4 ms·
Wouldn’t it be easier to send an artificial womb and the necessary freeze-dried ingredients on a thousand-year journey to the stars, instead of grown humans who
by _iyig 8y ago
Wouldn’t it be easier to send an artificial womb and the necessary freeze-dried ingredients on a thousand-year journey to the stars, instead of grown humans who you’d need to keep fed, watered, and happy?
The real trick then becomes raising babies entirely through automation. Of course, any automatic system up to the task may be smart enough to just colonize the planet itself.
- garmaine 8y agoThere will be no thousand year journies. You’d be overtaken by the generation after which left in faster ships and arrived in half the time. Make the trip in a few decades or don’t bother making it at all.
- SCHiM 8y agoEnter K-level thinking: What if we did send a ship on a thousand year journey, and learn more about building fast ships than if we hadn't? Such that the second ship we send, would be quicker than the first ship we'd have sent if we waited a few decades?
- raugustinus 8y agoHah, you made me think of this: "what's really going to bake your noodle later on is would you still have broken it if I wouldn't have said anything". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVF4kebiks4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVF4kebiks4
- shard 8y agoDo you put off buying electronics knowing that next year's product will be faster than this year's? At some point you just got to say, screw it, I'd rather do this now instead of waiting for some hypothetical future where the cost-benefit ratio is at its highest.
- AstralStorm 8y agoAdditionally, why do you expect the old ship cannot be retrofitted or replaced and travel sped up incrementally? It should be easy to find a hot broadcasting object in space and rendezvous with it. The crew might face some future shock.
- adrianN 8y agoGoing faster means expending more energy. At some point it won't make economic sense to go faster, even if technically you could. Freeze dried wombs don't care whether the journey takes a thousand years or five hundred, but the costs are very different.
- buboard 8y agoIt takes the same amount of energy to accelerate at any speed in space. The limit is our determination really, it is possible to visit our nearby star with ~200 hydrogen bombs
- adrianN 8y agoIt doesn't take the same amount of energy to accelerate (and later brake) to 0.5c as it does to accelerate to 0.1c.
- majewsky 8y agoNo it doesn't. Your mass increases the faster you go, so that more and more energy needs to be expended to accelerate more. At 50% light speed, you're 15% heavier. At 90% light speed, you're 129% heavier. At 99% light speed, you're 608% heavier. Your mass goes to infinity as you approach the speed of light, which is why the speed of light is unattainable for objects that have mass.
- adrianN 8y ago
- buboard 8y agothe point is to create self-sustaining colonies that will travel into the unknown for probably hundreds of years before finding appropriate planets to colonize.