Skip to main content
Living on a generation ship
A generation ship, or generation star-ship, is a hypothetical type of interstellar ark star-ship that travels at sub-light speed. Since such a ship might take centuries to thousand years to reach even a nearby star, the original occupants of a generation ship would grow old and die, leaving their descendants to continue travelling. Such a ship would have to be entirely self-sustaining, providing energy, food, air, and water for everyone on board. It must also have extraordinary reliable systems that could be maintained by the ship's inhabitants over long periods of time. This would require testing whether thousands of humans could survive on their own before sending them beyond the reach of help. Small artificial closed ecosystems, such as the Biosphere 2, have been built in an attempt to work out the engineering difficulties in such a system, with mixed results.
Rocket pioneer Robert H. Goddard was the first to write about long- duration interstellar journeys in his "The Ultimate Migration"(1918). In this he described the death of the Sun and the necessity of an "interstellar ark". The crew would travel for centuries in suspended animation and be awakened when they reached another star system. In order for a spacecraft to maintain a stable environment for multiple generations, it would have to be large enough to support a community of humans and a fully recycling ecosystem. However, a spacecraft of such a size would require a lot of energy to accelerate and decelerate. A smaller spacecraft, while able to accelerate more easily and thus make higher cruise velocities more practical, would reduce exposure to cosmic radiation and the time for malfunctions to develop in the craft, but would have challenges with resource metabolic flow and ecologic balance.
The first task would be to
accelerate the ship to cruising speed—and there we meet perhaps the most
daunting of the problems besetting interstellar travel: the colossal energy
budget. A cruise liner is massive (the Harmony weighs 220,000 tonnes). To
accelerate a one-tonne mass to 1/10th light speed would take 1/1,000th of
current world annual energy consumption. To accelerate the Harmony to that
speed would take 220 years of world energy!
This will be the biggest hurdle
for interstellar travel, and one that would need to be solved before we even
consider a ship that would be travelling for generations upon generations to
the nearest solar system. We don’t know all of the effects of low gravity or
zero gravity on the human body, but we’re starting to get a larger picture of
what happens for prolonged stays, and it’s not good. Not good at all. Bone loss, muscle loss, a change
in the shape of the eyes, genetic damage, odd rashes and the like have all been
experienced from extended stays on the ISS. Even with daily exercise, it’s a
losing war against attrition. This is something that needs to be solved before
we even consider hopping around our own solar system, let alone going the long
slow travel to another star. We have no idea how an infant would be affected,
going from birth to death with low or zero gravity. Could humans survive this?
Would we evolve into weird floating blobs over multiple generations and genetic
mutations, in order to better fit our new environment? Best not to walk down
that road, with all its thorny ethical considerations.
A generation ship, or generation star-ship, is a hypothetical type of interstellar ark star-ship that travels at sub-light speed. Since such a ship might take centuries to thousand years to reach even a nearby star, the original occupants of a generation ship would grow old and die, leaving their descendants to continue travelling. Such a ship would have to be entirely self-sustaining, providing energy, food, air, and water for everyone on board. It must also have extraordinary reliable systems that could be maintained by the ship's inhabitants over long periods of time. This would require testing whether thousands of humans could survive on their own before sending them beyond the reach of help. Small artificial closed ecosystems, such as the Biosphere 2, have been built in an attempt to work out the engineering difficulties in such a system, with mixed results.
Rocket pioneer Robert H. Goddard was the first to write about long- duration interstellar journeys in his "The Ultimate Migration"(1918). In this he described the death of the Sun and the necessity of an "interstellar ark". The crew would travel for centuries in suspended animation and be awakened when they reached another star system. In order for a spacecraft to maintain a stable environment for multiple generations, it would have to be large enough to support a community of humans and a fully recycling ecosystem. However, a spacecraft of such a size would require a lot of energy to accelerate and decelerate. A smaller spacecraft, while able to accelerate more easily and thus make higher cruise velocities more practical, would reduce exposure to cosmic radiation and the time for malfunctions to develop in the craft, but would have challenges with resource metabolic flow and ecologic balance.
The first task would be to
accelerate the ship to cruising speed—and there we meet perhaps the most
daunting of the problems besetting interstellar travel: the colossal energy
budget. A cruise liner is massive (the Harmony weighs 220,000 tonnes). To
accelerate a one-tonne mass to 1/10th light speed would take 1/1,000th of
current world annual energy consumption. To accelerate the Harmony to that
speed would take 220 years of world energy!
This will be the biggest hurdle
for interstellar travel, and one that would need to be solved before we even
consider a ship that would be travelling for generations upon generations to
the nearest solar system. We don’t know all of the effects of low gravity or
zero gravity on the human body, but we’re starting to get a larger picture of
what happens for prolonged stays, and it’s not good. Not good at all. Bone loss, muscle loss, a change
in the shape of the eyes, genetic damage, odd rashes and the like have all been
experienced from extended stays on the ISS. Even with daily exercise, it’s a
losing war against attrition. This is something that needs to be solved before
we even consider hopping around our own solar system, let alone going the long
slow travel to another star. We have no idea how an infant would be affected,
going from birth to death with low or zero gravity. Could humans survive this?
Would we evolve into weird floating blobs over multiple generations and genetic
mutations, in order to better fit our new environment? Best not to walk down
that road, with all its thorny ethical considerations.
Your posts are quite informative and interesting. I wish if you could write about some other topics also like dark matter,or worm hole or about the concepts of white hole.I will be waiting for your next post and hope to receive much more informative topics next time.
ReplyDelete