I need to get this out of my head so I can think of something else: a "generation ship" is a really, really, really bad idea. Not only for the practical reasons such as how to feed and clothe and keep alive generation upon generation of humans; nor the scaling problem of having a large enough population to avoid inbreeding; nor the psychological and political problems of still having a working society after all that time. There's also the ethical problem of the first generation of astronauts committing many generations of their descendants to a life that begins and ends on a ship, a choice that they had no say in and may well resent.
There is, in fact, a much more practical approach. Instead of sending expensive, fragile, ill-tempered humans, send eggs and sperm on board an entirely automated (and self-repairing) ship. We know they can be frozen and emerge viable, so it's not much of a leap to do so for the thousand years of a trip to the stars. We could send millions of sperm and eggs ensuring genetic diversity in a much smaller, cheaper ship, and have robots incubate, deliver, and raise the first generation of colonists. And because these children will be educated from a comprehensive library that came with them, you don't have the "cultural drift" inevitable in generations of shipboard life so that you don't risk colonizing the galaxy with literal Space Nazis.
BTW, I am currently writing a novel in which this brilliant idea goes horribly wrong, so if anybody wants to steal it, they have about eight months to get there first!
Cheers for this thoughtful reply, Jacob! Have you read Kim Stanley Robinson's "Aurora"? He does a really great job of looking at all the things that could go wrong with a generation ship - and makes a convincing case for our ability to muddle through anyway. But yes, I think you're right - the "seeding" approach looks to be a viable one, as long as there are people or adaptive AI that can be relied upon to not muck it up. (I think this was the plot point at the end of "Interstellar" with the colony that Amelia was setting up?)
I have not read Aurora, but have added it to my reading list. Thank you. I also enjoyed the TV series Ascension which explores some of the same themes. And the show Silo has many of the same elements that a generation ship would have, even though it's set in a bunker in a post-apocalyptic Earth rather than on a ship.
"People mucking it up" (as well as malfunctioning technology and a faulty or malevolent AI) provide tons of material for a novel on the topic. One of the things I want to inject is a caste system that develops between later generations of people conceived naturally and by choice, aristocrats descended from the first generation of children, versus those created randomly from the seed bank. And at some point it emerges that there are separate egg and sperm reserves from "exceptional" donors that are only matched with each other to purposefully breed an elite (some echoes of Brave New World here perhaps?). And perhaps a Luddite movement (in the true historical sense, not the capitalist caricature) to destroy the artificial breeding program. Lots to play with.
Well! I AM a Philosopher and say an answer to this problem (whose literature is grossly inflated) is very simple and doesn't require improbable requirements. The Observor simply throws themself on the rails, derailing the train. A natural response to save one potential loss of life or five. Suicide? In a technical sense, yes, but imagine the scenario where you yourself see a grizzly chasing your child (or anybody's child for that matter). You wouldn't stop to ponder. You would immediately step in to divert the bear's charge. Now just substitute train for bear and derail for divert and the logic is apparent. Why doesn't anyone use this approach? Because the designers of the gedankenexperiment can alter the terms-putting the Observor in a remote viewing tower with a switch control at hand. So much for my solution! But it still operates in the grizzly gedanken at least. Actually the U S. are currently in a trolley problem dilemma with the populations of two countries bound on the rails.
As a philosopher, can you tell me whether philosophers think that the Trolley Problem is really telling us anything about ethics, as opposed to, say, how people answer a ridiculous and hypothetical question in order to look good in front of whoever is asking? Surely philosophers are wise enough to recognize the huge gap between what people say they would do* and what they actually do? Isn't the Trolley Problem in reality telling us nothing more than how people answer the Trolley Problem?
*Even in entirely mundane and realistic scenarios like "would you recommend this pizza chain to your friends?", let alone absurd and unimaginable ones like "which people would you allow to die?"
Philosophers have two penchants: to ask endless questions and to find depth in the commonplace. They also are adept in finding ethical dimensions in almost any situation, even whether to eat oatmeal or eggs for breakfast. They are also adept at concocting ingenious thought scenarios to spotlight the issues they want other people to examine. They are not good engineers otherwise. Our thought experiments have a dismal failure rate in that few have generated conclusive answers that shut down debate. Perhaps this is why dear Ludwig threw up his hands and went off to become a school teacher! But Philosophy is a good thing otherwise. It is a career born of passion and love; no onee yet has made a lot of money choosing Philosophy as a career. Further, it doesn't contribute (at least directly or in an intentional way) to War, death, human misery, or environmental despoilation. We can't lay global warming at it's feet! It's a noble calling and those who are called to it can count themselves fortunate even though they face a life of driving used.cars and wearing Goodwill clothes!
I commented & deleted it because I really need to stop live-commenting as I read newsletters. ANYWAY. The excerpt below is blowing my mind & actually making me glad. Why are we trying to branch far out into space when we can't even fix the issues on our home planet? Maybe the possibility for us was never there. "Any superluminal (FTL) model of travel will have to overturn our current understanding of the nature of reality (hey, no biggie), which states that because the hard limit of light speed underpins everything, if you exceed it, you break causality - the relationship between cause and effect. This rapidly unravels…well, everything, but particularly everything as we humans experience it, and in particular our understanding of the ‘arrow of time’ and how it only ever points in one direction, so we don’t end up going back in time to accidentally murder our ancestors, or bang out infuriated replies to emails that other people haven’t sent us yet, whichever feels more anxiety-inducing to you today."
Thanks, Jessica! Yeah, the reading for this one has been tying my brain in knots over the last week - the theory side is above my intellectual pay-grade, so I'm very glad for the talented science communicators of New Scientist, Scientific American and so on. But all of it is head-spinning for sure.
As for fixing things on Earth, that's kinda what the space programme is for! At least, NASA's version (I'm reserving judgement on the efforts of billionaires until I understand what they're doing a little better). Energy-saving LEDs, scratch-resistant lenses, water purification, home insulation, smoke detectors, artificial limbs - these all came directly or indirectly from space travel research & engineering, and it's vastly accelerated other inventions (eg. solar panels) to make them practical years or even decades earlier than they would otherwise have been. So - it's all connected, really. To achieve both space travel and fixing Earth's environment, we really need to do (and fund) both!
I feel like it's all connected by accident sort of. Like if various militaries and governments around the world hadn't decided to release the tech they'd made (scratch-resistant lenses, water purification, home insulation etc) and just kept it classified, it wouldn't have helped people or our planet at all. BUT THEY DID. Which is great. And kind of affirms my trust in the goodness of mankind.
We might NEVER go superluminal? LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!! ALIENS WILL ARRIVE ANY DAY AND I WILL GET ON BOARD AND BE WHISKED TO SPACE IN AN EXPERIENCE THAT IS NOTHING LIKE TO SERVE MANKIND!!!!
I'm a simple man. I see the star ship Enterprise (albeit not NCC-1701-D, the best version) and a quote from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I press like.
Ha! I was just chatting with Phil Plait about favourite Enterprises, and we both agree that the ST: The Motion Picture version is the one for us. THAT SAID, here is some really incredible CGI work, splicing in a mix of the old Enterprise and the new JJ Abrams one into the Motion Picture launch scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSW6m9pCAtI There are some amazingly talented VFX people in the world, that's a fact.
I love reading excellent pieces on topics about which I have no idea and this has made me feel educated and inspired and massively insignificant all at once. Thanks for nothing Mike.
Hahaha. Thank you - I think? - Kev. I am glad you enjoyed it and also sorry it catapulted you into a version of the mild existential crisis I had when researching it. Hooray!
We already have all this per Lockheed Skunkworks, Raytheon, and the fav JPL. And no, we’re not ready for it. Can you imagine a whole bunch of “us” out there screwing up the galaxy?
Ha! I'm very hopeful that the galaxy is so mind-numbingly big that it's utterly un-screwupabble. And I also hope that humanity's current obsession with defense tech will yield a lot of useful breakthroughs with spacebound equipment. But, of course, we could just keep fixating on ways to blow each other up. Time will tell.
(Are you watching Apple TV's "For All Mankind"? They're painting a fascinating picture of an alternate future with NASA and national corps duking it out or teaming up to get the job done.)
I need to ask friends who also work in this field if anyone has calculated the energy requirements for the life support and ship management systems required to keep the crew alive and the ship operating during these lengthy voyages
I would love to hear your findings on this, if you get those calculations! I gather there have been a few journal papers on the subject (eg https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.09542) but they're well above my mental paygrade. (One person who might have done that math is author Kim Stanley Robinson, for this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(novel) )
For a look at subliminal space travel, check out my “Nu Book1: The Esss Advance”. The story postulates two very different alien species interacting over billions of years coming together in our solar system just as we are about to send out our first interstellar mission. The time scales are enormous because we are basically limited to going half the speed of light.
And of course the important thing is that we don’t destroy ourselves or THIS planet in order to be able to develop the technology to expand into space. Let’s hope we manage that in time.
Yep! I'm actually a lot less worried about the planet (it's a tough thing, this home of ours) and more worried about what's on it - including us, but as part of the whole ecosystem that we should be looking after, because aside from eco-stewardship being the right thing to do, our ability to survive depends on everything keeping working together. 🤞🤞🤞 But I am glad some of the smartest people on the planet are working the problem.
Brilliant! But the I wind up back at the toddler style question “why is light speed the limiting factor?” and now have to go away and remind myself. But not before watching the video and following the fascinating links you have here. I may be some time! 😉
Thank you! And - aren't those fundamental questions the absolute fun of it? I keep having to do that when I'm writing pieces like that, and so many times it's a process of realising I still have so much more to learn.
A book that's helped me hugely with the weirdest side of relativity is George Gamow's "Mr Tomkins In Wonderland". Gamow was a theoretical physicist - he died in 1968 - and to popularise the deeply strange ideas he was working with, he wrote four playful science books. You can read "Mr Tomkins in Wonderland" for free here - https://archive.org/details/B-001-001-755/mode/2up - and I'd recommend it to anyone who is the least bit interested in science, it's so fun and so mind-expanding.
I'm so excited I found this (and you). I'm in the midst of writing a generation ship novel and need all the help I can get! Can you believe I didn't even know about Aurora until this minute? Crazy thing is I've written the same book twice already (wasn't happy with the first try), the first time before Aurora was released. I'm still not stoked with it and am about to launch into the 3rd iteration, here on Substack. Hoping for some interaction with cleverer readers than me to up the ante again.
I need to get this out of my head so I can think of something else: a "generation ship" is a really, really, really bad idea. Not only for the practical reasons such as how to feed and clothe and keep alive generation upon generation of humans; nor the scaling problem of having a large enough population to avoid inbreeding; nor the psychological and political problems of still having a working society after all that time. There's also the ethical problem of the first generation of astronauts committing many generations of their descendants to a life that begins and ends on a ship, a choice that they had no say in and may well resent.
There is, in fact, a much more practical approach. Instead of sending expensive, fragile, ill-tempered humans, send eggs and sperm on board an entirely automated (and self-repairing) ship. We know they can be frozen and emerge viable, so it's not much of a leap to do so for the thousand years of a trip to the stars. We could send millions of sperm and eggs ensuring genetic diversity in a much smaller, cheaper ship, and have robots incubate, deliver, and raise the first generation of colonists. And because these children will be educated from a comprehensive library that came with them, you don't have the "cultural drift" inevitable in generations of shipboard life so that you don't risk colonizing the galaxy with literal Space Nazis.
BTW, I am currently writing a novel in which this brilliant idea goes horribly wrong, so if anybody wants to steal it, they have about eight months to get there first!
Cheers for this thoughtful reply, Jacob! Have you read Kim Stanley Robinson's "Aurora"? He does a really great job of looking at all the things that could go wrong with a generation ship - and makes a convincing case for our ability to muddle through anyway. But yes, I think you're right - the "seeding" approach looks to be a viable one, as long as there are people or adaptive AI that can be relied upon to not muck it up. (I think this was the plot point at the end of "Interstellar" with the colony that Amelia was setting up?)
I have not read Aurora, but have added it to my reading list. Thank you. I also enjoyed the TV series Ascension which explores some of the same themes. And the show Silo has many of the same elements that a generation ship would have, even though it's set in a bunker in a post-apocalyptic Earth rather than on a ship.
"People mucking it up" (as well as malfunctioning technology and a faulty or malevolent AI) provide tons of material for a novel on the topic. One of the things I want to inject is a caste system that develops between later generations of people conceived naturally and by choice, aristocrats descended from the first generation of children, versus those created randomly from the seed bank. And at some point it emerges that there are separate egg and sperm reserves from "exceptional" donors that are only matched with each other to purposefully breed an elite (some echoes of Brave New World here perhaps?). And perhaps a Luddite movement (in the true historical sense, not the capitalist caricature) to destroy the artificial breeding program. Lots to play with.
Well! I AM a Philosopher and say an answer to this problem (whose literature is grossly inflated) is very simple and doesn't require improbable requirements. The Observor simply throws themself on the rails, derailing the train. A natural response to save one potential loss of life or five. Suicide? In a technical sense, yes, but imagine the scenario where you yourself see a grizzly chasing your child (or anybody's child for that matter). You wouldn't stop to ponder. You would immediately step in to divert the bear's charge. Now just substitute train for bear and derail for divert and the logic is apparent. Why doesn't anyone use this approach? Because the designers of the gedankenexperiment can alter the terms-putting the Observor in a remote viewing tower with a switch control at hand. So much for my solution! But it still operates in the grizzly gedanken at least. Actually the U S. are currently in a trolley problem dilemma with the populations of two countries bound on the rails.
As a philosopher, can you tell me whether philosophers think that the Trolley Problem is really telling us anything about ethics, as opposed to, say, how people answer a ridiculous and hypothetical question in order to look good in front of whoever is asking? Surely philosophers are wise enough to recognize the huge gap between what people say they would do* and what they actually do? Isn't the Trolley Problem in reality telling us nothing more than how people answer the Trolley Problem?
*Even in entirely mundane and realistic scenarios like "would you recommend this pizza chain to your friends?", let alone absurd and unimaginable ones like "which people would you allow to die?"
Philosophers have two penchants: to ask endless questions and to find depth in the commonplace. They also are adept in finding ethical dimensions in almost any situation, even whether to eat oatmeal or eggs for breakfast. They are also adept at concocting ingenious thought scenarios to spotlight the issues they want other people to examine. They are not good engineers otherwise. Our thought experiments have a dismal failure rate in that few have generated conclusive answers that shut down debate. Perhaps this is why dear Ludwig threw up his hands and went off to become a school teacher! But Philosophy is a good thing otherwise. It is a career born of passion and love; no onee yet has made a lot of money choosing Philosophy as a career. Further, it doesn't contribute (at least directly or in an intentional way) to War, death, human misery, or environmental despoilation. We can't lay global warming at it's feet! It's a noble calling and those who are called to it can count themselves fortunate even though they face a life of driving used.cars and wearing Goodwill clothes!
I commented & deleted it because I really need to stop live-commenting as I read newsletters. ANYWAY. The excerpt below is blowing my mind & actually making me glad. Why are we trying to branch far out into space when we can't even fix the issues on our home planet? Maybe the possibility for us was never there. "Any superluminal (FTL) model of travel will have to overturn our current understanding of the nature of reality (hey, no biggie), which states that because the hard limit of light speed underpins everything, if you exceed it, you break causality - the relationship between cause and effect. This rapidly unravels…well, everything, but particularly everything as we humans experience it, and in particular our understanding of the ‘arrow of time’ and how it only ever points in one direction, so we don’t end up going back in time to accidentally murder our ancestors, or bang out infuriated replies to emails that other people haven’t sent us yet, whichever feels more anxiety-inducing to you today."
Thanks, Jessica! Yeah, the reading for this one has been tying my brain in knots over the last week - the theory side is above my intellectual pay-grade, so I'm very glad for the talented science communicators of New Scientist, Scientific American and so on. But all of it is head-spinning for sure.
As for fixing things on Earth, that's kinda what the space programme is for! At least, NASA's version (I'm reserving judgement on the efforts of billionaires until I understand what they're doing a little better). Energy-saving LEDs, scratch-resistant lenses, water purification, home insulation, smoke detectors, artificial limbs - these all came directly or indirectly from space travel research & engineering, and it's vastly accelerated other inventions (eg. solar panels) to make them practical years or even decades earlier than they would otherwise have been. So - it's all connected, really. To achieve both space travel and fixing Earth's environment, we really need to do (and fund) both!
I feel like it's all connected by accident sort of. Like if various militaries and governments around the world hadn't decided to release the tech they'd made (scratch-resistant lenses, water purification, home insulation etc) and just kept it classified, it wouldn't have helped people or our planet at all. BUT THEY DID. Which is great. And kind of affirms my trust in the goodness of mankind.
Wow! I understood about ten percent of this, maybe less, and it still was "wow". Loved it.
We might NEVER go superluminal? LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!! ALIENS WILL ARRIVE ANY DAY AND I WILL GET ON BOARD AND BE WHISKED TO SPACE IN AN EXPERIENCE THAT IS NOTHING LIKE TO SERVE MANKIND!!!!
WE ARE ALREADY HERE, MICHAEL-HUMAN. SOON THE SLEEPER DRONES WILL AWAKEN.
...
...
Sorry, don't know why I said that.
I think I need a nice lie down.
And a cuppa...
I'm a simple man. I see the star ship Enterprise (albeit not NCC-1701-D, the best version) and a quote from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I press like.
Excellent read Mike as usual :)
Thank you, sir!
Ha! I was just chatting with Phil Plait about favourite Enterprises, and we both agree that the ST: The Motion Picture version is the one for us. THAT SAID, here is some really incredible CGI work, splicing in a mix of the old Enterprise and the new JJ Abrams one into the Motion Picture launch scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSW6m9pCAtI There are some amazingly talented VFX people in the world, that's a fact.
Beautiful Mike. I also always appreciate a good Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy reference.
DON'T PANIC. 😁 Lord knows we need that advice right now, with everything going on in the world.
Doesn’t that advice precede the earth being destroyed? Always good to check your sources. ;)
Hahahaha...
....
oh god.
I love reading excellent pieces on topics about which I have no idea and this has made me feel educated and inspired and massively insignificant all at once. Thanks for nothing Mike.
Hahaha. Thank you - I think? - Kev. I am glad you enjoyed it and also sorry it catapulted you into a version of the mild existential crisis I had when researching it. Hooray!
Even more beautifully written than usual, Mr S.
You're the nicest, Thank you. :)
We already have all this per Lockheed Skunkworks, Raytheon, and the fav JPL. And no, we’re not ready for it. Can you imagine a whole bunch of “us” out there screwing up the galaxy?
Ha! I'm very hopeful that the galaxy is so mind-numbingly big that it's utterly un-screwupabble. And I also hope that humanity's current obsession with defense tech will yield a lot of useful breakthroughs with spacebound equipment. But, of course, we could just keep fixating on ways to blow each other up. Time will tell.
(Are you watching Apple TV's "For All Mankind"? They're painting a fascinating picture of an alternate future with NASA and national corps duking it out or teaming up to get the job done.)
I’ll look for it. Sounds interesting.
From your one sentence it sounds like what has actually been going on for the last 80 years or so.
And yeah, if they could use the stuff they have for good instead of ill….
I need to ask friends who also work in this field if anyone has calculated the energy requirements for the life support and ship management systems required to keep the crew alive and the ship operating during these lengthy voyages
I would love to hear your findings on this, if you get those calculations! I gather there have been a few journal papers on the subject (eg https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.09542) but they're well above my mental paygrade. (One person who might have done that math is author Kim Stanley Robinson, for this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(novel) )
Excellent piece, thank you. This sort of essay and the wonder therein keeps me going!
Cheers, John! That's very much why I write them, that feeling of "woah" - so I'm glad it's having the same effect on you too.
For a look at subliminal space travel, check out my “Nu Book1: The Esss Advance”. The story postulates two very different alien species interacting over billions of years coming together in our solar system just as we are about to send out our first interstellar mission. The time scales are enormous because we are basically limited to going half the speed of light.
Will do! Thanks, Charles.
And of course the important thing is that we don’t destroy ourselves or THIS planet in order to be able to develop the technology to expand into space. Let’s hope we manage that in time.
Yep! I'm actually a lot less worried about the planet (it's a tough thing, this home of ours) and more worried about what's on it - including us, but as part of the whole ecosystem that we should be looking after, because aside from eco-stewardship being the right thing to do, our ability to survive depends on everything keeping working together. 🤞🤞🤞 But I am glad some of the smartest people on the planet are working the problem.
Brilliant! But the I wind up back at the toddler style question “why is light speed the limiting factor?” and now have to go away and remind myself. But not before watching the video and following the fascinating links you have here. I may be some time! 😉
Thank you! And - aren't those fundamental questions the absolute fun of it? I keep having to do that when I'm writing pieces like that, and so many times it's a process of realising I still have so much more to learn.
A book that's helped me hugely with the weirdest side of relativity is George Gamow's "Mr Tomkins In Wonderland". Gamow was a theoretical physicist - he died in 1968 - and to popularise the deeply strange ideas he was working with, he wrote four playful science books. You can read "Mr Tomkins in Wonderland" for free here - https://archive.org/details/B-001-001-755/mode/2up - and I'd recommend it to anyone who is the least bit interested in science, it's so fun and so mind-expanding.
I'm so excited I found this (and you). I'm in the midst of writing a generation ship novel and need all the help I can get! Can you believe I didn't even know about Aurora until this minute? Crazy thing is I've written the same book twice already (wasn't happy with the first try), the first time before Aurora was released. I'm still not stoked with it and am about to launch into the 3rd iteration, here on Substack. Hoping for some interaction with cleverer readers than me to up the ante again.