the farthest humans have travelled) gets you, ballpark, to mars.
A lightyear is ~50,000 times the distance to mars or 50,000,000 times as far as humans have travelled. And yet, in interstellar travel, a lightyear gets you nowhere.
Sure, but the speeds you can realistically reach on the surface of a planet for any lenght of time is also many orders of magnitude less than you can reach in space & you also don't really loose speed by friction. That at least partially compensates for the mindboggling distances in space.
We're one good new religion away from colonizing the solar system.
Cathedrals were built over 100s of years. Imaging just living in a massive one and your whole holy purpose is to survive and thrive and spread.
It's entirely reasonable we'd have the will to make it happen, and pretty reasonable we'd be able to build it with planet scale effort, but sadly quite difficult to imagine it surviving even dust impacts for 400 years.
Everything is consumed on such a voyage. If we can send a generation ship at 0.01c, we can send replacement parts quicker and probes ahead to verify our estimates even faster.
Are you just casually handwaving away sending a dockable resupply ship at 0.01c to somewhere in interstellar space, then doing some kind of rendesvous with it at 0.01c with a spaceship measured kilometers in length?
There's no free lunch. Every gram of mass that you want to get to interstellar space requires exactly as much fuel to get there as you'd have to add to the original spacecraft to just carry it.
(thought experiment - have them fly side by side, then connect them by string, then shorten the string until they touch, then weld them together - the fuel required doesn't change at any point).
And a shield + a resupply ship has a lot more grams than just adding the shield to the original thing.
> It's entirely reasonable we'd have the will to make it happen
"We" are not even able to sustainably inhabit our current planet. We have hundreds of millions starving every day, we have wars in many places, the threat of thermonuclear war looming as strong as ever, and are still using natural resources at an unsustainable rate even though we know that that's the case. Settling on other planets has all these problems plus the issue of getting there plus the issue that the environment you find there is more hostile than the most hostile desert areas here on earth.
We currently live on paradise planet and can't even make things work well around here. Hard to see how you could make things work on Mars where you can't just go outside pick a leaf to eat and get some water to drink. Or just, you know, breathe.
We do not have hundreds of millions starving every day.
And if we did, we don't have a large portion of industrialized/militarized missions starving every day anway.
We'd send the best of the best, hand picked, with the best tech we can build.
It's fine if you believe we should not go (but I disagree), but the state of the world is not evidence of failure of the mission.
> We do not have hundreds of millions starving every day.
Then maybe it's time you stop being ignorant. It's not even hard to google. Start with the WHO, over 700 million people faced hunger and malnutrition in 2023. [1] And I'm not particularly interested in how you will try to nitpick your way out of that. It's so easy in the west and in upper classes of the developing world to close your eyes to this.
> And if we did, we don't have a large portion of industrialized/militarized missions starving every day anway. We'd send the best of the best, hand picked, with the best tech we can build.
Initially, sure. But that's not what I was talking about. Eventually you want to build a civilization there, right? Eventually you have millions there. And it's hard to see how you will be able to organize a society in large scale in a way that does not have the problems humankind currently has if you can't even fix that here which compared to all other planets is a nature paradise. Even after a thermonuclear war, earth is easier to live on than any other planet in this solar system. Time to leave your scifi bubble if you believe otherwise.
> It's fine if you believe we should not go (but I disagree), but the state of the world is not evidence of failure of the mission.
The state of the world is evidence of failure of a mission that is much easier than building a civilization on another planet.
We are a life form that triggered major environmental crisis and is trying to adapt to it at unprecedented speed that no other life form achieved in the past. Our base line for being able to make changes isn’t science fiction but couple billions of history of life on this planet. Our goals are ambitious but we are doing surprisingly well. Just not as we want it to happen.
I read their comment as saying that current physics doesn't allow the kind of propulsion systems we need, even with optimal engineering and well below the lightspeed limit.
> current physics doesn't allow the kind of propulsion systems we need
Which is wrong. Direct-drive fusion fits the bill. It’s also easier than terrestrial power-generating fusion since you don’t need to convert to electricity.
Energy is the limit. If used Wolfram Alpha right for reasonable comparison that is largest cruise ship with mass of 248663000 kg to speed up to 0.01c mentioned the kinetic energy would be 2.9 times the worlds fossil fuel reserves...
Then double that to slow down. And remember efficiency and that well you need to spend some to keep people alive...
Seems like energy in general is one of the true problems.
> If used Wolfram Alpha right for reasonable comparison that is largest cruise ship with mass of 248663000 kg to speed up to 0.01c mentioned the kinetic energy would be 2.9 times the worlds fossil fuel reserves
This math is wrong.
Back of the envelope: accelerating 250 x 10^6 kg to 1% of c over one year is about 310,000 TWh. That’s like half of current annual energy production.
Even at like 10g, which would accelerate that mass to 1% c in less than half a day, you’d only use like a tenth of our 10^22 joules of fossil fuel reserves.
> double that to slow down
Why the asymmetry? 1x to accelerate, 1x to decelerate. (Less if you can aerobrake and/or use gravity assists.)
Taking the 310k TWh from earlier and doubling it, and assuming 18 MeV for D-T direct-drive fusion, and you need 6,600 kg fuel for the journey. (Plus propellant.) 100x that to account for inefficiency and cooling and you have 660 metric tonnes of hydrogen. That, if kept in its bastard liquid form, takes up about 3 Olympic-size swimming pools in volume.
Yeah, stupid thing went with c^2... Not (0.01c) ^2... My bad from not reading the steps properly.
Still, even half of current annual production is quite a ask. For single ship, and I might venture to guess that 250e6 kg might be light for what is needed...
Shame we don't have a way to efficiently convert fuel energy directly into a ship's kinetic energy, and have to go via conservation of momentum… though I suppose magnetic launch of interstellar vehicles would be a neat use for a Dyson shell or Niven ring?: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=0.5+*+1+gee+*+%280.01c%...
If you can build and maintain a system capable of sustaining the lives of 1,000 humans for 400 years, why do you care about interstellar travel anymore?
“The indefatigable spirit of exploration” isn’t the answer. People, as a mass, only explore to find new resources due to scarcity.
There are exceptions, but they tend to be thrill seekers or publicity hounds seeking to capitalize on a measure of fame upon their return and dying on a spacecraft 1/5th of the way through its journey isn’t thrilling and no ticker tape parades await your return.
If you can build a spacecraft capable of sustaining 1,000 human lives for multiple centuries, you’ve solved all local resource scarcity problems. You could just mine the solar system and build billions of habitats that lazily circle the sun.
Hell, you wouldn’t even care about habitable planets anymore and a likely endpoint for any interstellar efforts would likely be a long-lived star with large orbiting gas giants you could turn into solid materials in order to build trillions of habitats orbiting that star, not an insignificant earth-like boulder.
Imagine turning all of the methane in a gas giant into carbon strands, using its hydrogen to do it and building a near-infinite number of habitats, each perfectly suited to human existence.
An earth-like planet with its quakes and tsunamis and seasonal cycles would seem pathetic.
> People, as a mass, only explore to find new resources due to scarcity
Empirically totally untrue as to be trivially disproven by like half of wealthy social media.
> thrill seekers or publicity hounds seeking to capitalize on a measure of fame upon their return
Everyone on these ships would be a celebrity on Earth. (Ideally, if they so chose.)
Again, a simple reading of one-way trip settler-explorers across history similarly rejects this notion.
> If you can build a spacecraft capable of sustaining 1,000 human lives for multiple centuries, you’ve solved all local resource scarcity problems
The first several of these ships are likely to end in catastrophe. The first to succeed will be breaking down on arrival. If we learn to build luxurious space habitats it will be through these endeavours.
Are you genuinely unfamiliar with the folks who launch off on their own into the deep wilderness for years on end. Not only for vanity, but largely to do groundbreaking research?
Sure, individual weirdos can do that for a few years. But you're talking about literally millennia of travel. Hundreds of generations of people living their entire life on the bus never getting to the destination before they die. Trapped out in the cold empty void of space with literally nothing around, for their entire lives, and the lives of their children, and their children's children, for longer than we have had the written word. Never even knowing if the destination is worth it.
We don't have anywhere near the engine technology to make it anywhere worth going to in 400 years. That's orders of magnitude more difficult.
Anywhere that might sustain life is no closer than a couple thousand years away if we develop ultra-efficient almost magical engines that only bend the laws of physics instead of breaking them outright. Stuff like accelerating the propellent so hard that it picks up enormous amounts of relativistic mass, like every gram of propellant weighs effectively a ton because you've accelerated it so close to the speed of light, which requires some kind of ultra-dense power source that makes mere matter-antimatter annihilation look like burning a match.
Are you confusing "adventurer" and "explorer"? There are plenty of contemporary adventurers (motivated by ego, fame, personal achievement) but explorers? Not so much.
In that timeframe it would by nature need to be capable of full self repair, with the shipped materials and energy, and with no wasted byproducts.
We'd have to completely re-think industrial processes. I'm in favor of realized nanotechnology and 3d printers at an atomic level. Evolution stumbled across carbon based lifeforms as it's answer on Earth.
Should be doable with beamed propulsion. Basically give each package a lightsail & you can have it maneuver when illuminated by laser arrays either in the home system or on the interstellar craft itself.
The beauty of this setup is that if you are really good at keeping the schedule, this can be all pre-computed. With time slots being allocated beforehand when the laser arrays send beams in a given direction & the packages (or the craft itself) just making really sure they stay in the beam & properly oriented when it arrives at the planed place and time.
Because if you don’t, someone else will, and they won’t share your values, and now have access to orders of magnitude more resources than you. We’ve seen how that ends.
With exponential growth and the second law of thermodynamics, there’s no such thing as solving resource scarcity, only delaying it.
The winning proposal coasts at 0.01c. Propulsion systems--not the speed of light--and thus engineering, not phsyics, are the relevant limitors.