Comment by gwbas1c 4 days ago
It makes me wonder what kind of "life" could perform interstellar travel? I used to imagine a spaceship being alive, with people inside being analogous to "cells" in a multicellular organism.
Perhaps this is really how AI achieves consciousness?
To make a generation ship work you have to build a self-contained ecology that is stable and self-repairing, inside mechanical and software systems that are fault tolerant and either extremely redundant or self-repairing, run by a political and social system that is also fault-tolerant and self-repairing.
We know how to do exactly zero of those things.
More to the point the ship needs to be absolutely self sufficient, it can't even use solar power and has no access to outside mass whatsoever. But if you have a ship like this you could build an orbital habitat using the same technology, and it would be much much easier to build since it doesn't have to accelerate, can use solar power, and has access to the rest of the resources of a solar system.
If you have all of this why would you go to the enormous extra effort to move the habitat to a different solar system? Even if your civilization is so old that the star is a dim brown dwarf that's still plenty of energy for day to day life.
There's a CRPG I've been meaning to play where this is basically the plot; there was a generation ship, it was heading towards some planet or another, but the social and political structure on the ship broke down at some point and now there's no one actually in charge, the ship is getting run down, and they probably blew past their destination a hundred years ago if they were even still on course at all.
I remember someone pointing out that a generation ship could be problematic because you have one generation who decides to launch this expedition but will never see the end, multiple generations who didn't choose this life and won't get to see the benefits, and then one generation who actually gets to the planet but might not even want to be there. Without some kind of cryogenic sleep or relativistic speeds the whole thing might fall apart just because most of the people involved "didn't sign up for this" but they have to toil away anyway for someone else to benefit from it.
What of the "just so" attitude of a child growing up? Everything is taken at face value, there is no comparison, only stories (unless you have a catalogue of 30EB of 8K earth footage or something to that effect for them to fawn over). They don't have the reference frame for other situations for a while, perhaps long enough to not be able to see things differently?
This makes me think of multi-generational migrations north out of Africa. There's only so much that can be passed orally losslessly. Eventually the group in north siberia after 20K years doesn't see living any other way.
> I remember someone pointing out that a generation ship could be problematic because you have one generation who decides to launch this expedition but will never see the end, multiple generations who didn't choose this life and won't get to see the benefits, and then one generation who actually gets to the planet but might not even want to be there.
That isn't really different from the way things are now. We are, in fact, traveling through the galaxy for many generations and none of us signed up for it. We just happen to be on a largeish ship and have no destination.
Well, to be frank, we currently have such a ship, but we're doing quite a lot to disrupt its capability of sustaining human life.
Of course, even if we stopped doing that, we'd need to figure out how to visit another place if our ship is passing close by. That also seems to pose a problem: both Voyagers are barely out of the exhaust fumes of our ship's motor, and getting so far took ~40 years.
It's a wonderfully entertaining book and for that reason I loved it, but Andy Weir really, really glosses over and hand-waves away all kinds of other difficulties for so quickly and easily building a ship that can travel at nearly the speed of light.
He basically just has it work because the fuel difficulties are solved and bam, the main character can zip around nearby start systems at close to perfect C on a ship built with little more than our current 21st century technology. Fun, but not even in the most basic way an attempt at presenting any science seriously.
What makes it more amusing is that for many other parts of the main drama, he puts a lot of effort into making the descriptions and scenarios seem as realistic and science-rich as you could like. I suspect a lot of entertaining word salad there too though.
Not really, because it was a single person and the spaceship was a vehicle. The other race was still in a vehicle.
Think more about the difference between single celled organisms versus a multicellular organism: IE, the spaceship itself is alive and has a lifespan where interstellar travel is a fraction of its life. The people inside are like cells inside our body.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_ship