All that could be accomplished by starfarers in such an ark would be to deal with these problems as well as possible, minimizing them so that they might hang on long enough for the starship to reach its destination. In short, a perfectly recycling ecological system is impossible Earth is not one, and an isolated system a trillion times smaller than Earth would exacerbate the effects of the losses, build-ups, metabolic rifts, balance swings, clogging, and other actions and reactions.
But even the largest starship would be about one-trillionth the size of Earth, and this necessary miniaturization would almost certainly lead to unknown effects in our bodies.Įcological problems: The generation ship would essentially need to function as its own recycling ecological island.
This is a difficult balancing act, and does not work perfectly even on Earth but divorced from Earth’s bacterial load, and thus never able to get infusions of new bacteria, the chances of suffering various immune problems similar to those observed in over-sterile Terran environments will rise markedly.īecause we need a broad array of bacterial companions, one would want to bring along as much of Earth as you could fit into a starship. Most of the creatures inside us have to be functioning well for the system as a whole to be healthy. Possibility of catastrophic collision with space matter.Īnd those are the easy problems to solve.īiological problems: Oddly enough, one of the biggest problems would be a lack of … bacterial infusions. Exposure of passengers to high levels of radiation. No possibility of re-supply along the way. Physical problems: Enormous amount of fuel needed to speed up and slow down. Or rather maybe, but it is so overwhelmingly improbable that it may as well be a pipe dream, and Robinson spends the rest of his essay articulating why. So you’d have to build an ark-like ship, a “generation starship,” in which only the children or grandchildren of the parents would reach the destination.Ĭool. Continued abuse of our services will cause your IP address to be blocked indefinitely.While researching my previous post, I happened upon a delightful speculative essay by Kim Stanley Robinson on traveling to another solar system: “ Our Generation Ships Will Sink.” It’s from 2015 and thus may seem old hat for a lot of serious sci-fi readers (or for those who’ve read Robinson’s novel Aurora), but for me it was a lot of fun to stop and wonder: can it really be done?įirst, the nearest stars (read: suns where a habitable or a terra-formable planet might exist) are very far away, and since we are nowhere close to achieving FTL speed, it would take many years-Robinson estimates 120-200 years-for a spaceship to reach the closest one. Please fill out the CAPTCHA below and then click the button to indicate that you agree to these terms. If you wish to be unblocked, you must agree that you will take immediate steps to rectify this issue. If you do not understand what is causing this behavior, please contact us here. If you promise to stop (by clicking the Agree button below), we'll unblock your connection for now, but we will immediately re-block it if we detect additional bad behavior.
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