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Just like birds, some species of hoverfly migrate with the seasons. They move to southern Spain in the early autumn and then as far north as Norway in spring (t
by bcraven 1y ago
Just like birds, some species of hoverfly migrate with the seasons. They move to southern Spain in the early autumn and then as far north as Norway in spring (the northern leg is less well understood, and seems to take place over several generations, since each fly only actually lives for a few weeks).
_This paragraph becomes more astonishing as it goes on_
- jcattle 1y agoSame, that was the first time I've heard of this. I mean, it kind of makes sense. "Just" go where flowers bloom. But still, this seems like madness.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- whynotminot 1y agoI wonder if that’s how we’ll eventually travel the universe. Generations living their whole lives onboard a ship migrating through space.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoIf there is a need for it, probably, but we'd need to be able to keep people alive for that long first. To date, the longest anyone has been in space has been 14 months. To make it work you'd need to produce food, artificial gravity, etc.
- rubyfan 1y agoSo maybe we’d see sustainable colonies orbiting the earth first?
- 2cynykyl 1y agoWe should start with a sustainable colony _on_ earth as a proof of concept. :-)
- prerok 1y agoNah, not needed. Let's just go straight to Mars. Real men test in production. /s
- pjc50 1y agoOnly a madman would get onto a generation ship on a one-way non-abandonable non-rescuable trip without seeing the proof of a sustainable colony orbiting the earth first. Given the acceleration and (eco)system bring-up challenges, I suspect it would take more than one generation from "keel laying" to the ship first leaving the solar system. You'd have a generation living in a partly-constructed colony ship while building the rest of it.
- NetMageSCW 1y agoSo everyone that founded the US and especially Hawaii?
- rubyfan 1y ago>Only a madman would get onto a generation ship on a one-way non-abandonable non-rescuable trip… This sounds like it ends with a xenomorph bursting out of your chest.
- hinkley 1y agoIn Hyperion, people change themselves to fit the surroundings instead of the surroundings to fit them. This makes them Other, and they are the Boogeyman to standard humans. This may be how it works out in the end. The “Belters” adapt and never set foot on anything with more gravity than a moon ever again.
- pjc50 1y agoIf we do, we'll need to have mastered perfect sustainability and 100% recycling. And/or bring a surprisingly large chunk of ecosystem along with us, also living out their generations. The flies are perhaps more like nomadic humans in the pre-agriculture era. Moving from one seasonal food source to the other.
- xattt 1y agoNomadic humans travelled in a single generation. These flies need to be DTF in order to finish their journey.
- Tangurena2 1y agoThe Biosphere 2 project was an attempt to see what the smallest self-sustaining ecosystem (that would feed humans and recycle air/water) would be. For a crew of 8 people, the area of plants, crops & wetland covered 3.14 acres. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
- mcv 1y agoIf I recall correctly, it ran into a number of problems, and they abandoned it when oxygen levels dropped too much. So I don't think this counts as having mastered it.
- rtkwe 1y agoThey were also quite naturalistic though too, they could have packed more into a smaller area with vertical aeroponics etc to decrease the area.
- rtkwe 1y agoNot necessarily what you really need is enough excess mass of critical elemental components to make up for any gaps in the recycling loop(s) between stars where you can resupply from asteroids.
- tocs3 1y agoMade me start wondering if supplies could be picked up in route. The oort cloud (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud) extends most of the way to the next star and presumably extends a similar distance away from the next star. Missions would need to be sent out in advance of the ship to start collecting and making fuel. It could then be accelerated up to catch the generation ship. It seams easily plausible in a science fiction sort of way.
- frutiger 1y agoNot sure if this was the intended joke, but that’s how we are already travelling the universe.
- fhdkweig 1y agoIf you want to steer the solar system in a new direction, you can use a Shkadov thruster. Why leave home behind when you can just carry it with you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine
- Hendrikto 1y agoIn this context, it is also interesting to think about alignment. Will people still care about “the mission” 5 generations and billions of kilometers from earth? Will the goal we set even be relevant or make sense at all? Would you still follow through on a mission Ferdinand II of Aragon sent your grand grand grand grand grand grandfather on in 1498? I probably wouldn’t. These goal would likely not even make much sense to me anymore, or be completely irrelevant in today’s world.
- boringg 1y agoDepends if you are the stone facer.
- churchill 1y ago>Will people still care about “the mission” 5 generations and billions of kilometers from earth? How could you not? At whatever point a crew member become disillusioned, it'll likely be too late to turnaround. There'll be a high incidences of interplanetary depression/psychosis as people struggle to deal with leaving the Blue Dot behind, esp. when they see footage from the earth, rainforests, etc. But, nothing counselling won't be able to take care of. Right now, state propaganda is powerful enough to make young people line up to kill and be killed. So, a little interplanetary panic can be taken care of. In extreme cases, you can have protocols for any crew members who attempts to munity to euthanatized to guarantee the success of the mission. My .02.
- close04 1y ago> people struggle to deal with leaving the Blue Dot behind, esp. when they see footage from the earth, rainforests, etc. 5 generations on, the people on the ship didn't leave anything behind. They were born and will die on the ship, and that will be their baseline. Even in places where life is the hardest here on Earth, in the middle of scorching or freezing deserts, people don't get depressed en-masse seeing nice pictures from elsewhere.
- BLKNSLVR 1y agoHere is a great and terrible rabbit hole to fall down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aniara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aniara
- z3t4 1y agoThere's a movie too with the same name. It does not have good graphical effects, but besides that a very good movie.
- gcanyon 1y agoYou might enjoy Kurzgesagt's video on moving the Sun (and with it the whole solar system) they propose a method that would theoretically let us colonize the galaxy in a reasonable (but not trivial) time frame. To your exact point though, since we're moving the whole solar system, everyone would be living their whole lives on the/a ship. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3y8AIEX_dU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3y8AIEX_dU
- hinkley 1y agoThere are rumors that we should pass close to some other stars over the next couple million years. If we live that long that may be how this goes. Push the limits of stellar travel to visit the new neighbor, check out how habitable it is, start a diaspora. I don’t know how fast things like that will happen. Maybe you have months to decide which side you want to be on. Maybe you get months. Or a generation. But eventually they will get too far apart to visit again, except to share stories between us.
- kulahan 1y agoIt's becoming more and more clear that exceeding the speed of light is not possible. This is almost certainly going to be the only real way to make it to distant locations.
- hinkley 1y agoEven if ansibles are real, the total communication payload between them will be limited by the mass of the ansibles. So real time communication won’t be a telephone or a conference call. You won’t be able to send robots and then control them in real time, decide if the colony is ready for humans, send them and then provide any missing expertise when they humans finally arrive. Or send embryos and raise them remotely. It’ll be telegrams. For everything else it’ll be giant lasers and a 4-20 year wait for the data to arrive.
- 542354234235 1y agoWhy do you say that? Ansibles use quantum entanglement for communication. If you change a particle’s spin (spin up to spin down for example) the entangled particle also changes. So, the amount of data is a function of both the number of entangled particles and the speed we can flip them. Let’s use a modern CPU’s 64 bit architecture for the number of entangled particles. Using a random baseline experiment [1], we can flip photons back and forth in the 1-100 nanosecond timescale. GBps internet is 8 billion bits per second, which means we would need to be switching 800 bits to get that speed. IBM’s 1,000 plus qbit quantum computer is 22ft by 12ft [2]. So it doesn’t seem unreasonable to have GBps communication speed if the underlying sci-fi entangled communication were real. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0079656523000055 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00796... [2] https://www.ibm.com/quantum/blog/quantum-roadmap-2033 https://www.ibm.com/quantum/blog/quantum-roadmap-2033
- kulahan 1y agoThat's not how QE works as I understand it. You can observe one entangled particle and know the spin of the other one, but setting the spin of one would simply break the entanglement. It's for receiving information only, not sending.
- singleshot_ 1y agoWhat are we doing now?
- 14 1y agounless we can some how find a way to go faster then the speed of light and I am talking like tens of thousands of times faster at a minimum or some way to warp to different locations like a worm hole that instantaneously transports you far distances there is no way we as humans will do anything even close to what one would describe as travel the universe. The Andromeda galaxy is about 2.5 million light years away so at 10000 times the speed of light we are still talking 250 years to get there. Then when you think that the observable universe is an estimated 93 billion light years at 10000 times the speed of light that would be 9,300,000 years to cross it. I don't say all that to sound negative or shoot down the idea but more of an acknowledgement of the amazing size of our universe and how incredibly tiny and limited we are in this universe. I have spent countless hours as a kid growing up watching shows like Star Trek in particular and imagining being the character Q from the next generation. He can travel all of time and space and that concept has consumed much of my thoughts as I was younger.
- ebiederm 1y agoI prefer the Oort cloud colonization plan. Since Oort clouds stretch so far out they touch between the stars. Once the problem of living on a comet has been solved, you get something like the Polynesian islanders. People would move from one commet to the next. One generation at a time, for more living space and more resources. I wonder what people in a generation ship would do when they arrive at a star and discover the comets of the star system are already inhabited.
- hinkley 1y agoMoana 12.
- zamalek 1y agoWhat completely and utterly boggles my mind is how these tiny things carry enough energy to make that trip (or each leg). It's absurd.
- stubish 1y agoThe Monarch butterfly also has a multi-generational migration, which seems to be well studied and understood.