What to bring on a Generation Ship/Fleet

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by (E)

Animal based studies have demonstrated that breed stability requires a population of about 100,000 animals.

I'm not getting any good results looking for the definition of "breed stability." What exactly are you referring to here?

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

It would make sense to send a smaller terraforming fleet ahead of the larger colony fleet though. For example, if the colony fleet travels at 0.01c and the terraforming fleet travels at 0.02c, the terraforming fleet will arrive at the destination 20 ly away one thousand years ahead of the colony fleet. If the colony fleet and the terraforming fleet both use cyclical nanostasis, then the original colonists/terraformers would spend only 20 subjective years traveling/terraforming, allowing them to see the fruits of their labor within a lifetime even though 2,000 objective years might have passed.

As noted, neither sleeper ships nor a preceding "bootstrap mission" are options for this setting.

Originally Posted by giant.robot

Is there a good reason for these colonists to sign up to be farmers...in spaaaaace?

Not really, no. With any generation ship, the only reasons to do it are idealogical, not practical. In this case, a big part of it was to prevent humanity from ever going extinct. The planet being settled was actually given the name Gateway, in large part because the idea was that, if humans could successfully settle there, they could start spreading throughout the galaxy (and, in theory, beyond), making our species as immortal as possible (the heat death of the universe would still catch up with us eventually, of course). There were plenty of other personal and idealogical reasons why the project was funded and crewed, of course.

Originally Posted by giant.robot

Just like animals raised in captivity, humans raised aboard a generation ship will change culturally and socially from the 0th generation. It's unlikely anyone setting foot on the colony world will culturally resemble their ancestors. They'll have no meaningful ties to Earth, if anything their cultural ties will be entirely based around the generation ship they lived on.

Quite right, although this being space opera, the settled societies are going to pretty closely resemble our own.

Originally Posted by ericthered

Ok, so outside of human habitation, we want tough, hardy life that is non-the less edible. There will be varying degrees of "Edible", of course. Kudzu is technically "Edible", but not particularly pleasant. Most fruits will require something that enjoys eating fruit to spread them far and wide. Using a grain such as wheat is asking for an invasive species to take everything over.

Sounds like wheat's definitely in, then - while the colonists didn't intend to completely displace the biomes already present, they did want life that was capable of doing so to allow them to establish a colony. The idea was more to have an Earth-like region on an otherwise alien world (for Cosmere fans, think of Shinovar on Roshar). Turned out the native life was pretty pitiful, though, so now everything's basically Earth life.

Originally Posted by ericthered

coconuts: coconut palms are very good at spreading along coastlines and can do pretty well in barren environments.

This is not something I would ever have considered, but results in great flavor (narratively anyway, not a fan a coconuts myself). Coconuts are in, but would have just been transported as seed stock.

Originally Posted by ericthered

Pigs: Wild Pigs are pretty resilient, and historically dumped in places to provide food. You need to have existing vegetation, of course, but that's coming. The trick with wild boar is that they are the closest thing to a large predator you will allow on this planet, they can be dangerous, and you just gave your civilians an excuse to own guns.

I absolutely want civilians to have guns (well, blasters - slugthrowers aren't very popular), and the rest of this was already in my thoughts, which is why pigs have been in for quite some time now. They'll definitely be a staple (in more than one way) of the setting.

Originally Posted by ericthered

Rabbits: they breed fast, they're not terribly picky about what they eat, and they taste good. they could possibly be a pest, but anything that's robust has that possibility, and rabbits are not the hardest garden munchers to deal with, peter rabbit not withstanding.

Excellent points as well, sounds like rabbits are in as well.

Originally Posted by ericthered

Actually, just go down the list of all types of classic wild game and most of them are good options. Though I'd look twice at including squirrels. I think most climbing rodents will be excluded from the list. Until someone sneaks one aboard as a pet.

I was thinking deer would be good as well, which I assume you're including in the classic wild game category. Squirrels I hadn't really considered.

EDIT: Considering how problematic deer and boar can be without something hunting them, their inclusion may well justify bringing in wolves, which as I already noted I do want in the setting.

Originally Posted by ericthered

I'm a little lost on what we want for flora. Some grass species probably, plus some trees. Fruit trees may be hard to spread. Oaks are probably the best as far as providing edible food (acorns are edible if you treat them right) but then you have to bring in squirrels. We probably need to bite the bullet and either give up wild fruit or find a minimally bothersome fruit eater to spread the seeds.

Many fruiting trees would probably be ok to get by just being in orchards primarily. The oak seems like a really good species to include, so I'll probably bring squirrels in too.

Originally Posted by PTTG

Why would someone with exowombs ever grow meat animals? That's just a waste of feedstock.

Grow your meat on a dish if you really want it.

As others have noted, animals aren't dependent upon heavy human intervention and human tech to grow. It may be wasteful to grow feedstock specifically for feeding the animals, but if the stuff they're eating is growing wild and the animals can too, that's potentially less effort. Additionally, vatmeat requires you to mechanically and chemically process your feedstock into something the growing cells can consume, and it's not a guarantee that human technology is going to be more efficient at doing that than the animals themselves (or at least sufficiently more efficient to justify replacing the animals, anyway).

Originally Posted by ericthered

If exowombs are expensive, they're still useful for this situation if they allow you to save weight and kick-start several breeding populations from a single womb. And the technology will be developed even if it is that expensive, because growing humans in an exowomb instead of tying the mother down for months has promise, even if its too expensive for meat.

The exowombs are indeed expensive, and finicky. They were brought along more for allowing animals that weren't feasible to raise on a ship to be in the colony than for allowing human mothers to avoid pregnancy, although they are indeed used some for the latter (particularly for allowing the stored sperm and ova from Earth to create more genetically distinct humans and avoid too much of a Founder Effect). Of course, using the complex exowombs to grow vatmeat is probably wasteful - food vats would be much more simplistic.

Originally Posted by ericthered

If you have access to a large and untouched pile of resources (such as 5 million square miles of land) it can make sense to create animals and set them loose. A slab of meat doesn't reproduce if you leave it alone for 100 years.

Indeed.

Originally Posted by ericthered

I'll admit there are ethical concerns to the approach, but that's a different issue, and ethics vary widely.

Earth humans assumed they themselves would soon be mostly consuming vatmeat and the like for ethical reasons, and that the colony would, once stable, do so as well (eating animals being seen as a necessary evil early on). Neither really turned out.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

There might also be a difference in flavor and texture. The lab grown hamburger is not necessarily bad, at least compared to factory beef, but it lacks the complex flavors of grass fed beef that comes from the essence of dozens of different planets being consumed and digested by the animal. I do not really expect vatmeat to get much better, since the goal is to produce a cheaper hamburger and not a better hamburger.

From what I understand, the first (and only) taste test of vatburgers found the meat to be overly lean but otherwise nearly indistinguishable from meat. I think you're right that the primary purpose of vatmeat is cheaper meat, but avoiding pain/suffering/death of animals is no small part of it as well.

[(E)]

Breed stability as I've used the term means enough genetic diversity to ensure a breed's characteristics are maintained (or improved at a reasonable rate) while ensuring genetic health.
100,000 is the number quoted for sheep, cattle are similar.
The number can be reduced in two ways, managing breeding and by keeping the vast majority of genetics in hibernation.
If you use the later then divide 100,000 (or whatever number you use) by the amount of time sperm, eggs and zygotes. remain viable in cold storage (currently about 20 years)

Vat meat in it's current form also requires animals as source material, functionally increasing the per head efficiency of meat production by a factor of 20,000 or so. Current technology has a high chemical requirement.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by (E)

Breed stability as I've used the term means enough genetic diversity to ensure a breed's characteristics are maintained (or improved at a reasonable rate) while ensuring genetic health.
100,000 is the number quoted for sheep, cattle are similar.
The number can be reduced in two ways, managing breeding and by keeping the vast majority of genetics in hibernation.
If you use the later then divide 100,000 (or whatever number you use) by the amount of time sperm, eggs and zygotes. remain viable in cold storage (currently about 20 years)

From the description (and ways to modify it), it sounds like the 100,000 number is assuming essentially random breeding (as having a controlled breeding program reduces the starting number) and a very high attrition rate (as those cold-storage gametes aren't contributing to starting diversity, they are simply allowing a cow to continue to produce offspring after it's been made into hamburger, yet they have such a drastic effect on the needed starting number). Considering the human breeding won't be random (I'm not intending for there to be a formal breeding program, but steps will be taken to avoid inbreeding) and that the crew of the ships aren't being raised for slaughter, I don't think the 100,000 number is relevant for my setting.

That said, I do still expect for a starting population of 100,000 to result in some degree of a founder effect, which is why they're bringing a larger selection of Earth gametes with them. I should note I'm considering the setting as having sufficiently advanced cryotechnology that gametes/zygotes are viable indefinitely in cold storage (full organisms are a no-go, however, hence no sleeper ships).

Originally Posted by (E)

Vat meat in it's current form also requires animals as source material, functionally increasing the per head efficiency of meat production by a factor of 20,000 or so. Current technology has a high chemical requirement.

Vatmeat in the Harpyias setting would either use immortalized cells for sustained vats (harvesting from it every so often and leaving the rest to regenerate) or would use a system where you pull a stem cell starter out of cold storage, use that to whip up a large quantity of meat, and then harvest the whole thing. I'm leaning more toward the latter.