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Comment by RodgerTheGreat | Hacker News Reader

Assuming you can cryogenically preserve sperm indefinitely, it seems like you could simply stock the ship with a large supply of frozen sperm gathered from distinct males and use this stockpile exclusively for reproductive purposes. As long as you have enough sperm samples there is no risk of inbreeding. Frozen sperm should, at any rate, consume far fewer resources than male colonists for an equivalent supply of genetic variety.

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While a logically sound solution, the issue with this is that the second / third generation would not have committed to the trip and would want to produce their own offspring as opposed to those of someone else.

I have to imagine being born on a ship and being told that your grandparents signed you up to live and die on it for a science experiment would potentially cause a psychological aversion to wanting to follow the rules set down a generation before regarding sex and procreation.

I doubt it. Kids adapt to the environment they are born into, and it's not like they would have experienced anything else, and they wouldn't know anyone else who had either, except for people in the original generation.

My first thoughts while reading this article was this exact issue. Are there any good sci-fi books or movies that explore this concept of what it might be like to be a middle generation on the way to a new solar system? You have little attachment to the original mission that your great-grandparents signed up for, and you'll never live long enough to see your destination.

Seems plausible to me that after the society and its people had adapted to living in deep space, they might end up simply never landing anywhere. Or finding a rogue planet and burrowing in because stars are too volatile and dangerous.

That's the easy part, gender is determined by the sperm. You can select the sex of your offspring when doing IVF today [0]. You just don't produce males until you've arrived at your destination.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_sorting

Well I guess you could select only female offspring if you were fully committed to this idea.

How difficult is it to produce an artificial womb? Very difficult, would be my guess, and morally ambiguous to produce humans without parents, but is it possible?

> How difficult is it to produce an artifical womb?

Artificial wombs are already a thing: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/artificial-womb-baby-lamb-raise...

Now granted, this technology up there is only intended for premature births, i.e. the fetus continues to grow in the artificial womb after birth. But with the technology for IVF covering the first phase of gestation, and this artificial womb covering the last phase, the gap between both appears to be shrinking. IANAD (I'm not a doctor) though, so take this with a grain of salt.

But the problem is sending people AT ALL. Not really which people you send.

The women you send there would still have the problem of potentially arriving to their destination to find it has been populated by humans for millennia. (If they arrived at all. Interstellar space is a dangerous place.)

It would be anticlimactic in the extreme to arrive to a destination to find a thriving civilization thousands of years ahead of you in terms of technical know how.

> It would be anticlimactic in the extreme to arrive to a destination to find a thriving civilization thousands of years ahead of you in terms of technical know how.

That would be extremely exciting! IMO even more exciting than finding a desolate planet. Discovering an entire unknown civilization is anti climatic? No way, it would be like discovering Atlantis! So what if they’re more advanced? We were capable and curious/brave enough to even make the trip! Keeping score would be pointless but the fact would remain that we made first contact with them, on their turf, even though they were more advanced.

Unless it was started by colonists who left years after you did but with technology orders of magnitude faster. Say the year after you leave in a colony ship with contemporary propulsion systems, wormhole travel is discovered and a second colonization effort is started thousands of years before you arrive.

(I chose wormholes specifically because it makes it more believable that you were not contacted or picked up and pulled along by the faster technology.)

aah, gotcha. Gee, you’d think in the eons they spent after settling on that new planet and sorting out their turf wars that they would have thought to maybe launch a ship with their advanced wormhole-hopping tech to collect earlier travelers who may still be traveling along that intergalactic path. If for any purpose other than studying how spending such a long time in space has affected them. But that would be too thoughtful or something.

I suspect we would learn to USE a technology like wormholes before we could reliably CREATE wormholes.

A mission like you suggest would require us to create precisely calibrated wormholes. Which is quite a step beyond DISCOVERING a wormhole.

Not sure who mentioned immediately launching a ship the day after landing, but I said sending out ships after colonizing, settling turf wars, advancing, etc. There’s no telling how advanced their ships or other tech would be at that point. How much would even 500 years do for space travel after they were already able to achieve such short-timespan intergalactic travel? I can’t fathom.

Anyways, lots of ways to skin a cat. Making wormholes may be one way, but faster space ships, or controlling gravity, or teleportation, or some other fantastical exploit we haven’t even begun to imagine may be another.

Wormholes are nice, but putting yourself through a subatomic mixer will not persuade anybody to try that. You can try it with a conventional meat grinder at home, if you like that idea, as in "Fargo".

GP is talking about humans who left later but arrived earlier.

> But the problem is sending people AT ALL.

Right. It doesn't seem to me that humans can live outside of Earth's safety for any significant duration of time at all. The Sun is very explosive.

Maybe freeze some eggs too. Might be worth having some variety in mitochondrial DNA.

By the time we have the technology to actually undertake such a journey, we might be able to correct for genetic defects such that some mild inbreeding among a smaller population would not be an issue.

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