Generation Ships--- Can we build one now?

Samloyal23 · Jan 29, 2019

A question I have not seen touched on, how many people do you send? You need to be genetically diverse and have a sustainable population for a colony, but you have limited space on the ship. Also, what about pets and livestock? Do you take Fido? Do you bring a herd of sheep for milk and wool? Even if you find a habitable planet, the chemistry of any plants or animals you find there may not be compatible with human needs.

Zardnaar · Jan 29, 2019

Samloyal23 said:
A question I have not seen touched on, how many people do you send? You need to be genetically diverse and have a sustainable population for a colony, but you have limited space on the ship. Also, what about pets and livestock? Do you take Fido? Do you bring a herd of sheep for milk and wool? Even if you find a habitable planet, the chemistry of any plants or animals you find there may not be compatible with human needs.

Vegetarian and synthetic meat would be the best.

Hussar · Jan 29, 2019

Wonder what the effects of that diet would be after fifteen or twenty generations.

Hope your synthetic meat is absolutely perfect.

Samloyal23 · Jan 29, 2019

Zardnaar said:
Vegetarian and synthetic meat would be the best.

Even if you are vegetarian, if you are going to build a civilization you will need animals for some things. You may need Earth insects to pollinate crops. Eggs and milk produce B-vitamins that cannot be found in plants.

MarkB · Jan 29, 2019

Samloyal23 said:
A question I have not seen touched on, how many people do you send? You need to be genetically diverse and have a sustainable population for a colony, but you have limited space on the ship. Also, what about pets and livestock? Do you take Fido? Do you bring a herd of sheep for milk and wool? Even if you find a habitable planet, the chemistry of any plants or animals you find there may not be compatible with human needs.

One option would be to have all reproduction aboard ship and for the first several generations in the colony be via artificial implantation from a genetically diverse 'seed bank' of frozen fertilised ova gathered from across the world.

Going with that option, it would make some sense to go with, and maintain, an all female crew throughout the voyage.

Ryujin · Jan 29, 2019

Legatus_Legionis said:
Has anyone recall/seen "The StarLost" (1973)

According to imdb, it had 16 episodes, with Walter Koenig (Chekov from Star Trek) in 2 episodes.
[video=youtube;UMAi6u4Ps5A]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMAi6u4Ps5A[/video]
They tried to explain how a generational ship might happen, and what might happen generations out.

But with how the "Biosphere 2" project has not been 100% successful to-dated, I still think it will be awhile before we send actual people with finite/reusable resources anywhere.

Well they more explained how a generation ship would go to hell. The stars played characters from an agrarian dome that fell into superstition and religion, forgetting that they were even on a ship at all. Walter Koenig played an alien whose ship crashed into the generation ship, in a few episodes. Keir Dellea, one of the leads, was most famous for playing Dave Bowman (The Starchild) in "2001: A Space Odyssey." The show was typically hokey produced in Canada fare, but not bad for its time.

So yeah, I saw it in its original run

Mustrum_Ridcully · Jan 29, 2019

Eltab said:
NASA sent up a married couple on one of the last Shuttle flights, and made a point of allocating them some time to be alone together with no other pressing duties.
Reports on the results of this experiment were of course not made public. Personally, I would not be surprised to find out "Oops, we relaxed and fell asleep" because it was the only break in their busy pre-programmed week long schedule.

Are you a parent?

Mustrum "I am not, but I know young parents" Ridcully

Tonguez · Jan 30, 2019

Samloyal23 said:
A question I have not seen touched on, how many people do you send? You need to be genetically diverse and have a sustainable population for a colony, but you have limited space on the ship. Also, what about pets and livestock? Do you take Fido? Do you bring a herd of sheep for milk and wool? Even if you find a habitable planet, the chemistry of any plants or animals you find there may not be compatible with human needs.

The calculation has been done by the University of Florida for a space trip of 200 years, (eight to 10 generations) and suggest a minimum number of 160 people are needed to maintain a stable population Apparently that yields 10 potential partners per person and avoids both inbreeding and genetic drift.

However the study also suggest that the number could be halved to 80 if women are asked to wait until after 35 before having children (this increases the gap between generations but increases medical risk from pregnancy)

All crew members would also need to be genetically screened prior to inclusion to ensure no unwanted recessive factors affecting future population health.

The other big issue raised by the study was Infighting which rises in small isolated communities with no way to get 'out' - if one person does wrong how does the community survive any potential conflict and faction-forming

Samloyal23 said:
Even if you are vegetarian, if you are going to build a civilization you will need animals for some things. You may need Earth insects to pollinate crops. Eggs and milk produce B-vitamins that cannot be found in plants.

meat can be grown from real animal cells and fortified with b-vitamins, so as long as they have a viable source of animal cells preserved then they can keep growing viable meat (lets ignore the likely soylent developments)

Having a beehive colony on board might be an option for both pollination of crops, honey and 'meat', I wonder too if worms or even microbial sources could be used to develop meat alternatives (apparently the Kombucha scoby is edible though I've never tried it).

Hussar · Jan 31, 2019

Only problem with that is, 200 years won't get us anywhere. When talking about generation ships traveling between stars, we're talking about 2000 years - anything that big would be far, far to massive to accelerate to any appreciable degree of C. Which then means that genetic drift becomes a serious issue. Never minding linguistic drift. What happens when the crew can no longer read their technical manuals or labels on the reactor?

Although, to be fair, insects as a source of protein would likely be the easiest way to go.

Zardnaar · Jan 31, 2019

Hussar said:
Only problem with that is, 200 years won't get us anywhere. When talking about generation ships traveling between stars, we're talking about 2000 years - anything that big would be far, far to massive to accelerate to any appreciable degree of C. Which then means that genetic drift becomes a serious issue. Never minding linguistic drift. What happens when the crew can no longer read their technical manuals or labels on the reactor?

Although, to be fair, insects as a source of protein would likely be the easiest way to go.

Linguistic drift can be minimized with things like audio recordings and dictionarys. They haven't existed for most of the last 2000 years.