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anti-aging / life-extension medicine might make a dent in the number of generations you need to get somewhere. Plus, thinking you need to live near a star, on

anti-aging / life-extension medicine might make a dent in the number of generations you need to get somewhere. Plus, thinking you need to live near a star, on a planet, is merely a bias for "free" fusion power and gravity that you don't need to maintain. I'm sure once we get artificial fusion working, the options for living in a community in a big, multi-story, 2 gigatonne, 500k population O'Neil cylinder tethered to a Kuiper belt iceball will look like "a big town with a nightlife, farmland, and a stable climate, with cheap trade and transit options for 'nearby' cylinders" At which point you can colonize any frozen rock bigger than Rhode Island between here and Wolf 359 'easily' (slowly) whenever you want to move your O'Neill cylinder.

dhosek 1y ago
It would require not merely anti-aging, but being able to produce resilient offspring at a later age, otherwise, anti-aging would be detrimental to the project since in the intermediate stages of the journey, non-reproducing adults would be a resource drain.
- NortySpock 1y ago
  Or you have your kids early, raise them, and then focus on community tasks (like running the ship) after that. I don't think I regarded my kind, wise, and friendly grandmother as a 'non-reproducing adult resource drain'... Seems like a cruel way to describe one's golden years.
  - dhosek 1y ago
    It is definitely a cruel way to think of it, but the thing is that in a generation ship, you have resources for a limited number of human beings. Longer lifespans mean you have more human beings to support. Life extension makes more sense if you can have the kids at age 50 to keep total population within reasonable limits. On a generation ship, it makes more sense to have a Logan’s Run scenario where once people reach a certain age… Carousel!
    - 542354234235 1y ago
      It seems like people being able to reproduce at-will would be the problem. Designing a system where people are sterile by default and can only have a child with intervention seems the only way to prevent random population explosions. If some group in your population finds religion and decides to be fruitful, you have a big problem. If 15% of your population has double replacement numbers, you have a 45% increase in your population in two generations.
      - dhosek 1y ago
        There are definitely some huge social challenges in the generation ship concept.

dhosek 1y ago

It would require not merely anti-aging, but being able to produce resilient offspring at a later age, otherwise, anti-aging would be detrimental to the project since in the intermediate stages of the journey, non-reproducing adults would be a resource drain.

NortySpock 1y ago
Or you have your kids early, raise them, and then focus on community tasks (like running the ship) after that. I don't think I regarded my kind, wise, and friendly grandmother as a 'non-reproducing adult resource drain'... Seems like a cruel way to describe one's golden years.
- dhosek 1y ago
  It is definitely a cruel way to think of it, but the thing is that in a generation ship, you have resources for a limited number of human beings. Longer lifespans mean you have more human beings to support. Life extension makes more sense if you can have the kids at age 50 to keep total population within reasonable limits. On a generation ship, it makes more sense to have a Logan’s Run scenario where once people reach a certain age… Carousel!
  - 542354234235 1y ago
    It seems like people being able to reproduce at-will would be the problem. Designing a system where people are sterile by default and can only have a child with intervention seems the only way to prevent random population explosions. If some group in your population finds religion and decides to be fruitful, you have a big problem. If 15% of your population has double replacement numbers, you have a 45% increase in your population in two generations.
    - dhosek 1y ago
      There are definitely some huge social challenges in the generation ship concept.