Our Generation Ships Will Sink (2015)
boingboing.net
boingboing.net
Unreasonable optimism is the only path to success at this scale.
Even been to the Vasa Museum?
They would know that their fate was
created for them by ancestors who made
the choice to enter the starship, a
choice they could never unmake.
That might be irritating.
In any case, the process of attacking the problems Robinson mentions will make us unimaginably stronger. Perfecting fusion power, understanding and mastering our own biomes, and learning to coexist with ourselves will hardly be a waste of time, even if we never overcome all of the showstoppers he cites.
In fact, I'd agree with Robinson in one key area: humans will never make it to the stars.
Somebody will, though. They won't be humans anymore, not as we are now. But their ancestors will have been. That's us.
A 'generation ship' could be just a bio-lab and genetic material (possibly digitized) that is grown into life only after the destination is reached. Or after it is terraformed by other genetically altered organisms, engineered on-site by AI (or by Earth-based scientists, at the cost of a few communication round-trips).
And this is just the most basic version someone from the 21st century would come up with.
Edit as reply because I am "posting too fast": From TFA: We are not gods
A cheap way of dismissing what is already, today, nearly working technology - artificial wombs [1], and building genomes from scratch [2]. Further, what I proposed is basically equivalent to seeds - as in literal, existing plant seeds. But we won't be able to replicate, in 10000 years of technological progress, what nature already has working? Such a claim requires showing some strong, fundamental barrier, not to have the possibility handwaved away with "we are not gods".
What technological progress can't be dismissed with "we are not gods"? Landing on the moon? Splitting the atom? Heart transplants? Heavier-than-air flight? Fire?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_womb
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter...
From TFA:
We are not gods, and anyone who thinks of science as a magic wand, or even as a verb, is making a mistake, a category error sometimes called scientism. Drill down a little harder on these issues, look at the evidence; use the scientific method properly. Limits to what we can do will quickly appear around you.
When's the last time someone making this argument turned out to be right in the long run?
The fundamental physical resources needed to launch and land enough material for an independent colony, even on our moon, would strip Earth of the things needed to sustain us here.
There may be more fruit out there, but it's on other continents while we live on an island atol with a single tree.
OK. Give me the keys to your time machine, so I can take a look at what "technology from 2000 years in the future" will look like.
You appear to be confusing fantasy for reality.
In order to prove him wrong, you'd have to really grapple with the question of how to have a self-sustaining ecology in space. This is something I basically never see in online space boosterism, and note that empirical attempts to answer it like Biosphere 2 ended in complete failure (and those were on Earth, which is orders of magnitude easier).
Now sure, the politics on who and what gets to go to thr next world will doom many. But physics can alleviate the whole "we'll tear each other apart over 200 years of space travel" part
I think more likely is we figure out wormholes. If we can't go light speed we can instead fold space like a piece of paper and reduce the space we need to Traverse. That may or may not be as easy as FTL.
I obviously don't have the finer details in line.
The other problems may become more amenable - one just can't know what will happen. Amazing things like CRISPR - an incredible tool that lets us edit genes - appear suddenly and change everything.
Sequencing a Genome once seemed a massive task and now it's no big deal - so perhaps some of these problems will end up like that.
We can also re-engineer ourselves and that might help a lot.
- Increased lifespan making the trip possible in 1 generation - A hollowed out asteroid or other extremely large biosphere. It is not hard to imagine something large enough to overcome the ecological problems - Virtual reality (the holodeck) if you're still worried about social issues in a large space. BTW, most teens today would be happy to stay in a closed room, as long as they had a phone. (I exaggerate, but only a little)
All of these things are reasonable extrapolations of existing tech. In 200 years, I'm sure a whole lot more will be possible.
Understatement of the year.
[1] Which, as with so many sci fi novels, has this panoply of great ideas but boy, do I ever not care about the characters. Except Ship. Ship was great. I suspect that the earlier Mars Trilogy had some great characters because they were transcluded real-life people that Kim new in the day to day interviews he did for that series. It's a repeating pattern for him. Honestly, so many really evocative science fiction books fail utterly as storytelling, I shouldn't complain so much.
It’s unethical to sign our descendants up for a difficult life away from the cradle of earth. Complex systems will fail in unexpected ways (sort of provably, and inevitably)
There’s no place like home. Literally. We co-evolved with this place over billions of years. There’s nothing like it anywhere. It’s a beautiful, wonderful, rare gift that we should cherish because there ain’t anything like it anywhere else we can go.
All human development involves risk, yes. However, when you depend on future progress in order for survival, I'd argue that passes a risk threshold.
Putting this somewhat more simply, if the Puritans remained stuck at 1600 technology, they could still (conceivably) survive in America indefinitely. If you went to live on Mars at today's technical levels, you personally probably would die on today's technology, but your children (or your pregnant wife!) would almost certainly be non-viable. You need "Future Technology Tree" to be a viable population.
Now, the Polynesian exception. The Navigators were making some absolutely insane voyages[1], but the risk threshold was different for them, because they lived on tiny islands whose ecosystems they burned through at a terrifying pace. I'd argue we're not looking at "Easter Island Planet Earth" today . . although it's not off the menu.
[0] For an airless land made of more poison. That's also radioactive. Mordor got nutin.
[1] "Insane". . so far as we know. No surviving writing, plus an esoteric culture of priest-navigators that jealously guarded knowledge, means we're never quite sure just how much these cultures did know about where they were going. Given genetic evidence that some single generations made cross-pacific trips . . and then came back again . . it's really looking more and more likely that they knew where they were going more than we thought.
The obvious candidate, Mars (despite its supposed problems, still a much more reasonable choice than anything outside the solar system and the planet with the most benign climatic conditions outside earth our whole system. This is a huge plus even when weighed against all of the difficulties of Mars)
The upper atmosphere of Venus (extremely amenable and doable even with something very close to current tech)
The subsurface of Mercury (easy climate control and so much free solar power once you set up the collection systems)
Asteroids hauled into the inner solar system, or even asteroids as they currently orbit in the Belt
At least a couple of Jupiter's moons.
With enough long-term investment and effort, potentially millions, or even hundreds of millions of people could live scattered across these places, with the resources of Earth still in the background as a backup to potential problems and creating a humanity that's much more robust against terrestrial cataclysms.
On that last note, asteroids would cease being one of those potential cataclysms, since our being able to fulfill any of the above colonization plans presupposes our being able to capture and redirect all but the most gargantuan asteroids if they're discovered heading for Earth.
But there's so many other ways, ways that our descendents will think of that were beyond our imagination. Think tiny robots and gene bombs, or peppering interstellar visitors with inert payloads, etc. Once you abandon the meme of a brave ship full of sailors, it's fair to return to an optimistic future millennium where humans are sending life to the stars.
And that's completely without considering all the very real possibilities in our solar system, which are more challenges of degree, rather than kind. Perhaps human lifespan in orbit is 30 years at first. It wouldn't be the first time a population took root in a hostile area.
In order to colonize space in our solar system we have to master living in space and building space habitats. If you live on a habitat full time then what do you care if it’s travelling around a star or towards another star or not even trying to go to a star and just moving from one interstellar object to another? If the habitat is big enough to contain two hundred million people then it is effectively the size of the world that most humans lived in for a large chunk of recorded history. The idea may seem strange to us but our current lives are very strange compared to the lives of those who lived when there were only two hundred million people alive on the planet.
Such confidence. We aren't even living sustainably on our home world. Strongly doubt we'll ever do so in craft that can reach other stars, much less once we arrive there.
That is theoretically possible. It's theoretically possible billions of humans could achieve perfect cooperation and peace on one continent whilst all others remain in the usual cycles of conflict. Both these seem highly unlikely to me, given natural constraints.
I hope its such as the optimists predict - a great bright future for us all. Still it's worrisome that each time somebody researches it, they get depressed and won't talk about it any more. Or writes a depressing book.
Spaceborne agriculture would be another, if only for species like bananas which are too vulnerable to parasites on Earth now (easier sterile, isolated environments).
I think you're dramatically underestimating the distances involved to the asteroid belt.
Beaming power over one to two astronomical units is something in between impractical and a death-ray superlaser. (And that's assuming Earth is exporting the energy, because the other way around makes even less sense--the asteroid belt only gets 10 to 20% as much light.)
> bananas
Lastly, sterile environments on Earth will be wayyy easier and cheaper an equivalent facilities in orbit, to construct, maintain, and house a workforce, etc.
The problem of screening/cleaning everything that passes through the airlock is the same regardless of gravity.
Not when you’re competing with belters growing truck sized GMO bananas in massive inflatable aeroponic spheres with 24 hours of lensed daylight and a robotic workforce that only needs tiny motors and propellors to move around. Not to mention the savings on freeze drying and sterilizing the crops before transit, they aren’t selling the water back at those prices!
Everything you've described could be accomplished better closer to home, such as with a sun-synchronous orbit [0] or at most of the local Lagrange points.
Insanely better on solar light supply, emergency resilience, incoming essential goods and staff, and most importantly your gigantobanana might still be edible by the time it reaches anybody else. (Without spending ridiculous amounts on fuel or transit times of over a year.)
I jest, but I believe we're far away from anything truly useful for space travel even to MARS or Belt objects. We should obviously try, so we can eventually succeed. I suspect our (democratic) culture is making long term thinking and planning harder than ever, since these efforts will require sacrificing short term comforts. It will be interesting to see if the much more centralized Chinese or private US-based efforts will speed up our progress.
Same thing applies to social criticism. Criticism is easy and makes you look wise. Improving society is incredibly hard and since it’s so hard you often fail and look foolish.
All advancement depends on people who don’t care if they look dumb or foolish.
At some point you'd think people would get tired of being wrong.
Many people suspected that the airplane naysayers were wrong because heavier than air flight was already possible and the only problem was sustaining it via mechanical means and carrying a human. There were numerous examples, from falling leaves to birds to children's gliders.
I reckon powered heavier-than-air flight was "proved" possible the second someone observed a bird of prey or scavenger carrying close in mass to itself.
There is no example of a generation ship. Earth doesn't count. I think they won't work because there has been no mechanism yet built that has lasted for the amount of time a generation ship will need it to last. Then you get into a mass death spiral of spare parts, raw materials, machines needed to create spares out of raw materials once the spares run out, recycling, storage of bulk raw materials, and the fuel needed to move all of that mass. Even the oldest currently-operating non-trivial mechanical devices, probably clocks that have been installed in continually-operating cathedrals, have had TONS of external inputs in the form of lubricants, wood, and metals for replacement parts over the centuries they've been operating.
Not even granite boulders "last" for tens of thousands of years. They weather and chip and change over timespans that long and are not the same as when they were formed. Space is not as hostile in some ways as the earth's environment but it is more hostile in other ways-- especially when you start approaching even a small fraction of the speed of light. People think a fusion reactor can be constructed will last for 50,000 years?
"Oh just use robots and to keep the robots from breaking down they'll be organic self-replicating robots and everything will be recycled in a closed loop even though it is impossible (literally and actually absolutely impossible) to construct a pressure vessel (like, it's atomically impossible it doesn't matter what material you use or how thick you make it) that won't either leak or absorb (seriously, even if you made it out of an exotic element not yet discovered that is denser by orders of magnitude than anything we can even dream of and install a magnetic containment field it WILL leak) the atmosphere to a noticeable degree over tens of thousands of years.
So then people come up with hand-waving solutions to those problems that are the equivalent to "oh they'll just use AI/the blockchain/hyperdrive".
Tell you what.
Once industrialized society exists for the amount of time it will take to get to an inhabitable star (so NOT Proxima Centauri) I'll say "you know what if we can last that long it might be worth figuring out the mass death spiral problem". We'll see if we last that long.
Until then?
Impossible.
There are no cohorts of commuters using there bicycle blimps or personal jetpacks to cross the skyways of Paris, for example.
Permanent, independent residence apart from Earth strikes me as a similar challenge.
Space habs are the next step, probably hollowing out and asteroid or something similar.
The other option will be cybernetics. Seems less radical with recent AI advances. Humans are brittle. Cybots less so.
I see a lot of permanent pessimists about space "we should fix the earth".
There are... 8 billion people? We cannot "change the course" of 8 billion people with policies or carrots. Alas, war or famine will be the only hammer I hat changes course of that many people, and if that happens we'll likely bring everything down.
What is true insanity is what we waste on the defense department. although within that is the real hope for space settlement: it provides military advantage.
Biotech seems like a better way. "Have robots grow us", maybe with predesigned adaptations to local conitions.
If it could record your emotional state and other inputs over years and make a model - it might even seem like you.
Such a system might be good enough to take care of the first generation.
So they are sentient in some horror way where they get woken to complete some awful, mundane task and then immediately put down again before they can scream.
(For the uninitiated, see https://qntm.org/mmacevedo and its corresponding HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26224835)
Also I'm afraid we'll need to develop AI and technology that transcends us before it's ready to simulate one of us, at which point it may not make sense anymore.
You mean, copies of ourselves. Our current selves would remain right where they were before, and wither and die, while our copies would lead on merry and adventurous if disembodied lives. Provided they practice good backup hygiene of course. I find that quite depressing to think about.