Appreciating these comments, especially as a writer currently immersed in a series of stories set aboard a generation ship. Proud to carry the torch.
In terms of Austintx, of course the physics and thus reality of generation ships make them so far out there when you really think about it, especially considering the mind-numbingly vast distances between the stars. Nevertheless, the speculative thoughts that can come out of the Protopian space colonist setting can be tremendously valuable–as Mr. Mari so eloquently describes–as a counter to the many more Dystopian narratives out there which are based on anxiety and fear instead of hope. Suffice to say, that this is something that is most necessary on planet Earth these days. One example that I used for my own inspiration was Ursula Le Guin’s The Birthday of the World. It’s a tradition going all the way back to Sir Thomas Moore’s Utopia, which can be used to great effect. Simply put, what would your ideal world look like?
There are also problems in the generation ship setting beyond the physics, but one especially more important to me as a writer. Since I don’t want my ship either getting there just yet or crashing in spectacular fashion, the relative peace and calm of the long middle leg of the exodus leaves less room for extrinsic plots based on events happening outside of the protective cocoon of the ship. Inherently I think this tends to limit the reach of a broader audience begging for action based sci-fi, but who cares? Star Wars we’re not and never will be. We’re the dreamers, right?
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will be as one
Since it seems like y’all are the perfect audience for my work I’d love to offer it to you. Feel free to contact me on Twitter or by email me at exo@exobooks.com and I’ll set you up.
Excited to see what you think about my version of the generation ship!
Canned monkeys–even heavily cyborged and bioneered monkeys–will never make it out of this solar system. They’ll be long extinct before even our machine successors ever have to even consider moving the another star because Sol’s energy output it dropping by so many billions of particles per Planck second. I still maintain that the smartest answer to the “Where are all the aliens?!” questions are: every-fucking-where. Everyone goes digital and never leave home until their sun starts to die…and then, all you’;d see coming from that sun would be a cloud of dust headed toward another star…which is exactly what a Dyson swarm migration would look like through a telescope.
Wouldn’t it be better to just make orbital stations and then just move them as the sun goes Red Gaint and then move them closer when it goes dwarf, at which point we jump to Alpha Cent. , being tied down to a planet seems too inside the box, if anything it should be tied to a solar system, mine it, & then move
Given the probability of any bit encoded on DNA making it to another star – due to thermal noise if the ship goes slowly, due to ionizing radiation if it goes more than a few kilometers per second – the most reliable “generation ship” won’t be shipping human bodies at all. It’ll be shipping bits – bits with massive error correction codes, massively redundant – aboard an AI vessel capable of building “humans” at the far end, with genetic tweaks as required for the environment.
Start from there. Scores of new worlds with divergent children of Earth on them, able to communicate between stars at lightspeed (but not terribly high data rates) and ahead of them an expanding front of “ships” that can reproduce themselves and their payloads. Thirty kilometers per second is not terribly hard to accomplish; escape from Earth orbit is only about 40 kps, after all, so the energy requirement is about five times what we have been able to do since the Voyagers. Even at 30 kps collisions with molecular hydrogen produces ionizing radiation, and 30 kps takes 40,000 years to reach even the nearest stars.
It won’t happen in human lifespans, but there’s no reason to write off human expansion for something so minor.
Generation ships would basically be portable space colonies, anyway. Since it’s far easier to build stationary colonies, this is no doubt what will consume our attention for millennia. A thousand millennia. And this will give us the experience to discover how to make them self-sustaining for periods of ~hundreds of years. By then, no-one will be thinking in terms of finding new planets and moons to live upon… madness! They’ll be thinking in terms of, for instance, getting their cultural splinter group to safety, somewhere that there is material to build more colonies.
Well, in Alastair Reynold’s last series, they basically make a bunch of hollowed out asteroid colonies and use them as a fleet of generation ships to go to another system…
Aside from what they did in that book, real generation ships will not be hollowed out asteroids!!! They’ll be built of the lightest materials possible (carbon fiber?) and encased in clean water ice for shielding and propellant… A generation ship will probably be shaped like a ring rotating around an engine cylinder. Inside the ring, the living sections will be able to swivel so that they experience 1G acceleration as gravity, and then switch to spinning while stationary or coasting between stars. See “The Jupiter Theft”.
This video demonstrates a ship which uses the concept to reconfigure it’s artificial gravity system from using centripetal force to using acceleration, on the fly, as the engines fire. However, I would dispense with much of the heavy rigid structure and simply attach the habitat modules to the thruster using cables: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jog1w_vOSQI
Stationary colonies however, will be heavier. Made out of asteroid rock, but not made of hollowed asteroids. Asteroids are loose piles of rubble, uneven density throughout. You need something strong enough that it can be a mile across, and be spun on it’s long axis for simulated gravity. So, the powdered tailings from mining will be sintered (melted and sprayed in place) into cylinders, appearing much like a concrete or ceramic material.
You’re right because they’ll never actually exist!
I suggest that something more like what happens in Ken MacLeod’s newest series is the likely reality: star whisps with bootstrapping nanotech and digital files.
Don’t they have to start, like, planting crops and having kids to be strictly considered colonists? Or am I imagining that? Perhaps they should be considered “hermits”.
Would a ship filled with posthuman, maybe postbiological entities count as “our” ship? Given that we can’t even convince people to commit serious time and resources to work on the problem of asteroid deflection, what are the chances that some day people are going to dedicate themselves to the monumental task of creating a Frankenstein species and sending it to another planet they themselves will never see or hear from? And what are the ethics of creating entirely new life forms to ship off to a hostile planet that may wipe them all out entirely?
I think that it is whether or not this ship’s mission was created by humans, and/or carries our “cause” to the stars, whatever you may feel that is, which makes it “ours”.
Maybe I’m being too pedantic, but I have trouble trusting the science knowledge of a science fiction writer who seems to buy into the left-brain-right-brain myth – which, in science circles, is pretty well-known to hold only a slight grain of truth.
I don’t know – I think that the human cause depends on shared historical experiences, shared physiologies, and shared ecosystems. Whatever makes its way to another solar system will probably develop a civilization vastly different from our own and, given the harsh constraints of space travel & colonization, it could very well be one that we’d find monstrous. Most of what we value as humans depends on our ability to waste a bunch of surplus resources – culture, play, community, creative experimentation. Is there going to be room in the energy budget on the generation ship for those things or are they going to be excised from the space colonists to maintain maximum efficiency?
I’m definitely being overly pedantic, as it is just a couple of sentences – from the article: “The left-brain wants something predictable, knowable; it wants a button to push, and a clear line of causation. But organic life is a lot messier than a computer switch.”
