I doubt the human psyche is capable of such a voyage while being awake the whole time. Even with all the toys and biomes, life will get boring and pointless fast, producing unfulfilled needs, disorder, conflict and revolt. People can't be ants in a colony working for such a narrowly defined goal through a lifetime, especially not multi-generationally. Our existence is based on constant questioning and revolutions. A 400 year travel to an unknown, possibly empty, lifeless target, however historic, is not something that can keep a society running long term.
> doubt the human psyche is capable of such a voyage while being awake the whole time
The human population fell to fewer than 10,000--possibly under one hundred--in the last Ice Age [1][-1]. There were almost certainly bands of fewer than 1,000 individuals who had to migrate for generations.
> life will get boring and pointless fast
Maybe on v1000. The first tens could expect a constant war footing against entropy and the unknown.
Polynesians took enormous risks to populate the pacific.
Medieval builders built Catherdrals that they knew wouldn't be finished in their lifetime.
Heading off on a multi-generation mission with no guarantee of success is not for most people. But there are billions of us. I'm sure they would easily find enough people to crew a mission.
Would it be any more cruel than having children as a serf on a farm, where your family has worked for countless generations, knowing that they're likely to have the same fate?
No, cause you need hands to work the land. And you end up having a dozen cause a few won't make it. /s
The whole "cruel to children" aspect is flawed. It only self-identifies individuals with a world view that is very earth-centric. We need a societal system where such a position is seen as an honorable one. That's why I liked the Antarctica bit of the submission. We ALL need to learn and change.
As adults we make our decisions as best we can. We can’t not make decisions, and the ones we do affect future generations whether they like it or not. That’s just life.
Having said that I worry about the sustainability of these projects. If these are not indefinitely sustainable on arrival, then future generations are doomed to die out with no hope of survival. I’ve no problem with a carefully judged risk, there are no guarantees in life, but there has to at least be a reasonable chance.
Right! And it's got crops, jobs, and a very small social circle and living quarter allocated for you. And you dream of more but are secretly happy with less.
People are not the monolithic group you seem to think them to be and in my experience most people adapt fairly quickly to their situation once they realize there is nothing they can do to change it.
The whole equation changes pretty drastically if we had a practical hibernation or biological stasis technology (I hate saying cryosleep, though in practice we know freezing things pauses them - see the 31 year old embryo baby recently).
Like do you really care how long it takes to get somewhere if it subjectively happens in the blink of an eye? Would you even necessarily be likely to lose your own peer group if you all spent significant time in hibernation travel between meetings?
This is how it works in the universe in the novel "Right of Return" by Janusz Zajdel - humanity has developed both safe hibernation as well as practical sub-light travel.
Many colonies, research stations and logistic hubs have been established with fast and dependable sub-light ships traversing between them.
On such a ship most of the crew is in hibernation at any one time, with just a couple people taking shifts from the hibernation to stand a watch during the flight.
Even with the ships reaching high sub-light speeds, the voyages take decades from outside perspective. But that might not be a problem! If you are one of the crew it might seem like a couple weeks as that's how long you flight crew shift took. If you are a passenger - it takes not time at all, you just go to hibernation & wake up at you destination!
So as long as you are a spacer or part of the wider community (e.q. space scientists who either study a wonder of space or are in transit to another one) this is fine - you will meet you friends again in a couple flight, in days or weeks of subjective time.
But if you befriends someone outside of the community or decide it was enough and settle down, you might never see them again.
Can really recommend the novel - has much more than this topic & quite a few other surprises. :)
Particles are indistinguishable, this means that the specific particles that make up a physical object (like a human) are not important, you could replace all of them with different particles, ship of Theseus style, and it would be the same object.
What makes an object unique then is the specific configuration of the particles that make up that object. This configuration is a form of information.
Fortunately, we already know how to transmit information at the speed of light; no new physics required. This then reduces the problem to transporting the ‘printer’. No generation ship required. You need something that harvests particles locally and can receive a stream of data with what to print. You can bootstrap this, send a tiny particle harvester/printer that can print a slightly larger printer, etc.
There's a reason Star Trek teleporters have a "Heisenberg compensator", we cannot record both the position and momentum of a particle precisely. Scanning the "configuration of particles" to transmit to this theoretical printer is the first impossible roadblock. The human you scan can never be the same exact person printed.
The reason Trek has it is likely a common misunderstanding of QM: it's not only that we cannot record both position and momentum, the information does not exist in the first place.
TLDW: an infinitely long wave does not (cannot) have any definite location, but it does have a definite periodic wavelength; conversely, a single impulse noise (a shockwave from e.g. a bullet or an explosion) has a definite location (in the direction of motion and at any given point in time) but no meaningful wavelength.
The more you constrain the possibility space of one, the looser the other becomes in a physical sense, not just the information you have about it.
That said, we definitely don't have the means to 3D print even relatively simple tissues, last I checked we are still limited to structures thin enough to be kept alive by oxygen diffusion.
One of my open questions on this topic is: given we can cryopreserve small tissue without the freezing-damage problem, why can't we do a repeated process of:
1. cell culture tissue sheets that are ~1mm (or whatever) thick
2. cryopreserve each sheet
3. then assemble those sheets, still frozen
4. then thaw out as per normal procedure for cryopreserved organs
Caveat: I have minimal knowledge of biology, this may be a stupid idea for a whole bunch of reasons I don't even know the names of.
Simulations still need to run on something & need energy to power them. The better, more stable, higher fidelity simulation you want, the more mass & energy it will need. And that needs to come from somewhere - a thing many infomorphs tend to conveniently forget far too often.
To the extent what they’re suggesting isn’t bunk, it’s in being able to transmit genetic information and then print it to a womb. Then have a generation of psychopaths raised by a robot.
As with many topics, the Orions Arm Universe project has you covered - the Engenerator[0]!
Originally developed in-universe when a bunch of immortal cyborgs got bored on a colonization ship & decided to instruct a precursor probe to print a machine that prints a machine that will print their bodies on site. :)
The engenerator technology is completely safe[1] and can't be misused in any way.
This is the most likely way we'd do it, provided we get over our cultural/political/religious limitations, which might pose a real obstacle.
The most likely way to move in the Universe is through something along the lines of von Neumann probes, which can be small machines sent at relativistic speeds across the whole galaxy, setting up these "spawn" points. Even at 10% speed of light it would take 1 million years to get such probes in strategic points to cover most of our galaxy.
But the process have been bootstrapped billions of years ago. They would have to print a feconded egg cell and make it grow. I think that the best we can do now is to freeze that cell and ship it to the next star. Then build the womb, which we can't do yet. And a zillion of other problems to solve.
No, they'd have to print the whole human that's encoded as data. Provided the process is fast enough, and the tech is available, it should be way faster than growing a full human from cells.
There's also no point in talking what can be done today, since such a project would take quite a while, both to assemble and get anywhere close to destination. Just because we cannot do it today doesn't mean it shouldn't be considered as a possible approach since we might get there in 30-50 years, which is nothing for the scales of time we're talking about.
Cryo tech is quite primitive, you are fighting to maintain a structure instead of saving its data and rebuilding it later when tech allows.
Imagine 3D printing a benchy and freezing it so it stays "fresh" for 50 years (for some potential use at that time), instead of saving the benchy stl file and printing it in 50 years.
Plans for potential human expansion into our galaxy must include potential tech developments, can't block it to the tech that is available today. The way things are going there's no reason to discard full scan and reassemble of a full human being, in some future. Let alone moving consciousness on other type of more resilient hardware.
Spin can be measured but what's the use for that? You can scan a chair and use the data to reassemble. If you get the wrong spins on particles do you not get the same chair? You're looking for a function which arises at higher level.
I don't understand, what is the purpose of measuring electron spin for your various atoms? Electrons are in a probability cloud, you need to scan/replicate the atomic structure, not measure the electron spin of your atoms. Doesn't really make sense for me, do you have something particular in mind or?
> Doesn't really make sense for me, do you have something particular in mind or?
Do you? I already said what I have in mind. particles are not indistinguishable and "scanning" objects without destroying them not possible in this reality
Most people don't leave a pretty small radius around work/home for most their life. All you need is a religion/lifestyle built around it and the people factor is pretty easy.
I mean think about what we do all day. We stay in our little rooms, pushing some tasks we're told to do, and cherish our friends, spouses, and kids, and then we die without seeing 99.9999% of the spaceship we're already riding (Earth).
Heidegger would say that all humans are thrown into existence and into circumstances that they did not choose. In some sense, we are currently on a large spaceship, and I assume some mission chosen for us by our predecessors.
I think we even today have enough propaganda and religion experience to make sure that the next generations would be happy to see themselves as the chosen ones, etc.
(small case in point - back in USSR we were happy that we were born in that wonderful country USSR and not in those decadent dangerous inhumane capitalist societies of the West where people were forced to struggle everyday to avoid becoming one of those numerous hungry homeless filling to the brim the dirty decaying cities of the West which they were showing us on the Soviet TV while we were supposedly on a mission to build better/higher/ideal society consisting of a new better entity "Soviet man" - "The Soviet man was to be selfless, learned, healthy, muscular, and enthusiastic in spreading the communist Revolution." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Soviet_man - note how the first 4 qualities work for interstellar, and they are pretty common among various other ideologies and religions, and the specific target for the 5th - for the enthusiasm - is just adjusted according the specific ideology or religion, and "spreading human civilization" wouldn't be even half-bad like some others out there)
Of course the religious fervor of the first post-Revolution years wasn't there say in 197x, yet so many people in Russia have during the last 30+ years been wanting back to USSR. The propaganda shapes your brain, especially if they hit you while you're young.
>But personal and in private, it was very different.
Deep down unfortunately the ex-Soviet people, me included, are damaged goods :)
So you just make it so they don't notice they are on an interstellar mission - sorry, to board the train to the capital you still need to fill in form XB1, but the officer who can fill it is on vacation (in the capital and the trains totally go somewhere!) - please come next cycle.
Basically an unhollo combination of Kafka and Truman show, keeping the community stable until arrival. :)
What's our current mission? "Keep society running" and "don't fuck up the planet" don't seem to be going super well, but that's just my cynicism talking. I need a nap.
Provided the first generation volunteered, I expect the second generation would still be indoctrinate enough to the idea and mission to be fine, but the third generation would definitely be stirring some shit up.
Not really possible for many mission profiles (e.g. if using target system star for braking or pre-programmed beamed propulsion) - so often that would not be an issue. ;-)
Not really. That would just be the way life is to those people. Showing them videos of how people lived on a planet would be like asking them to imagine how a caveman lived.
If they did rebel it would probably be more along the lines of reaching the target inhabitable planet and refusing to leave the ship. Just grab enough material to set a new course for the next one and keep going.
The next set of rebels would be the ones who actually fulfilled the mission.
Living on a ball of rock with no climate controll ? Are you insane ? Do what you want, I'll go back to building that new custom Stanford Torus we just got started last cycle. And don't call for help when it inevitably starts raining!
