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Spacecraft Designed That Could Carry 2,400 People on a 400-Year Trip to Alpha Centauri (livescience.com) 174

Posted by EditorDavid from the star-trek-the-next-generations dept.
They haven't built a spacecraft for travelling to our nearest star system. But "Engineers have designed a spacecraft that could take up to 2,400 people on a one-way trip to Alpha Centauri," reports LiveScience: The craft, called Chrysalis, could make the 25 trillion mile (40 trillion kilometer) journey in around 400 years, the engineers say in their project brief, meaning many of its potential passengers would only know life on the craft. Chrysalis is designed to house several generations of people until it enters the star system, where it could shuttle them to the surface of the planet Proxima Centuri b — an Earth-size exoplanet that is thought to be potentially habitable.

The project won first place in the Project Hyperion Design Competition, a challenge that requires teams to design hypothetical multigenerational ships for interstellar travel.

Before boarding the ship, the Chrysalis project would require initial generations of ship inhabitants to live in and adapt to an isolated environment in Antarctica for 70 to 80 years to ensure psychological wellbeing. The ship could theoretically be constructed in 20 to 25 years and retains gravity through constant rotation. The vessel, which would measure 36 miles (58 km) in length, would be constructed like a Russian nesting doll, with several layers encompassing each other around a central core. The layers include communal spaces, farms, gardens, homes, warehouses and other shared facilities, each powered by nuclear fusion reactors....

This plan is purely hypothetical, as some of the required technology, like commercial nuclear fusion reactors, don't yet exist.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for submitting the article — and for sharing this observation...

"My first thought was that someone read Arthur C. Clarke's book, Rendezvous with Rama and used it as a model design!"

Spacecraft Designed That Could Carry 2,400 People on a 400-Year Trip to Alpha Centauri More | Reply

Spacecraft Designed That Could Carry 2,400 People on a 400-Year Trip to Alpha Centauri

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  • where it could shuttle them to the surface of the planet Proxima Centuri b — an Earth-size exoplanet that is thought to be potentially habitable.

    What do they do if they get to his planet and find out it can't support their life? Do they stay in the system and live their lives in the ship? Do they turn around and return home? Go some place else?

    This is all well and good to talk about sending people to a planet, but thinking it's habitable is far different from knowing it's habitable.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ghinckley68 ( 590599 )

      I would think a 400 year trip is way to long what happens 200 year later when the next bigger faster ship passes them on a 40 year trip.

      • Re:Question (Score:5, Interesting)

        by SNRatio ( 4430571 ) on Saturday August 09, 2025 @04:12PM (#65578010)

        I would think a 400 year trip is way to long what happens 200 year later when the next bigger faster ship passes them on a 40 year trip.

        What happens when the first generation of kids comes of age, notices they never gave consent to be confined to a ship for their entire lives, and decides to turn around? And about that 40 year trip. Bear in mind this math is for a 2000 kg ship, 1 billionth the size of the proposed one:

        https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html

        Now, let's say we want to deliver our canned monkey to Proxima Centauri within its own lifetime. We're sending them on a one-way trip, so a 42 year flight time isn't unreasonable. (Their job is to supervise the machinery as it unpacks itself and begins to brew up a bunch of new colonists using an artificial uterus. Okay?) This means they need to achieve a mean cruise speed of 10% of the speed of light. They then need to decelerate at the other end. At 10% of c relativistic effects are minor — there's going to be time dilation, but it'll be on the order of hours or days over the duration of the 42-year voyage. So we need to accelerate our astronaut to 30,000,000 metres per second, and decelerate them at the other end. Cheating and using Newton's laws of motion, the kinetic energy acquired by acceleration is 9 x 1017 Joules, so we can call it 2 x 1018 Joules in round numbers for the entire trip. NB: This assumes that the propulsion system in use is 100% efficient at converting energy into momentum, that there are no losses from friction with the interstellar medium, and that the propulsion source is external — that is, there's no need to take reaction mass along en route. So this is a lower bound on the energy cost of transporting our Mercury-capsule sized expedition to Proxima Centauri in less than a lifetime. To put this figure in perspective, the total conversion of one kilogram of mass into energy yields 9 x 1016 Joules. (Which one of my sources informs me, is about equivalent to 21.6 megatons in thermonuclear explosive yield). So we require the equivalent energy output to 400 megatons of nuclear armageddon in order to move a capsule of about the gross weight of a fully loaded Volvo V70 automobile to Proxima Centauri in less than a human lifetime. That's the same as the yield of the entire US Minuteman III ICBM force.

        • What happens when the first generation of kids comes of age, notices they never gave consent to be confined to a ship for their entire lives, and decides to turn around?

          There are major ethical problems with generational ships.

          No human being on earth gives consent to be born either, and I personally think it's an analogous situation. I'm currently planning to not have children on the basis of this kind of consideration.

        • What happens when the first generation of kids comes of age, notices they never gave consent to be confined to a ship for their entire lives, and decides to turn around?

          Religion is a tried and true solution used by humanity many times previously to solve just that very same issue.

          Personally though I think that the engineering problems dwarf the social ones. Humanity's longest lived buildings are only a few thousand years old, and they are basically ruins not fit to live in. We have no clue how to build

          • What happens when the first generation of kids comes of age, notices they never gave consent to be confined to a ship for their entire lives, and decides to turn around?

            Religion is a tried and true solution used by humanity many times previously to solve just that very same issue.

            Personally though I think that the engineering problems dwarf the social ones. Humanity's longest lived buildings are only a few thousand years old, and they are basically ruins not fit to live in. We have no clue how to build anything that would stay intact and fit for purpose over 500 years.

            Notre-Dame cathedral was built in 1163, and is still fit for occupation. That's 863 years. But it's had some damage over the years.

            • Re:Question (Score:5, Interesting)

              by martin-boundary ( 547041 ) on Saturday August 09, 2025 @10:04PM (#65578606)
              Notre Dame was partially destroyed multiple times since 1163 and (luckily) repaired each time. It was also redesigned multiple times to avoid imminent collapse. Notre Dame's repair plan was external.

              The wood needed for repairs required tall and straight trees, hundreds of years old, planted in special purpose forests. These forests are mostly gone due to other factors, and this time there was a scavenger hunt across the country just to find enough replacement trees. Previously, suitable old trees were plentiful. In terms of redesign, unforeseen extra buttresses were needed to reinforce the structure centuries later.

              In space, there is no external repair plan and no redesign of unforeseen flaws. The density of particles is too low to collect material outside the space ship. Recycling has limited applicability over many cycles due to degradation. Carrying extensive repair materials also adds unacceptable mass, which reduces the top travel speed and increases travel time by centuries. Increased travel time means increased time for degradation.

              The design needs to be complete and resilient from the beginning, not rely on future cleverness and external resources every 50 years or so to patch up unforeseen problems. Space is hard and we have never attempted something even remotely similar on such a timescale.

              • You are disproving your own initial claim. Since people will be living in the vessel and overseeing maintenance and repairs there is no reason why it should not remain serviceable forever. Notre Dame is still in use because they can fix it -- this defeats your original claim.

    • Compared to all the other engineering challenges packing a few thousand shelf-stable euthanasia modules should be pretty trivial.

    • Re:Question (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Zocalo ( 252965 ) on Saturday August 09, 2025 @02:58PM (#65577868) Homepage
      It's theoretical - more an attempt to get potential ideas that might one day form the basis of an actual ship than anything else. Hypothetically speaking, before you would actually build something this you'd expect there to have been a few technological advances to both shorten the trip and confirm whether or not Proxima Centuri b is habitible or not.
    • They could turn around and come back. The question is what will they come back to? Is earth still habitable? If it is, are "earthlings" willing to share the planet with an 800 year old space faring civilization that probably looks nothing like earth civilizations anymore? If the ship is designed to withstand the rigors of space, they might even chose to not go back, but keep going until they do find a habitable planet. Maybe they don't want to leave space anymore and will use the resources of the planet to

      • We've seen it before, those who left not welcome (Score:4, Interesting)

        by drnb ( 2434720 ) on Saturday August 09, 2025 @03:47PM (#65577972)

        are "earthlings" willing to share the planet with an 800 year old space faring civilization that probably looks nothing like earth civilizations anymore?

        The book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" suggests no. A Pacific Islander population splintered, a group went off to colonize another yet-to-be-discovered island. They were successful and lost contact with the homeland. A very small number of generations later, three?, the group left behind discovered the colonized island. The people living on the island were peaceful and promptly conquered and enslaved by their still warlike relatives only a few generations apart.

        If the ship is designed to withstand the rigors of space, they might even chose to not go back, but keep going until they do find a habitable planet.

        And we saw this with the Pacific Islanders too.

      • The one way trip requires 4.5 million tons of He3 and Deuterium, they'd need to either bring more than double that or find it there, and also remanufacture most of the 2.4 billion ton ship to bring it back to spec for the trip back. Actually though, I'm surprised at how llitle fuel they need for the trip.

    • Talking about 16 generations. Those people if they build a stable society won't have more connection to any planet other than old legend that there used to be a world beyond the spacecraft. They'll be native "spacecraftians", they'll just keep living there. Until their resources are exhausted, that is.

      I personally don't believe the travel is possible with so few people. To support advanced machinery, one needs a population in the several millions and huge mining resources. Otherwise no steel mills, no concr

      • Earth could continuously transmit the latest knowledge to the ship throughout its journey. The signal delay would increase as the ship gets farther away, but Alpha Centauri is only 4.25 light years distant. That's not much lag if the main concern is keeping up on the latest advancements in research.

        2-way communication is still not crazy unreasonable with an 8.5 year round trip delay.

        The folks on the ship would have to put a lot of effort into education to be successful. I think the bigger issue is the et

        • Earth could continuously transmit the latest knowledge to the ship throughout its journey. The signal delay would increase as the ship gets farther away, but Alpha Centauri is only 4.25 light years distant. That's not much lag if the main concern is keeping up on the latest advancements in research.

          Also there entertainment programming would be only 4 years behind.

      • To support advanced machinery, one needs a population in the several millions and huge mining resources. Otherwise no steel mills, no concrete, no microchips. Also no engineers, medical doctors, university professors without a large enough population to pick the best.

        So basically we need to turn something like a small moon into our spacecraft?
        Neat! I recommend Deimos. [wikipedia.org]

      • Also, unless their spin gravity is creating 1g, the people that arrive at Alpha Centauri would be quite physiologically different than us - several generations of low-g living would decrease bone density and elongate the body, and then bringing someone ill-adapted to real gravity from actual mass would probably kill them from not having a circulatory system that is used to fighting gravity.

        If they got there and realized it sucks and decide to haul ass back for Earth, by the time they get here they couldn't

    • What do they do if they get to his planet and find out it can't support their life?

      Well, they start terraforming, of course!

      • We've done that ... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by drnb ( 2434720 ) on Saturday August 09, 2025 @03:55PM (#65577990)

        What do they do if they get to his planet and find out it can't support their life?

        Well, they start terraforming, of course!

        It's what the Pacific Islanders did. As part of a colonizing effort, or a survival kit if unintentionally stranded somewhere, they traveled with about a dozen or so plant species that provided sustenance and medicinals. Getting these into cultivation on a new island was a priority after landing.

        Europeans did something similar during their colonization. Select a site to build, turn a few pigs loose in the area. Hell, sometimes they'd drop a few pigs on a promising location with plans to come back in a few years.

        • Yeah OK, sure. Those Pacific Islanders arrived at islands that already had everything needed to support life. They had plants and animals already living there, just not the specific plants that were desired.

          Starting from a completely dead planet, probably with a poisonous atmosphere, is a completely different thing.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by drnb ( 2434720 )

            Yeah OK, sure. Those Pacific Islanders arrived at islands that already had everything needed to support life. They had plants and animals already living there, just not the specific plants that were desired.

            Starting from a completely dead planet, probably with a poisonous atmosphere, is a completely different thing.

            Good thing the interstellar multigenerational space travels have an entirely different level of technology.

            Personally, I think the space travels might do something else Pacific Islanders did. We found an island but its bad, lets keep looking.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by cstacy ( 534252 )

          Europeans did something similar during their colonization. Select a site to build, turn a few pigs loose in the area. Hell, sometimes they'd drop a few pigs on a promising location with plans to come back in a few years.

          That's not a nice thing to say about Virginians!

    • What do they do if they get to his planet and find out it can't support their life? Do they stay in the system and live their lives in the ship? Do they turn around and return home? Go some place else?

      Historically, the Pacific Islander migrations suggest the latter. Go some place else.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Guignol ( 159087 )
      They'd get there, think it's not up to their standards of living, so turn back, to their beloved history books blue planet, and 400 years laters, when finally getting back to earth, they'd have a 'madagascar's penguins' moment "well this sucks"

    • where it could shuttle them to the surface of the planet Proxima Centuri b — an Earth-size exoplanet that is thought to be potentially habitable.

      What do they do if they get to his planet and find out it can't support their life? Do they stay in the system and live their lives in the ship?

      You mean "home"? The so-called "ship" is a self-sustaining mobile colony, making its own cultural choices. They may be interested in exploring said planet, then again, maybe not.

  • They just turn around and come back?

  • Yeah, "designed" (Score:3)

    by paul_engr ( 6280294 ) on Saturday August 09, 2025 @02:51PM (#65577850)
    Bunch of made up oie in the sky shit
  • "Could". I "could" become a billionaire. I could have monkeys fly out of my butt. These are all at the same level of likelihood.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by lurcher ( 88082 )

      "These are all at the same level of likelihood."

      I disagree, we know that billionaire's exist, so that is at least a non zero level of likely. AFAIK, there is no documented case of monkeys flying out of anyone's butt, so I don't think it would be unreasonable to assign a zero level of likely to that.

  • Four hundred years is about 12 generations and 5 to 6 lifetimes. The number of things that could go wrong that have nothing to do with the physical design boggle the mind. Has their design accounted for the inevitable leakage of air and water over time, the potential growth of the population, the effects of radiation on the health and genetics of the crew, the need for artificial gravity, and the numerous other things that need to be considered. Even if all those things could be taken care of, it seems u
    • Aside from the points you mention, I was more concerned with human factors, psychological and psychiatric issues, societal, group dynamics and so on. Basically everyone going bonkers.

      • need for artificial gravity, and the numerous other things that need to be considered.

        Artificial gravity is somewhat provided by centrifugal force due to the rotation. However, the apparent gravity would be linear on the distance from the rotation axis, and there would be Coriolis effects that make the “gravity” behave strangely, especially if the angular rate is high and the radius is small.

    • For me the dead giveaway was it will be powered by fusion. Well, no, there are no working fusion reactors. None, zero. But then after their 80 year trial, maybe it will be available. That is 2 "fusion is only 40 years away" periods.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cstacy ( 534252 )

      Four hundred years is about 12 generations and 5 to 6 lifetimes. The number of things that could go wrong that have nothing to do with the physical design boggle the mind. Has their design accounted for the [....things]?

      Yes, if you read more than just the headline.

  • This ship design presumes technology not currently existing, but does so poorly.

    The tech required for it is not significantly beyond the requirements for:

    1) a solar system based laser to power a solar sail ship, that should be able to travel at 0.5% of the speed of light, enabling travel in less than 80 years, let alone 400.

    2) medical technology to allow humans to live for up to 140 years in a controlled environment like a starship.

    This combination would negate the need for a 'generation' ship, replacing it

    • This ship design presumes technology not currently existing, but does so poorly.

      For navigation it uses Tesla Autopilot, or will about two years after launch ....

  • Anybody can come up with sketch for such a thing, which is what this is. The thousands upon thousands of issues to be solved before the construction of this ship could get going are not even mentioned in the proposal, much less addressed.

  • Not Clarke & "Rama"; O'Neill & "The High F (Score:4, Informative)

    by Zocalo ( 252965 ) on Saturday August 09, 2025 @03:14PM (#65577902) Homepage
    Clarke's vision of Rama in 1973 predates O'Neill's eponymous conceptual station design [wikipedia.org] by one year, but it's a completely different model to this. Rama did not spin for gravity and was (internally) infinite in size, so probably wasn't really anything intended as something actually buildable so much as a fantastical McGuffin to facilitate the plot.

    This design is much more akin to Gerard K. O'Neill's proposal for an *actual* space habitat consisting of two counter-spinning concentric shells to provide spin-gravity, mechanical stability, and increased habital surface area; this is where jms and Harlan Elison got the basic design of "Bablyon 5" from, although the basic idea of habital cylinders in space goes back even further; Hermann Oberth used the idea 1954 and also Larry Niven included the idea in 1970's "Ringworld", but AFAIK O'Neill's was the first actually designed as a potentially viable construct (once suitable tech was available), e.g. calculating that it was mechanically and physically viable, hence the reason the basic design concept is named for him.

  • Anybody want to buy some? These tickets are guaranteed to get you to Alpha Centauri, or your money back. If you should choose to receive a refund after your 70 years on Antarctica, please contact my grandchildren.

  • However long your first crew stays in isolation in Antarctica, those people won't be on the ship, their children, and their children's children will. Just because Great-Granddad did fine, has no bearing on whether the children will "do fine." As every parent knows, each child is unique, even when they have the same parents.

    No, if you're going to get on board this thing, just...do it already. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Whatever happens, you're just going to have to make it work.

    • Genetics.

      Descendants of those that did well in Antarctica isolation are more likely to do well in space isolation than those that did not.

      • Do you have children? Are they like you?

        One thing you find out, being a parent, is that children have a mind of their own. They have very different strengths and weaknesses than you do.

        I have two boys. I handle money well, one of my sons does also, and one does not. I'm an extrovert, one of my sons is an extrovert, the other is not. I'm terrible at art, but both my sons are excellent artists.

        No, "doing well with isolation" is not likely to be a genetic trait.

        • Yes I have children. Like many children, they are similar to myself and my partner in some ways and different in others. I take your point, however children as a general rule are more like their parents than the general population, I suspect many character traits and psychological factors relevant to survival in harsh conditions have at least some genetic component. While nothing is guaranteed, selecting parents that can tolerate in isolated colony with limited space would confer more advantage than disadva

          • Yes, point taken.

            And thankfully, the point is purely academic, because the design is very, very far from becoming reality.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Genetics is important, but "chaos" is equally important. Development has lots of attractors where really small initial differences yield extremely different results. OTOH, most chaotic developments are bounded in their differences. So you may not be able to predict individual differences, but can do better at the population level.

        2400 people is enough that nobody there would know everyone else. That's probably important. OTOH, we don't know anything about designing stable societies in an environment w

  • HOA disputes (Score:3)

    by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Saturday August 09, 2025 @03:22PM (#65577922) Homepage

    Hope your neighbor doesn't build an unsightly fence, or plant a tree too close to your property line. It could get ugly.

  • I already played that game (Score:3)

    by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Saturday August 09, 2025 @03:27PM (#65577928)
    I already played that game [steampowered.com] and so should you!

    Building something like this is a bigger engineering challenge than we're currently capable of, but I think that in time we'll do it. Some crazed rich fool will pay for it and even crazier fools will fight for the opportunity to go along for the ride. It's in our DNA.

  • Only once 'though' changes into 'known' (Score:3)

    by Teun ( 17872 ) on Saturday August 09, 2025 @03:28PM (#65577930)
    Thought to be habitable is not good enough.

  • Its an ambitious idea, but we should build more to be rid of all the useless people.

  • To travel 40 trillion km in 400 years means an average speed of about 3168 km/s. And this ship is 58km long?? let's assume it's 58km x 100m x 100m with an average density half that of water. That gives us a mass of about 290 billion kg. To accelerate 290 billion kg up to 3168 km/s will take about 1.46 * 10^24 joules, or roughly as much energy as everyone on Earth consumes in 2500 years.

    Good luck with that.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dskoll ( 99328 )

      Just read the spec; my mass estimate was low. They're claiming 2.4 billion tons which is 2.4 * 10^12 kg. So I under-estimated the energy almost by a factor of 10; we're looking at about as much energy as everyone on Earth consumes in 20,600 years.

      • Now add the energy it takes to put that mass into orbit around earth to construct the ship in the first place.

        I suppose they're banking on a space elevator.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by HiThere ( 15173 )

          By the time we can build that, we'll be using asteroids and small moons for raw materials.

  • Perfect ... (Score:3)

    by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Saturday August 09, 2025 @05:11PM (#65578108) Journal
    ... for the telephone sanitizers.

  • It will be fun. :-)

  • There is a more realistic way... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ndsurvivor ( 891239 ) on Saturday August 09, 2025 @05:27PM (#65578132)
    Send fertilized eggs cryo frozen, have a massive AI, and a few robots that the AI controls. "grow the humans" when they get there. It may not be possible at the moment, but should be possible in 20 years or so, the ship would be 100x smaller than the one they envision. I don't think generational ships is feasible for a lot of reasons. If they get there, and there isn't a habitable planet, they could possibly re-fuel and go to the next system.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mrbester ( 200927 )

      And after 400 years, they get "grown" and discover they were beaten to the planet by a more technologically advanced people and craft that only took 30 years to get there and launched far later making them essentially second rate citizens that can serve as a slave population to build New Earth for their new overlords.

      Because mankind is essentially a collection of groups who are assholes to each other.

      • Assuming that they are not "beaten" to the planet by future technology that can overcome the currently known laws of physics, I'm guessing that the AI will be the parent/god like figure of the children raised there. The AI will have to be able, I'm guessing, to hopefully structure a more "utopian society" than we are able for many reasons to create here on Earth.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by crow ( 16139 )

      YES!

      I was going to suggest the same thing. The ship could go into orbit around the best candidate planet in the target solar system, then seed it with life to try to get it to optimal conditions before raising humans to live there from frozen embryos. They could send sufficient DNA to eliminate any inbreeding concerns, and not for humans, but all the species introduced. And in many cases, it may be simplest to have a database and synthesize new DNA as needed for each new seed or embryo.

      I imagine sending

      • Right. We can send plant seeds, embryos of Cows, Chickens, pigs, and insects. What to send is beyond my area of expertise but you get the idea. I was also thinking of a way to communicate. It seems like a 10m disk of an LCD type of thing, one that can pass or block light, could be placed between our sun and the target planetary system at a distance where it could block or pass all of the light of our sun. It may only be able to do morse code, but that would be something. Maybe they could carry a

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jeremi ( 14640 )

      I have my doubts about an AI's reliability over the course of 400 years. Even if the hardware holds up, by the time the ship gets there, the AI may moved on to different plans than the ones its creators had in mind :)

  • If you read much science fiction you will have seen a lot of stories about interstellar flight like this. And there are all kinds of solutions, many of which involve hibernation or cold storage of the crew while some kind of AI handles the navigation and ship systems. Usually it goes haywire in order to generate drama.

    Sometimes there's a rotating set of human skeleton crew that gets awoken to make sure things are going okay. In the novels there will be all kinds of tension associated with that, or the ship

  • What do we want? Faster than light travel!

    When do we want it? It's irrelative!

    (Sorry)

  • The classic problem with a generation ship isn't engineering, it's biological reversion to the mean.

    You pull 400 crew from the brightest, best qualified of the 8 billion people on Earth. Their children will be smarter than the average human, but not nearly as smart as their parents. And the third generation will be dumber still as the average intelligence and competence ebbs toward the overall human average.

    Can a team of essentially random people plucked off the street keep an interstellar spaceship in good

    • Re:Generation ship (Score:5, Interesting)

      by careysub ( 976506 ) on Sunday August 10, 2025 @02:51AM (#65578968)

      The classic problem with a generation ship isn't engineering, it's biological reversion to the mean.

      You pull 400 crew from the brightest, best qualified of the 8 billion people on Earth. Their children will be smarter than the average human, but not nearly as smart as their parents. And the third generation will be dumber still as the average intelligence and competence ebbs toward the overall human average.

      This is an imaginary phenomenon. It does not exist. What really happens is that the founder effect -- a real thing -- establishes the genetic norm for the new population which can be quite different in various respects from the original source.

      The heritability of intelligence in adults is about 0.8. It so happens the heritability of height is also about 0.8. If you establish a population with just tall people then the population average will be unusually tall forever barring continued selection against it. The shortest Dinka will always be taller than the tallest Pygmy -- they don't move to some average human population height with time. It is true that if we start a population with people of only the same fixed height (tall), variation will appear in the next generation, and thereafter, until a height distribution will emerge but the mean for the population will remain tall.

      Reversion to the mean is something that only happens with sampling from a data set. It is not a biological phenomenon.

  • In 400 years, empires rise and fall, religions are born and take root, technological revolutions come and go.

    By the 3rd or 4th generation, the inhabitants of this grand spaceship would begin to forget their "great purpose" and start to form their own ideas. People would ascend to power, and displace others. Factions would rise and fight each other for control.

    This ship would become a "Mouse Paradise" that would descend into chaos.

  • We're not going to send humans into deep space to colonize. We're going to send AI instead.

    This is why the aliens will come back and kill us later....

  • But sorry, relativistic propulsion will never take us to the stars.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jmccue ( 834797 )
      I think there was a TV show that took place in the 70s, it was about a multi-generational ship that kind of looked like this. But it was cancelled rather quickly and my memory is rather fuzzy from that time. But this looks rather interesting.

  • A journey like that is better undertaken by a long-range probe. At least that way we could study the planet and (eventually) hear back from the probe.

    • The challenge to this, I think.. is how to communicate over 4 light years. I asked ChatGTP just now, and it gave nonsense. It started by talking about lasers, but I asked it if the light from the sun would drown that out. it said yes. I asked it about my idea of placing a 10 meter disk with an LED type of a membrane that would pass or block light outside of the solar system. I asked it how far the disk would have to be placed from the sun to block out the light to Alpha Centauri, and it said this:
  • If you are waiting for technology you don't have a design. At best you have a place holding sketch. The design of any device requires that *all* the elements be accounted for. The drive system is going to be highly dependent on details of a fusion reactor that can't be known because no viable candidates exist. We don't even have anything that works but needs a predictable sequence of refinements to be viable. Volume? Mass? Fuel Consumption? These all vary wildly depending on what assumptions actu
    • I think it could be done with existing fusion designs. I think you are right though... just dreaming up something that might happen in the future. I mean... why not just dream up warp engines that get us there in a few days?

  • The habitable parts of the ship would have to be rotating to provide artificial gravity. But what would wear and tear be like after 100 years? 200? Can we even build a machine to last 400 years? How can we launch such big parts and get them into space? And I can not imagine being stuck on a ship for your remaining lifespan. Would AI be used to educate the crew?

  • We can't get a base on the Moon, the planet is becoming uninhabitable for the life as we know it, yet some waste time on boring science fiction that's absolutely worthless. Facepalm yourselves to death, please.

    We have a shit-ton of equally useful designs in at least a thousand other sci-fi projects, most of those vastly more interesting to read than this one. The last one I read about was even coming the other way around for 400 years.

    We've already had a working spaceship simulator, built form SS Structural

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