Generation Starships

[Astromancer]

This thread is about the practical conciderations of setting up a means of taking humans and/or parahumans to new star systems. The rules are simple, we must assume that living comunities, not just A.I.s and genetic matterial, are taking the journey. The fastest the ship/s can go is 4% of C. And the final rule is that we are useing the technology of THS in AD2100, and/or a reasonable extrapilation of what THS might have by 2110AD.

Myself, I assume that Generation Starships will only be sent out as fleets. One ship alone would always be to vulnerable.

[Keiko]

Would the parahumans be modified to make long distance space travel easier like tolerance to zero g, reduced consumption and other mods?

[vicky_molokh]

The requirement that not just infomorphs and genetic material, but whole living communities be transported, means that the best way to do this is to:

1. Build a fleet relatively big ships.
2. (Optionally) Deep-brainscan the passengers.
3. Put the passengers in nanostasis in the Core section of the ships.
4. Maintain ships using cybershells inhabited by AIs and AI+Shadow combinations of the passengers. Make sure the AIs/Shadows are deeply programmed to have the community's best interests as a priority.
5. Upon reaching the destination, unpack the passengers and un-stasisify them.

[Anthony]

Well, within the context of THS, the big question is 'why would anyone do this?'. Sending out communities instead of AIs and genetic material is a huge additional expense for, well, nothing.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Well, within the context of THS, the big question is 'why would anyone do this?'. Sending out communities instead of AIs and genetic material is a huge additional expense for, well, nothing.

Why does anyone in TS do anything? The answer is usually because they just feel like it.

It's not like there was any particularly hard reason for sending infomorphs and genetic material.

Given the parameters it's time to stop thinking about "ships". What you'll see would be "habitats" that were accelerated for brief periods of time and then coasted for centuries or millennia.

So you have an existing habitat whose population decides they want to go elsewhere. Interstellar space is not much more of a stretch than some of the places the Red Duncanites have gone.

[mindstalk]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Well, within the context of THS, the big question is 'why would anyone do this?'. Sending out communities instead of AIs and genetic material is a huge additional expense for, well, nothing.

If your goal is a head of state who wants to spam the universe with Earth-descended mindlife, it's a huge additional expense. If you're some bioconservative (para)humans who want to (a) see other stars or (b) escape the coming Singularity, then it's the only way to go.

If your biolongevity is good enough then it's not so much a generation ship as a very long cruise. 4% c gives you 109 years to Alpha Centauri.

The THS core spaceship design has 360 km/s as the highest impulse drive available, which is 0.12% of light speed, and a travel time of 3600 years to Alpha Centauri. Whether that's a realistic maximum by that point, I don't know. Seems like nuclear drives should be capable of more. OTOH a habitat ship will have lots of overhead, including radiation shielding; to get high speed your initial fuel load will be huge. Unless you can use a beam or fuel-projected system, but that's more speculative tech.

Not sure what you're looking for. With a large budget to spend, I'd make sure I had multiple full-spectrum robofacs, a bunch of spare parts, redundancy in all systems, lots of assistant AIs for rare skills. And then, whee! To the stars! Slowly.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by mindstalk

If your biolongevity is good enough then it's not so much a generation ship as a very long cruise. 4% c gives you 109 years to Alpha Centauri.

The THS core spaceship design has 360 km/s as the highest impulse drive available, which is 0.12% of light speed, and a travel time of 3600 years to Alpha Centauri. Whether that's a realistic maximum by that point, I don't know. Seems like nuclear drives should be capable of more. OTOH a habitat ship will have lots of overhead, including radiation shielding; to get high speed your initial fuel load will be huge. Unless you can use a beam or fuel-projected system, but that's more speculative tech.

The 4% is stictly abitary.

Not sure what you're looking for. With a large budget to spend, I'd make sure I had multiple full-spectrum robofacs, a bunch of spare parts, redundancy in all systems, lots of assistant AIs for rare skills. And then, whee! To the stars! Slowly.

I agree with the point about redundancy. Redundancy would be the only safety measure you'd absolutely know would work as it is supposed to.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Well, within the context of THS, the big question is 'why would anyone do this?'. Sending out communities instead of AIs and genetic material is a huge additional expense for, well, nothing.

I suppose their are two big reasons. It's either A) they want to found new worlds and societies, or B) they think a genocidal/suicidal system wide war is coming and they want some of the things they value in civilisation to survive.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

The requirement that not just infomorphs and genetic material, but whole living communities be transported, means that the best way to do this is to:

1. Build a fleet relatively big ships.
2. (Optionally) Deep-brainscan the passengers.
3. Put the passengers in nanostasis in the Core section of the ships.
4. Maintain ships using cybershells inhabited by AIs and AI+Shadow combinations of the passengers. Make sure the AIs/Shadows are deeply programmed to have the community's best interests as a priority.
5. Upon reaching the destination, unpack the passengers and un-stasisify them.

This sounds like a solid list. But isn't this list for sleeper ships? Generation Starships take comunities on them and the passengers live their lives on the ships of the fleet.

[fwcain]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

The requirement that not just infomorphs and genetic material, but whole living communities be transported, means that the best way to do this is to:

1. Build a fleet relatively big ships.
2. ...

Actually, I'd think another approach would have something like this, in front of your "step 1" above...

0.1) Build a "test-bed", that is, a scaled-down version of the proposed "big ship"

0.2) Send the test-bed out beyond the solar system to a distance of 0.1 light-years (i.e.: "merely" 1.2 light-months away). Have the test-bed constantly reporting back to "control" any and all problems encountered with its components (in case of catastrophic failure).

0.3) Have the test-bed return back home, to be stripped down and examined, to find any and all problems that it did not find on its own.

These three preliminary steps have an additional advantage, in being prime grounds for potential adventures (industrial espionage, for example). ;-)

Franklin