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My uncle was awarded a PhD in the late 1970's from Arizona for the technical papers on generations ship written for NASA, so I have some insight to this stuff [

by Balgair 10y ago

My uncle was awarded a PhD in the late 1970's from Arizona for the technical papers on generations ship written for NASA, so I have some insight to this stuff [0]. The TLDR; for the project was that assholes suck. Many many things are hard to work out for a generation ship, from the correct number of light bulbs to bring with you, to the plumbing, to the risks of permanent 0g. In all, the engineering was remotely possible for the tech at the time, but extreme. A generation ship, ala a giant metal can with people and pipes in it, was engineeringly feasible, but the human considerations made it impossible. The main issue was that the ship's inhabitants were to be born, essentially, in Alcatraz; a prison they could never escape. As time went on, the crew was expected to become less and less aware of the danger of the vacuum and an accident was exponentially likely to occur. Most highly isolated peoples, like on Rapa Nui or Naval ships, were brutally strict. As teenagers are wont to be boundaries testers, it was expected they would be the most risk to the ship. Add in deteriorating conditions and failure of parts, and you end up with the Stanford Prison Experiment[2] for generations. The project was a human rights nightmare. For thousands of years, potentially, you breed and die in what may eventually amount to a Nazi death camp. The simplest solution was to make a giant Stanford torus [1] with the land area of between California or Maryland, stick an artificial sun in the center for light and heat, and launch it at your target [3]. Remove any computers or guidance of the Tube, just let gravity somehow guide you into the right place. Oh and make it big enough that some wacko death cult that may arise can't break it apart or kill everyone. Essentially, you launch a mini-Earth Tube, and let them fend for themselves. When the Tube gets into position, you hope they get curious enough to figure out a way to jump out. Obviously, the mass of the thing alone is too much to begin to think about, let alone the time it would take to create, launch, fly out, orbitally park and decelerate, and finally disembark. Even back in the 1970's, they knew that the rate of tech increase would just make it so that you launch a robot with some zygotes and grow the people when you get there. In the end, the possibility of a generation ship was deemed too remote to devote more funds towards. Our better natures think that we could live in harmony in the stars, but history tells us that our darker selves always arise. The issue with a generation ship of humans is not the ship, but the crew, as a lot of the time people can be nothing more than assholes. [0] By awarded, I mean he published the papers, and someone at UA forced him to take a single class for the requirements, so impressed they were at the scholarship. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_torus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_torus [2]http://www.prisonexp.org/ http://www.prisonexp.org/ [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_the_Long_Sun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_the_Long_Sun

Houshalter 10y ago
That's a very cynical view of humanity. For most of human history, people lived in small tribes of no more than 200 people and got along fine. The risk of sabotage is hugely over rated. Large cities survive on Earth every day because most people arent motivated enough to dump poison in the water supply or destroy critical infrastructure. The vast majority of people are not genocidal, and the few that are are terrible at it. The zygote idea may be possible in the future. We don't have artificial wombs yet, not to mention baby raising robots. Perhaps cryopreservation could work. I believe a rabbit kidney has been successfully frozen and revived intact. But brains are more delicate.
- douche 10y ago
  For most of human history, people lived in small tribes and waged incessant tribal warfare over women, land, and resources. Trying to cast prehistoric humanity as some golden age of peace and harmony is disingenuous. And we know for a fact that in the historical era, mankind has been at war virtually every year since the Sumerians started pressing glyphs into clay or the Chinese scratched runes on ox bones.
  - Houshalter 10y ago
    I don't think there is a lot of evidence to support that. Ive read that war was mostly a product of agriculture, which led to famines and stores of food easy to steal. But regardless, when hunter gatherers did go to war, they fought other tribes. Internal conflict is much less common. In a group where everyone knows each other and depends on each other for survival, war makes no sense. Groups of humans that didnt cooperate within a tribe would have died out long ago. Such an environment will hopefully have plenty of resources. At least of food and water and other necessities. Which also reduces the motivation for war and conflict.
  - jcranmer 10y ago
    There's very little evidence of war (defined loosely as an organized conflict between two polities) before the development of agriculture and civilization. It's worth noting that, in ancient Sumer, whereas most advancements start from the south and go north, defensive walls originate at the north and go south. The best evidence for Paleolithic warfare--which is to say pretty much the only--is a single apparent cemetery (at the tail end of the Paleolithic) where about half the people died with signs of violent trauma.

by Balgair 10y ago

Houshalter 10y ago

That's a very cynical view of humanity. For most of human history, people lived in small tribes of no more than 200 people and got along fine. The risk of sabotage is hugely over rated. Large cities survive on Earth every day because most people arent motivated enough to dump poison in the water supply or destroy critical infrastructure. The vast majority of people are not genocidal, and the few that are are terrible at it. The zygote idea may be possible in the future. We don't have artificial wombs yet, not to mention baby raising robots. Perhaps cryopreservation could work. I believe a rabbit kidney has been successfully frozen and revived intact. But brains are more delicate.

douche 10y ago
For most of human history, people lived in small tribes and waged incessant tribal warfare over women, land, and resources. Trying to cast prehistoric humanity as some golden age of peace and harmony is disingenuous. And we know for a fact that in the historical era, mankind has been at war virtually every year since the Sumerians started pressing glyphs into clay or the Chinese scratched runes on ox bones.
- Houshalter 10y ago
  I don't think there is a lot of evidence to support that. Ive read that war was mostly a product of agriculture, which led to famines and stores of food easy to steal. But regardless, when hunter gatherers did go to war, they fought other tribes. Internal conflict is much less common. In a group where everyone knows each other and depends on each other for survival, war makes no sense. Groups of humans that didnt cooperate within a tribe would have died out long ago. Such an environment will hopefully have plenty of resources. At least of food and water and other necessities. Which also reduces the motivation for war and conflict.
- jcranmer 10y ago
  There's very little evidence of war (defined loosely as an organized conflict between two polities) before the development of agriculture and civilization. It's worth noting that, in ancient Sumer, whereas most advancements start from the south and go north, defensive walls originate at the north and go south. The best evidence for Paleolithic warfare--which is to say pretty much the only--is a single apparent cemetery (at the tail end of the Paleolithic) where about half the people died with signs of violent trauma.