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I doubt the human psyche is capable of such a voyage while being awake the whole time. Even with all the toys and biomes, life will get boring and pointless fas
by poisonborz 1y ago
I doubt the human psyche is capable of such a voyage while being awake the whole time. Even with all the toys and biomes, life will get boring and pointless fast, producing unfulfilled needs, disorder, conflict and revolt. People can't be ants in a colony working for such a narrowly defined goal through a lifetime, especially not multi-generationally. Our existence is based on constant questioning and revolutions. A 400 year travel to an unknown, possibly empty, lifeless target, however historic, is not something that can keep a society running long term.
- jiggawatts 1y agoI suspect it’ll be easier to adapt the human species to be compatible with long-duration travel than to design spaceships to accommodate humans as-is.
- Qem 1y agoReminds me of this: https://www.badspacecomics.com/post/rivers-end https://www.badspacecomics.com/post/rivers-end
- hermitcrab 1y agoThat was cheery!
- shmeeed 1y agoJust to let you know, I fell for that
- XorNot 1y agoThe whole equation changes pretty drastically if we had a practical hibernation or biological stasis technology (I hate saying cryosleep, though in practice we know freezing things pauses them - see the 31 year old embryo baby recently). Like do you really care how long it takes to get somewhere if it subjectively happens in the blink of an eye? Would you even necessarily be likely to lose your own peer group if you all spent significant time in hibernation travel between meetings?
- m4rtink 1y agoThis is how it works in the universe in the novel "Right of Return" by Janusz Zajdel - humanity has developed both safe hibernation as well as practical sub-light travel. Many colonies, research stations and logistic hubs have been established with fast and dependable sub-light ships traversing between them. On such a ship most of the crew is in hibernation at any one time, with just a couple people taking shifts from the hibernation to stand a watch during the flight. Even with the ships reaching high sub-light speeds, the voyages take decades from outside perspective. But that might not be a problem! If you are one of the crew it might seem like a couple weeks as that's how long you flight crew shift took. If you are a passenger - it takes not time at all, you just go to hibernation & wake up at you destination! So as long as you are a spacer or part of the wider community (e.q. space scientists who either study a wonder of space or are in transit to another one) this is fine - you will meet you friends again in a couple flight, in days or weeks of subjective time. But if you befriends someone outside of the community or decide it was enough and settle down, you might never see them again. Can really recommend the novel - has much more than this topic & quite a few other surprises. :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janusz_Zajdel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janusz_Zajdel
- ttemPumpinRary 1y agoMenonites in space. Autistic astronauts only.
- SJC_Hacker 1y agoIn the Expanse they used Mormons, at least until the discovery of how to traverse the Ring Gate
- trhway 1y agoGive the people some Minecraft on steroids and they wouldn't notice how half-century flew by. Or those people of the past who would for generations not leave their village/county doing the same thing generation after generation.
- hermitcrab 1y agoI think the problems would come in the 2nd generation, who didn't choose to go on the mission.
- silverquiet 1y agoHeidegger would say that all humans are thrown into existence and into circumstances that they did not choose. In some sense, we are currently on a large spaceship, and I assume some mission chosen for us by our predecessors.
- ryandrake 1y agoTo be fair, no human born on our current Earthship asked to go on our current mission.
- fragmede 1y agoWhat's our current mission? "Keep society running" and "don't fuck up the planet" don't seem to be going super well, but that's just my cynicism talking. I need a nap.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> doubt the human psyche is capable of such a voyage while being awake the whole time The human population fell to fewer than 10,000--possibly under one hundred--in the last Ice Age [1][-1]. There were almost certainly bands of fewer than 1,000 individuals who had to migrate for generations. > life will get boring and pointless fast Maybe on v1000. The first tens could expect a constant war footing against entropy and the unknown. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/how-human-beings-almost-vanished-from-earth-in-70-000-b-c https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/h... [-1] Possible counterfactual: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44818098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44818098
- estearum 1y agoThe people who had to migrate had a front row seat (and supporting role) to the greatest show in the known universe: life on earth. Nature produces a truly unlimited amount of novelty, especially if you’re moving through it.
- pavel_lishin 1y ago> Nature produces a truly unlimited amount of novelty, especially if you’re moving through it. I'm sure it was a lot of fun, in the Dwarf Fortress sense.
- VagabundoP 1y agoFUN!
- RugnirViking 1y agoTo be clear, the reference is !!FUN!! The double exclamations signal that an object is on fire in DF.
- notahacker 1y agoThey also had plenty of room to roam if they didn't like half the other people in their small corner of the universe...
- levocardia 1y agoYou're on a voyage through space in a big spaceship right now!
- jvanderbot 1y agoRight! And it's got crops, jobs, and a very small social circle and living quarter allocated for you. And you dream of more but are secretly happy with less.
- M95D 1y agoAnd I wish we could change course a little bit, away from the sun.
- cindyllm 1y ago[dead]
- hermitcrab 1y agoPolynesians took enormous risks to populate the pacific. Medieval builders built Catherdrals that they knew wouldn't be finished in their lifetime. Heading off on a multi-generation mission with no guarantee of success is not for most people. But there are billions of us. I'm sure they would easily find enough people to crew a mission.
- trvz 1y agoIt would be cruel to their children.
- simonh 1y agoAs adults we make our decisions as best we can. We can’t not make decisions, and the ones we do affect future generations whether they like it or not. That’s just life. Having said that I worry about the sustainability of these projects. If these are not indefinitely sustainable on arrival, then future generations are doomed to die out with no hope of survival. I’ve no problem with a carefully judged risk, there are no guarantees in life, but there has to at least be a reasonable chance.
- nradov 1y agoThere's no need to worry about something that will never actually happen.
- pavel_lishin 1y agoWould it be any more cruel than having children as a serf on a farm, where your family has worked for countless generations, knowing that they're likely to have the same fate?
- alenrozac 1y agoNo, cause you need hands to work the land. And you end up having a dozen cause a few won't make it. /s The whole "cruel to children" aspect is flawed. It only self-identifies individuals with a world view that is very earth-centric. We need a societal system where such a position is seen as an honorable one. That's why I liked the Antarctica bit of the submission. We ALL need to learn and change.
- ofalkaed 1y agoPeople are not the monolithic group you seem to think them to be and in my experience most people adapt fairly quickly to their situation once they realize there is nothing they can do to change it.
- Aaargh20318 1y agoParticles are indistinguishable, this means that the specific particles that make up a physical object (like a human) are not important, you could replace all of them with different particles, ship of Theseus style, and it would be the same object. What makes an object unique then is the specific configuration of the particles that make up that object. This configuration is a form of information. Fortunately, we already know how to transmit information at the speed of light; no new physics required. This then reduces the problem to transporting the ‘printer’. No generation ship required. You need something that harvests particles locally and can receive a stream of data with what to print. You can bootstrap this, send a tiny particle harvester/printer that can print a slightly larger printer, etc.
- hermitcrab 1y agoit is not clear to me that getting an autonomous 'printer' to function from 4 years away is any easier than creating an interstellar colony ship. It also remains to be seen if you can 'print' a complex biological object, like a human.
- eamsen 1y agoYou are being printed, every day, cell by cell.
- pmontra 1y agoBut the process have been bootstrapped billions of years ago. They would have to print a feconded egg cell and make it grow. I think that the best we can do now is to freeze that cell and ship it to the next star. Then build the womb, which we can't do yet. And a zillion of other problems to solve.
- random_is_rando 1y agoNo, they'd have to print the whole human that's encoded as data. Provided the process is fast enough, and the tech is available, it should be way faster than growing a full human from cells. There's also no point in talking what can be done today, since such a project would take quite a while, both to assemble and get anywhere close to destination. Just because we cannot do it today doesn't mean it shouldn't be considered as a possible approach since we might get there in 30-50 years, which is nothing for the scales of time we're talking about. Cryo tech is quite primitive, you are fighting to maintain a structure instead of saving its data and rebuilding it later when tech allows. Imagine 3D printing a benchy and freezing it so it stays "fresh" for 50 years (for some potential use at that time), instead of saving the benchy stl file and printing it in 50 years. Plans for potential human expansion into our galaxy must include potential tech developments, can't block it to the tech that is available today. The way things are going there's no reason to discard full scan and reassemble of a full human being, in some future. Let alone moving consciousness on other type of more resilient hardware.
- jvanderbot 1y agoMost people don't leave a pretty small radius around work/home for most their life. All you need is a religion/lifestyle built around it and the people factor is pretty easy. I mean think about what we do all day. We stay in our little rooms, pushing some tasks we're told to do, and cherish our friends, spouses, and kids, and then we die without seeing 99.9999% of the spaceship we're already riding (Earth).
- kayodelycaon 1y agoYup. All it takes is one short-sighted group to break something important to protest real (or perceived) injustice. It already happens in the real world all the time.