Generation Ships--- Can we build one now?

MarkB said:

Further than what? We're having a discussion, not citing sources.

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If we are just having a conversation then why do you need to ask for my qualifications?

If you want to dismiss extremely difficult engineering challenges as just routine legwork, feel free.

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Considering that we already have to sort those extremely difficult engineering challenges before even creating the Generation ship it seems odd to worry that we have not solved those extremely difficult engineering challenges yet. Thats just a circular argument.

Shasarak said:

Considering that we already have to sort those extremely difficult engineering challenges ...

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It would be anything but routine, mechanically, the challenges can be insurmountable. My qualifications are that I am an Engineer. A lot of people want to put the cart before the horse in this discussion.

Hussar said:

2. The exploration done on earth was not really done out of "curiousity". It was done out of necessity/search for resources. Whether you want to talk about those coming across the land bridge to North America, or Magellan, it doesn't really matter. No one explored the continents nor colonized those continents because they wanted to know "what's over there". America and Australia were dumping grounds for malcontents and convicts as well as giant sources of wealth.

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Maybe that is true for Europe and on the other hand in the South Pacific humans were exploring fine before Magellan was born.

dragoner said:

It would be anything but routine, mechanically, the challenges can be insurmountable. My qualifications are that I am an Engineer. A lot of people want to put the cart before the horse in this discussion.

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Take fusion power for example. Thats a pretty hard engineering problem until we solve it. And we need something like fusion to have enough energy for a 1,000 year trip.

Why stand around wringing your hands about how hard fusion power is? That would be a different thread.

Migration =/= exploration.

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As far as enforcing population controls on Earth goes, well, the jury is still out on that. Every first world nation currently has birthrates far below replacement. It appears that as countries become wealthier, their birthrates drop. The only western countries currently with a positive population growth are ones with fairly high immigration rates - the US, Canada, and a couple of others.

Japan, on the other hand, is due to lose half its population in the next thirty years. As are many European nations. And, population growth world wide is slowing as countries are becoming wealthier overall.

IOW, the system tends to balance itself without the need for enforcement. Mostly because we have such a massive abundance of resources.

Again, the problem isn't instituting controls. It's that you are instituting controls for the next thousand years. Pointing to real world cultures doesn't apply. No one chooses to move to repressive regimes and then chooses to force their decedents to live in those repressive regimes while choosing to force their decedents to never, ever change those repressive regimes.

And, as far as "we'll die when the sun expands", well, that's 5 BILLION years in the future. If we survive as a species for 5 billion years (that's about 10 times as long as pretty much any other species) which is wildly optimistic, I'm pretty sure that we have other options by that time. Heck, that far into the future, moving the Earth further out into the Solar System is an option.

Shasarak said:

Take fusion power for example. Thats a pretty hard engineering problem until we solve it. And we need something like fusion to have enough energy for a 1,000 year trip.

Why stand around wringing your hands about how hard fusion power is? That would be a different thread.

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How so? The topic of discussion is "can we build generation ships yet?" If we're discussing exactly how far off we are from doing so, how can the basic technological requirements for making them a reality be off-topic?

MarkB said:

How so? The topic of discussion is "can we build generation ships yet?" If we're discussing exactly how far off we are from doing so, how can the basic technological requirements for making them a reality be off-topic?

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Discussing the basic technological requirements for making them a reality is not off topic. Trying to shut down the discussion because engineering a fusion reactor is "hard" is off topic in my opinion. Fusion power is not even some kind of fake science like talking about FtL drives. Complaining that we should not even discuss Generation ships because we have not developed Fusion power yet is ridiculous.

MarkB said:

How so? The topic of discussion is "can we build generation ships yet?" If we're discussing exactly how far off we are from doing so, how can the basic technological requirements for making them a reality be off-topic?

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They aren't off topic.

Much of the recent thread has focused on the sociological view of it, but the technological sphere is full of fair points.

Broadly - no, we could not build such a ship at this moment. If nothing else, we don't currently have a drive system that would do the trick. We have started using small ion drives on occasional probes, but those aren't up to snuff for moving entire cities of people yet. And that's ab out what we see for a lot of the technologies and systems that we'd need. We have *started* on most of it, but so much is not yet mature technology. This, however, is a far cry from the situation when writers started considering generation ships. So, with a little more time and focused effort, reality could catch up.

Shasarak said:

Discussing the basic technological requirements for making them a reality is not off topic. Trying to shut down the discussion because engineering a fusion reactor is "hard" is off topic in my opinion. Fusion power is not even some kind of fake science like talking about FtL drives. Complaining that we should not even discuss Generation ships because we have not developed Fusion power yet is ridiculous.

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I thought you disliked strawman arguments. You're the one who mentioned fusion in the first place, and nobody's suggested that we shouldn't even discuss the topic.

MarkB said:

I thought you disliked strawman arguments. You're the one who mentioned fusion in the first place, and nobody's suggested that we shouldn't even discuss the topic.

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So then put forward an argument.