William Shatner: Actually, going to space was a huge bummer

[ZombieRasputin]

@Brainspore

Once you start packing everything you think you’ll need to establish a new biosphere you start running into what I call the “Noah’s Ark” problem pretty quick. You want to bring a pair of lions? Better make sure you have a breeding population of zebras to keep them well fed! And that means a whole lot of grass. And of course you’ll need lots of soil additives and nutrients and microbes and whatnot to keep the grass alive. And so on.

Even if the only species you ultimately care about keeping alive is humanity we aren’t exactly sold separately.

There is a part in Aurora where the residents of the ship realize that the original mission planners neglected to bring along enough bromine, and the quantity they had was slowly leaching into structural elements of the ship, and it would be prohibitively expensive to extract it. The residents despair that there isn’t a source of it for five lightyears in either direction.