FSTDT Forums
Community => Science and Technology => Topic started by: Quasirodent on February 16, 2012, 09:44:58 pm
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On reading the 'super-earth' thread, I was reminded of this idea I had when I was a teenager and interested in writing science fiction: How would I allow spacecraft to travel huge distances within manageable lengths of time?
Basically, I supposed that the sub-atomic particles that made up the universe spun at different frequencies and rates depending on where you were, and if you altered the spin of one group of particles so that it exactly matched the signature of another place, they would essentially exist in two locations at once (referencing some quantum experiments) and create a wormhole between the origin point and the signature point.
My grasp of the physics involved isn't that great, so I'm sure it's not really a feasible idea (But still more realistic than what I've seen in a lot of books.)
So what ideas do you folks have?
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Garganta.
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*googles this* ... 200 foot tall giant woman in a furry bikini?
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What the fuck were you looking at?
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What the fuck were you looking at?
Apparently this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garganta). While you are probably referring to this (http://bleach.wikia.com/wiki/Garganta).
Anyway, interstellar space travel in a reasonable time is going to be a tough nut to crack. I'm sure I'll never see it happen and reasonably sure no one active on this board will, either.
Hell, I'd be happy just to see us land a human on Mars.
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I vote for generation ships. Although I'm not sure if even those would work.
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It has to be either Arthur C Clarke's Songs of Distant Earth or Poul Anderson's Tau Zero.
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I'm still holding out a hope that we will eventually discover a way to reduce the insane energy requirements of an Alcubierre drive and make the concept feasible. Even a subluminal warp drive would be the best thing ever.
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If you could get close to the speed of light, the time dilation would allow you to travel a lot farther than your normal lifespan in light years (but would take an absurd amount of energy). Alternatively, there could be a large self contained space civilization that would make the journey over multiple generations. Or, medical technology would advance to the point that all body parts could be replaced with young clone tissue, and lifespans would be limitless.
Wormholes are a nice plot device, but unless there was a reasonable way to produce/stabilize one, it'll never be any more than that.
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I have a way!
Garganta.
You just have to die & eat some people. No biggie.
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It has to be either Arthur C Clarke's Songs of Distant Earth or Poul Anderson's Tau Zero.
I never understood the concept of generation ships. Give finite resources the following scenarios hypothetically play out in chronological order:
- Capable of building a generation ship that lasts 1000 years
- Capable of building a generation ship that lasts 750 years
- Capable of building a generation ship that lasts 500 years
- Capable of building a generation ship that lasts 250 years
- Last one out shut the lights off!
Of course this assumes complete mutual cooperation among all political powers.
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It has to be either Arthur C Clarke's Songs of Distant Earth or Poul Anderson's Tau Zero.
I never understood the concept of generation ships. Give finite resources the following scenarios hypothetically play out in chronological order:
- Capable of building a generation ship that lasts 1000 years
- Capable of building a generation ship that lasts 750 years
- Capable of building a generation ship that lasts 500 years
- Capable of building a generation ship that lasts 250 years
- Last one out shut the lights off!
Of course this assumes complete mutual cooperation among all political powers.
Well the point is that you try to recycle/reuse as much as possible and hope that the resources on the ship won't end untill you reach your destination. Also you would have to have population control to keep the numbers low enough to be sustainable and some sort of eugenic program to make sure you won't end up destroying the crew by inbreeding.
Having a ship where most of the passengers are in hibernation/cryo-sleep would be easier. But if we go down that line then why not simply hope for a FTL-drive.
Generation ship not only reguires huge resources you also need thousands of people who say:
"Ok. I and my descendants will spend rest of our lives trapped in this ship suffering claustrohpobia (and all psychological problems that arise from being stuck here) as well as the risks of: starvation if the farms or supplies are damaged, death if any vital systems become unrepairable and of course harsh totalitarian regime so that at some point this ship will reach another star system, which may or may not be inhabitable."
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It has to be either Arthur C Clarke's Songs of Distant Earth or Poul Anderson's Tau Zero.
I never understood the concept of generation ships.
Neither of those books involves a generation ship as such. In Songs of Distant Earth the last ship to leave Earth uses cryogenics for the passengers, and the story plays out on a stop-off on the way to their new home. The stop-off (like all the other human-inhabited worlds not featured in the story) was previously populated by a ship that transported not much other than genetic material for the people and their food (etc) needs.
The ship in Tau Zero was not intended as a generation ship, but depended on time dilation to reduce the journey time.
Give finite resources ....
Material resources are not finite: given enough energy, all matter is infinitely recyclable. That's how life on Earth has kept going for all these years. All you need is to not jettison too much Stuff and to maintain a good energy supply - the second of these is the chief difference between the ships on those two books.
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I would have thought that you only need a generational crew with most of the colonisers being carried in the form of frozen genetic material. That same genetic material could be used to prevent crew inbreeding.
However I have no idea what you would do to keep the crew from going completely insane
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Generation ship not only reguires huge resources you also need thousands of people who say:
"Ok. I and my descendants will spend rest of our lives trapped in this ship suffering claustrohpobia (and all psychological problems that arise from being stuck here) as well as the risks of: starvation if the farms or supplies are damaged, death if any vital systems become unrepairable and of course harsh totalitarian regime so that at some point this ship will reach another star system, which may or may not be inhabitable."
That actually won't be that much of an issue. As soon as the idea for a one-way Mars mission in the next two decades got juggled around, NASA already had more volunteers than they would ever need.
The descendants don't get asked, though I imagine rebellious teenagers are going to be funny[not] on a generational ship.
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Send fundies. They're already in a state of hibernation/cryo-sleep.
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But how would you wake them up at the end of the journey?
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But how would you wake them up at the end of the journey?
You don't. You just gather them all in one ship and blast them out of this solar system.
Douglas Adams presented this solution in one of his books.
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I would have thought that you only need a generational crew with most of the colonisers being carried in the form of frozen genetic material. That same genetic material could be used to prevent crew inbreeding.
However I have no idea what you would do to keep the crew from going completely insane
Use robots for the crew. Non-sentient, boring old machines that can do the same task a million times over. With artificial wombs they could raise the first generation of colonists, which, if you really want to get fancy could actually be clones of voulnteers who's personalities were downloaded and stored on the ship's computer in order to make the trip. The only biological resources you would need to expend during the trip would be the ones necessary to raise your first batch of people, which might not be much if you can accelerate development and bring them to adulthood quickly.
It would actually avoid a lot of problems because it would mean that only people who wanted to be there and should be there were establishing the colony.
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But the robots go crazy like in 2010? What about maintenance?
Actually fully automated ships sounds like a remarkably good idea and given how far we can send unmanned probes we probably aren't too far away from this being feasible.
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But the robots go crazy like in 2010? What about maintenance?
Or a hacker gets into the computer storing the crews personalities and changes them into serial killers, supernazis, the cast of Jersey Shore, or even worse, 2012 Republican presidential candidates.
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I'm thinking of President Eden from Fallout now.
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Frank J. Tipler had a lot of nutty ideas but I still think his Physics of Immortality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Tipler) book had one of the most likely scenarios.
Basically you send out a bunch of robots and AI's moving at sublight speeds into the galaxy, they then resurrect human genetic material and colonize the universe that way. None of the inherent problems of generation starships with all of the pluses.
The only technology we don't have yet in that scenario is artificial wombs and AI's smart enough to do the job, as far as I know those two don't violate any fundamental laws of physics or require the sort of stupendously insane levels of energy that something like wormholes would.
Oops, Mojo beat me to it. Sorry.
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It's not very time-efficient, though. You also have to give them a way to steer away from stars, uninhabitable worlds*, asteroids, black holes, & space daddy longlegs.
*=They will have to know this ahead of time. Once they touch down, it is unlikely they will have enough fuel to achieve escape velocity. Unless they're big fucking robots.
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...Space Daddy Long Legs?
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Space Daddy Long Legs.
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I'm... sure there are plenty of those lying around to be worried in case we ever want to take to the stars past our own solar system.
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They are frequently found crawling on nebula clouds, humping stars, climbing into your wormholes to gunk up the joint, & just generally being massive douchebags.
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I was derpin' around on twitter and this link popped up:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGE-WRqgPRE
Thought it might be relevant to the discussion. If not, it's Carl Sagan.
The gist- while a group of people would take only a few decades, by the time they got back it would be way in the future.
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A sub light ship that carries on board a traversable time wormhole, so when the ship arrives in a few thousand years, the crew simply step through the wormhole and are at their destinations moments after they left. Sort of assumes working suspended animation technology for the trip out. Then just reverse the process to go home. Or carry a second wormhole that takes you instantly home.
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It's not very time-efficient, though. You also have to give them a way to steer away from stars, uninhabitable worlds*, asteroids, black holes, & space daddy longlegs.
*=They will have to know this ahead of time. Once they touch down, it is unlikely they will have enough fuel to achieve escape velocity. Unless they're big fucking robots.
Are these space daddylonglegs?
(http://www.waynesbooks.com/images/graphics/shadows1.jpg)
Because, yeah. An infestation of these could totally screw with the whole "colonizing the universe" thing. Those poor robots would be too busy cleaning space-cobwebs!
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Daddy longlegs don't make webs. They are not spiders.
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Well to be fair, there are Harvestmen, and there are also Cellar Spiders, which do spin webs. Both of them are called 'Daddy-Long-Legs'.