Interstellar space travel: which designs have the best chances of getting...

[Dave]

I am unaware of the studies you speak of, but their logic would seem prohibitive.

I don't have a study to hand but Google "child Development" "terrible twos" and you will get pages of websites with advice for parents. It is a testing time for parents (mothers) as the children begin to learn to assert themselves and their personalities emerge. One of those sites says "Your child is using one of the only tools he has–noncompliance in what he perceives as a battle for a sense of self and power." Children who parents cave in to and allow them to do whatever they like, continue to believe they can do whatever they like for the remainder of their lives. Throwing a tantrum every time you fail to get your own way is a behaviour difficult to unlearn once learned.

My point is that if parents find that hard to cope with, how hard would it be for an AI.

Even harder to deal with would be the emotional problems of teenagers.

I don't think it is off-topic because I can't see an AI being able to bring up children in the very near future. The other options might be easier to achieve.

 

[Parson]

I don't have a study to hand but Google "child Development" "terrible twos" and you will get pages of websites with advice for parents. It is a testing time for parents (mothers) as the children begin to learn to assert themselves and their personalities emerge. One of those sites says "Your child is using one of the only tools he has–noncompliance in what he perceives as a battle for a sense of self and power." Children who parents cave in to and allow them to do whatever they like, continue to believe they can do whatever they like for the remainder of their lives. Throwing a tantrum every time you fail to get your own way is a behaviour difficult to unlearn once learned.

This is so true! I have a 2 year old grandson who lives with us half time and his tantrum throwing "No" yelling is very hard to take. It is almost always necessary to let the little "yeller" discover that the tantrum is not going to gain him anything more or different; but that asking politely has a chance of doing that.

On the other hand it is necessary to see life from the child's eye as well. So much of the world is incomprehensible and so completely out of his understanding or control.

On the whole I think that we agree that the raising of the children might be one of the greatest downfalls in the embryo method of stellar travel. What might have seemed at first brush to be one of the lesser problems might well be the one that makes this method very unlikely to be used by humans.

Cavet: It may be that AI's would do a better job than a lot of parents.

 

[matt-browne-sfw]

This sounds more like a sociological experiment than a control group. We have all of the old battleground issues of nurture vs. nature here. Suffice it to say that I believe that nurture is at least as important as nature in determining the kind of adult which will arise from a birth.

There's an even more ambitious idea: instead of frozen human embryos just take a collection of CD-Rs on the trip. Each CD-R stores the genome of a human being living on Earth now. Or take a large harddrive use some compression algorithms (I've each genome would only require 100 megabytes if compressed).

In addition to artificial womb devices you also need the technology to transfer the genome into a generic fertilized egg that just needs the DNA injected.


And you still need the androids to raise the children.

 

[Parson]

There's an even more ambitious idea: instead of frozen human embryos just take a collection of CD-Rs on the trip. Each CD-R stores the genome of a human being living on Earth now. Or take a large harddrive use some compression algorithms (I've each genome would only require 100 megabytes if compressed).

In addition to artificial womb devices you also need the technology to transfer the genome into a generic fertilized egg that just needs the DNA injected.


And you still need the androids to raise the children.

Wow! Science on that level would seem to need the equal of the science needed to get a true atomic star drive (I'm assuming a 10% speed of light as a minimum for actually traveling with a living crew to a new star.) If the latter were possible, I wouldn't want to mess with the former for sociological reasons listed above.

 

[matt-browne-sfw]

Wow! Science on that level would seem to need the equal of the science needed to get a true atomic star drive (I'm assuming a 10% speed of light as a minimum for actually traveling with a living crew to a new star.) If the latter were possible, I wouldn't want to mess with the former for sociological reasons listed above.

I admit it's truly visionary... but that's the great thing about science fiction, isn't it?

 

[Parson]

I admit it's truly visionary... but that's the great thing about science fiction, isn't it?

So true! But like most things "your greatest strength is also your greatest weakness." For SF that amounts to pushing an idea so far that it loses any touch of reality. I thought the later Dune sequels did that. I've never even been tempted to read those "prequels."

When it comes to Star Drives it seems SF deals with them inversely proportionally to their connection with understood physics. So we have generation ships or embryo ships rarely making an appearance, but warp drives, private star ships, and interstellar matter transfer making regular appearances.

 

[Steve Jordan]

If the point is to basically get humans, any humans, to another star system, I could see D, powered by either E, F, or G, by the end of this century.

I base that on the idea that an embryonic ship could be incredibly compact, needing no life support other than embryonic preservation, therefore being able to travel fastest with whatever drive technology you used. Once it reached a viable destination (and it would be easier to leapfrog around, if the first destination did not suit, until a viable planet was found), it could presumably land and use the local resources to construct its artificial wombs and nurturing facilities, and grow humans only after they arrive.

I can't see the logic in living people trying to make such a trip at all, asleep or awake/generational, unless it was a dire emergency (Earth is finally dying, about to be asteroid-food, etc) and Earth's inhabitants insist on trying to rough-it in space. Even if this was the case, I wouldn't even try to get to another planet: I would put everyone in orbit around or near Earth, and try to repair the terrestrial damage enough to return to it. I'd bet that could be done a lot faster, and with less energy, than trying to get to another planet we-know-not-where (the "Bird in the Hand" theory of human preservation).

 

[Steve Jordan]

Well, with all the talk about a "technological singularity"... don't you think it's a bit simpler to build androids capable of raising children (belonging to the species of friendly AI).

In my book I tried to show that the embryo space colonization concept could work...

Matt, if you've never been exposed to it, try and find a series of manga called 2001 Nights, written by [SIZE=-1]Yukinobu Hoshino. An excellent example of embryonic travel and android raising of children (as well as a believable map of development of Man's ability to eventually travel the stars, and what he is likely to find).[/SIZE]

 

[Montero]

Even if they did try a generational ship, chances are that one of the other faster options might become possible within that time-frame, leapfrogging them to the destination more quickly. That sounds like an idea for a story actually!

Its the background for RA MacAvoy's "The Third Eagle" . A very good story it is too.

Though it is a sleeper ship overtaken by faster technology not a generational ship.

 

[Montero]

Raising children from embryo

There is an interesting take in The Legacy of Heorot by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes.
They arrive on planet largely by sleeper technology (in the Dragons of Heorot) and have a massive cargo of frozen embryo (or sperm plus egg, can't remember which now). The adults who survive the journey have their own kids, plus they defrost a number of babies from the cargo and raise them as well.
However, said kids finish up feeling a separate group and thereby hangs trouble. (Don't want to go into a spoiler here.)

 

[RVM45]

.....No one mentioned the Bussard Ramjet. If I remember correctly, it is capable of accelerating up to about .38C. Oddly enough, it cant go any faster because of "Wind Resistance".(At 38% of lightspeed, even 1 atom of hydrogen per cubic yard starts to add up.)

.....I do have an observation though- many folks seem to think that Einstein's discovery that the speed of light is an unsurpassable limit, dashed many hopes of travelling to the stars.

.....Reality check people. If they came up with a device tomorrow, that let you travel through space AS-IF it was completely Newtonion; accelerating to as many C as you had delta V to- where would you get the delta V? You wouldn't be one step closer to the stars than we are right now.(although undoubtedly such a weird process would certainly contain beaucoup unintended and quite possibly unforseen consequences. One of the side effects might get you to the stars- if one of the others didn't blow up the known universe first...)

.....RVM45

 

[Steve Jordan]

.....No one mentioned the Bussard Ramjet. If I remember correctly, it is capable of accelerating up to about .38C. Oddly enough, it cant go any faster because of "Wind Resistance".(At 38% of lightspeed, even 1 atom of hydrogen per cubic yard starts to add up.)

It's item "F" of the opening item, fusion engines, e.g., based on Bussard Ramjet. My suggestion was of an embryonic ship using one of 3 propulsive systems, including F.

 

[RVM45]

.....Don't know how I missed that. Maybe because you confused me by putting it right out in plain sight that way.

.....My bad.

.....RVM45

 

[Steve Jordan]

Of course, I still hold out hope for "J," "warped space" or other FTL method.

I worked out the details (sshhh) for a transportation system that ably bypasses the limits of the speed of light, and which seems not only theoretically plausible based on the tenets of quantum theory and experimental data I've dug up, but within the realm of practical possibility for a piloted space craft to use... maybe even by end of century! I don't believe this method has been suggested before, though admittedly there's a lot of SF out there that I haven't seen yet. But it's a very elegant system, so I'm looking forward to messing with it.

I plan to apply it in a future novel (not the one I'm on now, which takes place firmly rooted on Earth, but possibly the next story).

 

[Steve Jordan]

Well, I see no one's been in here for awhile. Just thought I'd mention that I used my drive system in my novel Verdant Skies, and it turned out to be my most acclaimed novel yet, partially for the inventive and believable use of science.

 

[John Thiel]

Make mine a spacewarp. A ship should be suspended in an energy-field and transmitted (like radio waves) to a new destination. But of course there has to be a receiving area to do that---hence, I think, the alien make of the spacecraft in SGU. They seem to beam across on solar attraction.

 

[chrispenycate]

Make mine a spacewarp. A ship should be suspended in an energy-field and transmitted (like radio waves) to a new destination. But of course there has to be a receiving area to do that---hence, I think, the alien make of the spacecraft in SGU. They seem to beam across on solar attraction.

But radio waves travel at light speed, so even if the occupants of your vessel experienced no duration, if the star the ship was travelling to was twenty odd light years distant, it'd be forty years before the folks back home new they'd arrived.

I take a spacewarp to eliminate distance entirely, fold the cosmos so that two points that are separated by light years when travelling through conventional space become contiguous. Obviously this requires manipulating a supplementary dimension, and the only thing that shows any signs of doing that for the time being are intense gravitational fields; but it's not mathematically impossible.

 

[Deathpool]

I'd choose a wormhole.

 

[John Thiel]

By the way, if those are to be called wormholes, what is considered to be the worm?

 

[Steve Jordan]

By the way, if those are to be called wormholes, what is considered to be the worm?

You are... after you're reduced to your constituent particles and squeezed through the hole.

I don't know why wormholes are so popular lately, or why anyone believes we can either survive intact when traveling through a wormhole... or somehow reconstruct our forms, particle by particle, to their original intact positions before we went in. The amount of processing power required to do that must be as practically impossible as using brute-force rocket thrust to get to light speed.

And that doesn't even include the idea of actually being able to wrangle the wormholes themselves, to set their end points and actively maintain them over a significant period of time! Might as well use a firecracker to try to push the Earth out of orbit...

For me, I don't discount the possibility that there are aspects of spacetime that we still don't know much about, and that one of those aspects may give rise to a way of moving from place to place in a unique way.

I keep coming back to experiments that have used lasers to fire controlled bursts of energy at photons, resulting in their apparently disappearing, and reappearing in another location, in a span of time so short as to mean they traversed the distance faster than light could have traversed the same distance. I think some type of FTL travel may come from this essential finding, which is what I based my novel's transport system on.