8 ms·

The 100 Year Starship

39 points by mmhsieh 7y ago

EA 7y ago
What if Country X starts building a starship in, say, 40 years and it works and off they go. Then Country Y invests in new technology and starts building their new ship in, say, 100 years. It's possible and likely that Country Y's starship is more capable and faster than Country X's ship as they would have waited for and capitalized on scientific breakthroughs that make interstellar travel better.
- stanferder 7y ago
  You're assuming the 60 years after Country X's starship is launched is going to be a period of progress. If it's a period of collapse, perhaps complete collapse, humanity will have lost an opportunity by delaying the launch.
- imgabe 7y ago
  Country X will have 40 years of experience of actually being in space and might learn much more valuable knowledge than the theoretical advances made by country Y.
- rootbear 7y ago
  This is the same idea as waiting to buy a computer until they're faster, on the assumption that the faster computer will give you the answer sooner. About twenty years ago, this idea was quantified and published in the paper "The Effects of Moore's Law and Slacking on Large Computations", which you can read here: https://archive.org/details/arxiv-astro-ph9912202 https://archive.org/details/arxiv-astro-ph9912202
- JNRowe 7y ago
  There is a fair amount of thought that has gone in to that, often referred to as the Wait Calculation. An interesting example was "Interstellar Travel - The Wait Calculation and the Incentive Trap of Progress"¹, which somehow isn't on libgen [yet?]. 1. http://www.jbis.org.uk/paper.php?p=2006.59.239 http://www.jbis.org.uk/paper.php?p=2006.59.239 - The incentive trap of linking to a £5 download for fifteen year old paper is another paper entirely.
  - marbs 7y ago
    The "incentive trap" has also been referred to as the "incessant obsolescence postulate", in this paper from 2011 titled "Energy, incessant obsolescence, and the first interstellar missions": https://arxiv.org/abs/1101.1066 https://arxiv.org/abs/1101.1066
  - LeifCarrotson 7y ago
    The author also uploaded that paper to Researchgate, where it's available for free: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260275150_Interstellar_Travel_-_The_Wait_Calculation_and_the_Incentive_Trap_of_Progress https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260275150_Interstel... (edit: I presume the downvotes are for linking to Researchgate? I know they're not held in high regard like Arxiv, they're more like a sleazy Linkedin for academics, but if there's valuable content there why not use it?)
- fapjacks 7y ago
  Are you asking for a value judgment? Or what exactly is your question? This can happen for example in some games like Master of Orion. You send a ship to the border, and before it gets there, you've already researched, built, and deployed a faster version. Sometimes it changes things, sometimes it doesn't. If your sole purpose is simply to arrive then it hasn't changed a thing. If you are planning to fight aliens when you get there, however...
- growlist 7y ago
  This idea is in the game Elite Dangerous, and you can go and look at them: https://elite-dangerous.fandom.com/wiki/Generation_Ship https://elite-dangerous.fandom.com/wiki/Generation_Ship The lore is quite amusing and poignant. Many of them met a sad end in one way or another, reminiscent of Fallout.
- m4rtink 7y ago
  This is a plot point in various SF works. For example, in the Honor Harrington books by David Weber, the Manticore system colonists traveled to their target a couple hundred years in hibernation. But as it was likely propulsion technology will advance before they reach their destination, they also left part of their money in a trust fund back on Earth, to make sure the Manticore system won't get squatted in the meantime. This proved to be a sound idea, as practical FTL drives have been invented after the colony ship has departed and they have been greeted by the Manticore Trust navy upon arrival, that has secured the system a couple years earlier, arriving by the newfangled hyper drive. :)
  - cptaj 7y ago
    Very nice. Alastair Reynolds touches on this concept as well in Chasm City.
- boutad 7y ago
  > It has been argued that an interstellar mission that cannot be completed within 50 years should not be started at all. Instead, assuming that a civilization is still on an increasing curve of propulsion system velocity and not yet having reached the limit, the resources should be invested in designing a better propulsion system. This is because a slow spacecraft would probably be passed by another mission sent later with more advanced propulsion (the incessant obsolescence postulate). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_calculation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_calcu...
PaulHoule 7y ago
"Did jesus die for Klingons?" can be answered the way that Mormons answer the question for Americans. That is, Quetzalcoatl came to the middle east to offer the good word. (I always tell Mormon missionaries about Quetzalcoatl and they haven't heard of him, but the Quetzalcoatl cult did start around the same time as when Jesus came +/- 100 years or so.)
dfilppi 7y ago
There should only be one Manhattan style project now: figure out how to download consciousness into a machine. Besides conferring immorality, this would also make interstellar travel time scales irrelevant.
- sxu 7y ago
  What about reproduction?
  - icandoit 7y ago
    We can do both. One doesn't limit the other does it?
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    cp -R me/ me2/
    - bencoder 7y ago
      Yep, I would fork myself. Merging and deconflicting if you want to reunite forks could be a fun problem to solve in the future
      - zentiggr 7y ago
        Future person: "Who are you?" Future forks: "One of us." (Thanks to I, Robot for a cute scene.)
      - ceejayoz 7y ago
        You might enjoy the Bobiverse trilogy: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0753LBFQ7/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0753LBFQ7/
- icandoit 7y ago
  If we could do this wouldn't we spin up minds-in-machines to do all sorts of cognitive tasks on demand and shut them off when the task is done (or they abandon their task) like a virtual machine. Imagine making a copy of someone like Fabrice Bellard [1] and spinning up 100 of them to write your flappy bird clone for you and then shutting them off. Would this be a terrible crime, or a paradise? This is an idea known as Hansons "ems" [2]. - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard - https://ideas.ted.com/are-you-ready-for-the-impending-age-of-robots/ https://ideas.ted.com/are-you-ready-for-the-impending-age-of...
viach 7y ago
I hope the future of interstellar travel is not these gigantic starships. It's like starting a project of building a gigantic Zeppelin in 1900 in order to get able to get to moon in 100 years. Teleportation seems more convinient to me and much less financially and socially devastating.
- naravara 7y ago
  >Teleportation seems more convinient to me and much less financially and socially devastating. Sure, but there is that pesky problem where the solutions need to be theoretically possible.
  - viach 7y ago
    Both teleportation and Death Star are impossible with current technology, but the folks anyway are building the Death Star?
    - naravara 7y ago
      a.) Who is building a Death Star? b.) Death Star isn't theoretically impossible. We know you just need to direct a massive amount of energy at a planet to blow it up, the only question is figuring out how to get that kind of energy. Teleportation though, we literally have no idea how it would work or what it even means.
      - m4rtink 7y ago
        Engeneration is an interesting very high tech "teleportation" alternative: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4a3d78dc77e6f https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4a3d78dc77e6f You basically send your digitized DNA & personality copy to the target (needs to have reasonably high tech infrastructure already in place), where a blank body is grown & "flashed" by your personality. And voila, you are now walking the surface of another world couple light years away from your destination. (And you likely also now effectively exist at least twice, but oh well.) There are serious ethical and security issues with this technique, but it might still be useful none the less. :)
scrumper 7y ago
Is this program dead? I had a look through the website and couldn't see much to suggest otherwise other than their writing prize in July last year. The list of partners too was a bit weird, all branding consultants and design agencies.
- close04 7y ago
  > the endeavor was meant to excite several generations to commit to the research and development of breakthrough technologies to advance the eventual goal of interstellar space travel It doesn't seem that the purpose is to come up with a working concept but rather a concept that's interesting enough to push the topic forward and tickle the imagination of scientist, engineers, etc. for generations until the practical implementation is achievable. So I expect right now branding and design are more useful in popularizing this.
  - cptaj 7y ago
    So, where is that? That branding and design they made? Seems like this was a big scam.
    - zentiggr 7y ago
      Sometimes when humans try to get a hand-wavy initiative started, all you get is hand waving. My uninformed take on it: if the initiative was more on the level of "Here's my amazing ship design, prove me wrong" they would have gotten way more involvement. Even if Version 0 was a Jules Verne design...
allochthon 7y ago
Interesting. 100 years is a long time. Would this be a generation ship [0]? If so, I'm curious about their discussion of the moral and ethical considerations of committing children to such a journey. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_ship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_ship
- cptaj 7y ago
  The project aims to study how we can develop interstellar travel technologies in 100 years. Not to develop a ship that can travel for 100 years. (Even though that might be the case)

39 points by mmhsieh 7y ago

EA 7y ago

What if Country X starts building a starship in, say, 40 years and it works and off they go. Then Country Y invests in new technology and starts building their new ship in, say, 100 years. It's possible and likely that Country Y's starship is more capable and faster than Country X's ship as they would have waited for and capitalized on scientific breakthroughs that make interstellar travel better.

stanferder 7y ago
You're assuming the 60 years after Country X's starship is launched is going to be a period of progress. If it's a period of collapse, perhaps complete collapse, humanity will have lost an opportunity by delaying the launch.
imgabe 7y ago
Country X will have 40 years of experience of actually being in space and might learn much more valuable knowledge than the theoretical advances made by country Y.
rootbear 7y ago
This is the same idea as waiting to buy a computer until they're faster, on the assumption that the faster computer will give you the answer sooner. About twenty years ago, this idea was quantified and published in the paper "The Effects of Moore's Law and Slacking on Large Computations", which you can read here: https://archive.org/details/arxiv-astro-ph9912202 https://archive.org/details/arxiv-astro-ph9912202
JNRowe 7y ago
There is a fair amount of thought that has gone in to that, often referred to as the Wait Calculation. An interesting example was "Interstellar Travel - The Wait Calculation and the Incentive Trap of Progress"¹, which somehow isn't on libgen [yet?]. 1. http://www.jbis.org.uk/paper.php?p=2006.59.239 http://www.jbis.org.uk/paper.php?p=2006.59.239 - The incentive trap of linking to a £5 download for fifteen year old paper is another paper entirely.
- marbs 7y ago
  The "incentive trap" has also been referred to as the "incessant obsolescence postulate", in this paper from 2011 titled "Energy, incessant obsolescence, and the first interstellar missions": https://arxiv.org/abs/1101.1066 https://arxiv.org/abs/1101.1066
- LeifCarrotson 7y ago
  The author also uploaded that paper to Researchgate, where it's available for free: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260275150_Interstellar_Travel_-_The_Wait_Calculation_and_the_Incentive_Trap_of_Progress https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260275150_Interstel... (edit: I presume the downvotes are for linking to Researchgate? I know they're not held in high regard like Arxiv, they're more like a sleazy Linkedin for academics, but if there's valuable content there why not use it?)
fapjacks 7y ago
Are you asking for a value judgment? Or what exactly is your question? This can happen for example in some games like Master of Orion. You send a ship to the border, and before it gets there, you've already researched, built, and deployed a faster version. Sometimes it changes things, sometimes it doesn't. If your sole purpose is simply to arrive then it hasn't changed a thing. If you are planning to fight aliens when you get there, however...
growlist 7y ago
This idea is in the game Elite Dangerous, and you can go and look at them: https://elite-dangerous.fandom.com/wiki/Generation_Ship https://elite-dangerous.fandom.com/wiki/Generation_Ship The lore is quite amusing and poignant. Many of them met a sad end in one way or another, reminiscent of Fallout.
m4rtink 7y ago
This is a plot point in various SF works. For example, in the Honor Harrington books by David Weber, the Manticore system colonists traveled to their target a couple hundred years in hibernation. But as it was likely propulsion technology will advance before they reach their destination, they also left part of their money in a trust fund back on Earth, to make sure the Manticore system won't get squatted in the meantime. This proved to be a sound idea, as practical FTL drives have been invented after the colony ship has departed and they have been greeted by the Manticore Trust navy upon arrival, that has secured the system a couple years earlier, arriving by the newfangled hyper drive. :)
- cptaj 7y ago
  Very nice. Alastair Reynolds touches on this concept as well in Chasm City.
boutad 7y ago
> It has been argued that an interstellar mission that cannot be completed within 50 years should not be started at all. Instead, assuming that a civilization is still on an increasing curve of propulsion system velocity and not yet having reached the limit, the resources should be invested in designing a better propulsion system. This is because a slow spacecraft would probably be passed by another mission sent later with more advanced propulsion (the incessant obsolescence postulate). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_calculation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_calcu...

PaulHoule 7y ago

"Did jesus die for Klingons?" can be answered the way that Mormons answer the question for Americans. That is, Quetzalcoatl came to the middle east to offer the good word. (I always tell Mormon missionaries about Quetzalcoatl and they haven't heard of him, but the Quetzalcoatl cult did start around the same time as when Jesus came +/- 100 years or so.)

dfilppi 7y ago

There should only be one Manhattan style project now: figure out how to download consciousness into a machine. Besides conferring immorality, this would also make interstellar travel time scales irrelevant.

sxu 7y ago
What about reproduction?
- icandoit 7y ago
  We can do both. One doesn't limit the other does it?
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  cp -R me/ me2/
  - bencoder 7y ago
    Yep, I would fork myself. Merging and deconflicting if you want to reunite forks could be a fun problem to solve in the future
    - zentiggr 7y ago
      Future person: "Who are you?" Future forks: "One of us." (Thanks to I, Robot for a cute scene.)
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      You might enjoy the Bobiverse trilogy: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0753LBFQ7/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0753LBFQ7/
icandoit 7y ago
If we could do this wouldn't we spin up minds-in-machines to do all sorts of cognitive tasks on demand and shut them off when the task is done (or they abandon their task) like a virtual machine. Imagine making a copy of someone like Fabrice Bellard [1] and spinning up 100 of them to write your flappy bird clone for you and then shutting them off. Would this be a terrible crime, or a paradise? This is an idea known as Hansons "ems" [2]. - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard - https://ideas.ted.com/are-you-ready-for-the-impending-age-of-robots/ https://ideas.ted.com/are-you-ready-for-the-impending-age-of...

viach 7y ago

I hope the future of interstellar travel is not these gigantic starships. It's like starting a project of building a gigantic Zeppelin in 1900 in order to get able to get to moon in 100 years. Teleportation seems more convinient to me and much less financially and socially devastating.

naravara 7y ago
>Teleportation seems more convinient to me and much less financially and socially devastating. Sure, but there is that pesky problem where the solutions need to be theoretically possible.
- viach 7y ago
  Both teleportation and Death Star are impossible with current technology, but the folks anyway are building the Death Star?
  - naravara 7y ago
    a.) Who is building a Death Star? b.) Death Star isn't theoretically impossible. We know you just need to direct a massive amount of energy at a planet to blow it up, the only question is figuring out how to get that kind of energy. Teleportation though, we literally have no idea how it would work or what it even means.
    - m4rtink 7y ago
      Engeneration is an interesting very high tech "teleportation" alternative: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4a3d78dc77e6f https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4a3d78dc77e6f You basically send your digitized DNA & personality copy to the target (needs to have reasonably high tech infrastructure already in place), where a blank body is grown & "flashed" by your personality. And voila, you are now walking the surface of another world couple light years away from your destination. (And you likely also now effectively exist at least twice, but oh well.) There are serious ethical and security issues with this technique, but it might still be useful none the less. :)

scrumper 7y ago

Is this program dead? I had a look through the website and couldn't see much to suggest otherwise other than their writing prize in July last year. The list of partners too was a bit weird, all branding consultants and design agencies.

close04 7y ago
> the endeavor was meant to excite several generations to commit to the research and development of breakthrough technologies to advance the eventual goal of interstellar space travel It doesn't seem that the purpose is to come up with a working concept but rather a concept that's interesting enough to push the topic forward and tickle the imagination of scientist, engineers, etc. for generations until the practical implementation is achievable. So I expect right now branding and design are more useful in popularizing this.
- cptaj 7y ago
  So, where is that? That branding and design they made? Seems like this was a big scam.
  - zentiggr 7y ago
    Sometimes when humans try to get a hand-wavy initiative started, all you get is hand waving. My uninformed take on it: if the initiative was more on the level of "Here's my amazing ship design, prove me wrong" they would have gotten way more involvement. Even if Version 0 was a Jules Verne design...

allochthon 7y ago

Interesting. 100 years is a long time. Would this be a generation ship [0]? If so, I'm curious about their discussion of the moral and ethical considerations of committing children to such a journey. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_ship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_ship

cptaj 7y ago
The project aims to study how we can develop interstellar travel technologies in 100 years. Not to develop a ship that can travel for 100 years. (Even though that might be the case)