Organically Grown Space Ships

[stephen.samuels]

Baxter's Spline spacecraft are grown, and at least partially sapient; Mofitt's 'Genesis Quest' has interstellar, nay intergalactic trees, though they don't have much of a propulsion system. I remember a short story where the main characters were space-living organisms where the adults were ships, and the young passengers.

My principal difficulty is with an organic drive system that is at the same time reasonably efficient and fits into present-day physics. Then again, the drive might be dead matter (equivalent to the mineral shell of a coral polyp), though this removes the auto-reparing function that's a living vessel's most positive aspect.

Of course there are any number of ships which are cyborgs, with some part (generally the control system or parts of life support) living, while others are manufactured. Ships that sing, mutate, eat asteroids…

My concept is that the ships are principally grown from trees, which have the unique ability to take on useful properties from things which they come into contact with, such as metals and other materials. The propulsion system is a little bit special, so I won't reveal too much about that.

 

[Biskit]

Couple of observations (and I'm too lazy to highlight the various comments from other people I'm picking up on):

"Organically grown" - surely does not need to mean every bit is squishy, fleshy stuff. Nor does it mean that 'dead matter' can not be regenerated. Someone mentioned crustaceans, but go poking around in the animal kingdom and you find all sorts of hard, impermeable materials.
According to the stats, by my age I should have a wide expanse of shiny scalp on show, but instead I have a mop of curly hair and moult more than the damned cat. That's definitely regenerating 'dead matter'. And don't get me started on the state of the yard when the chickens are moulting and leaving feathers everywhere. Bone, hair, nails, feathers…

Oxygen-Carbon Dioxide - well, no need to get too hung up on this. It might be the common theme of the energy cycle for a lot of life on this planet, but in the vicinity of undersea volcanic vents you find life which runs on sulphur compounds.
http://www.noaa.gov/features/monitoring_0209/vents.html
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/essay_vogt.html
(And beware when reading these articles, 'oxidising' and related terms does not necessarily mean any oxygen is involved.)

Heavy metals - some years ago we visited a lead mining museum in the Dales. One of the things that was highlighted was a particular local plant which was highly tolerant of lead. There has also been interest in the last few decades in using plants to clean up or exploit contaminated land by accumulating materials such as heavy metals.
http://msacad.org/journal/ejour3.html

Peter Hamilton - every time someone mentions him (and I did enjoy his books) I always remember the orbiting station that generates its power by trailing a superconducting cable through the planet's magnetic field. Sorry - crash and burn. If you get power out the cable, then there is a force on it, and on the station in turn, which means a decaying orbit unless there is some power/propulsion system to counter it.

If you can imagine it, and 'it' is consistent with basic scientific principles (or at least self-consistent with some armwavium to paper the cracks), there is almost certainly something real and even more weird out in the world.

 

[Ursa major]

With regard to trees and dead matter: in simple terms most of the structure of a tree above ground is dead (i.e. not the leaves and roots), and provides structural support and the route () through which water is carried up the tree.

Hyperion, by Dan Simmons, has trees that are used for space travel: treeships, which Wiki describes thus:

Living trees (related to Dyson trees) that are propelled by ergs (spider-like solid-state alien being that emits force fields) through space. The ergs also generate the containment fields around the enormous tree that keep its atmosphere intact. There are only a small number of Treeships in existence - in Hyperion, the Consul remarks that the Yggdrasill is one of only five.

By the way, Wiki describes a Dyson tree as:

a hypothetical genetically-engineered plant, (perhaps resembling a tree) capable of growing in a comet, suggested by the physicist Freeman Dyson. Plants could produce a breathable atmosphere within hollow spaces in the comet (or even within the plants themselves), utilising solar energy for photosynthesis and cometary materials for nutrients, thus providing self-sustaining habitats for humanity in the outer solar system analogous to a greenhouse in space or a shell grown by a mollusc.

A Dyson tree might consist of a few main trunk structures growing out from a comet nucleus, branching into limbs and foliage that intertwine, forming a spherical structure possibly dozens of kilometers across.

The articles lists some SF that uses Dyson trees.

 

[Dave]

Just for sake of completeness, the TV series Lexx was set upon an organic spaceship.

Also, Larry Niven had Starseeds or Sailseeds that travelled interstellar space. He also had Integral Trees within the Smoke Ring.

As for growing inanimate objects, I seriously believe that is the way forward in the future. Something like a chair or a bed is made of wood and vegetable fibres, so once we have the ability to decode whole genomes, why can't it be grown from a single cell. The advantages are huge - self-replication, little waste of resources, and little energy (sunlight).

It would have to have died before it could be used to sit or sleep on. If we were to grow a spaceship in that way, a dead spaceship could hardly be sentient. You didn't specify if you wanted a sentient living spaceship or if it could be grown and harvested.

 

[Culhwch]

Also don't think it's been mentioned but in the Star Wars Expanded Universe, the main antagonists of the New Jedi Order series use organically-grown everything - ships, weapons, comms, and so on.

 

[Montero]

Not a space ship, but Peter J Evans Mnemosyne's Kiss had houses grown from genetically modified coral sort of stuff. Nicely done as I recall. I think one of the characters comments on the new build stuff - they don't really like the rounded shapes, prefer old man-made ones with square corners. (Or could be mis-remembering the last bit since it is a long time since I read that.)

 

[JunkMonkey]

I seem to remember that the White Stars in Babylon 5 were part organic too.

As were the Vorlon ships from the same show.

Back in the days when I used to read comics (the latter part of the 20th Century) Howard Chaykin created a character called Lord Ironwolf who (to blatently steal from Wikipedia) 'was the finest officer in the Earth-based interstellar Empire Galaktika in the 61st century. On his home world of Illium, he owned millions of trees with "anti-gravity wood" from which starships such as his own were constructed.'