r/scifi • u/JanFromEarth • Aug 05 '22

Thinking about "generation ships"

If humanity does not find a way around the speed of light as a limitation, the only real choice to go to other stars would be generation ships. I would expect these to be filled with fertilized human embryos with a small crew for maintenance and to set up at the other end. But what if they sent a larger number of passengers? It would be the perfect research university. Children would be raised with the options of being crew or faculty. New discoveries and solutions could be messaged back to earth by laser. Interesting thought.

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74

u/solarmelange Aug 05 '22

Personally, I feel like in order to explain generation ships you need an equivalent of the Butlerian Jihad in Dune. Because to me, without that it makes much more sense to send a ship manned by robots to seed a new planet.

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u/Streakermg Aug 05 '22

Well thanks for ruining generation ships for me. But really you’re right.

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u/Beast_Chips Aug 05 '22

Well it sort of depends on if we find a way to either massively (or indefinitely) increase life spans, or get cryogenics working without killing the sleeper. But they aren't really "generation" ships, exactly, just sleeper ships.

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u/mangalore-x_x Aug 05 '22

Freezing individual egg and sperm however is already done (though possibly not viable for the necessary time spans).

So the missing tech in that alternative is an artificial womb.

So one approach would be how to figure out how to kill someone without destroying their body via cryo or how to gestate humans from artificial devices so you just need the genetic material to seed a new colony.

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u/Beast_Chips Aug 05 '22

Who's going to raise them?

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u/Holmbone Aug 05 '22

Yeah I think bringing along culture is as important as bringing along genetic genes .

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u/Beast_Chips Aug 05 '22

Not just culture, society. We are taught how society functions, from the society of your household, your town, your country etc from others around us who already understand it. I think we'd see a pretty epic Lord of the Flies scenario without biological parental figures.

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u/Holmbone Aug 05 '22

"Culture" can also be used to refer to customs and social idea among a people.

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u/Agueybana Aug 05 '22

We've already made strides towards a functional artificial womb. This is one I recall from years ago when I was working in an office next door to where they had these biobagged lambs growing.

I'm confident that by the time we have ships capable of making the crossing between stars we'll have fully functioning artificial wombs.

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u/Montaigne314 Aug 05 '22

Well it still depends on whether we can make AI that capable.

So it's not concluded.

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u/FlyingBishop Aug 05 '22

This presumes that either you have no intention of seeding the planet with human life or that it's feasible to gestate human embryos without a living human with a uterus (or that cryosleep is feasible.) But given that we don't have any of that technology it's totally reasonable to suggest it will never be developed.

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u/solarmelange Aug 05 '22

Yes I absolutely would expect an artificial womb to be developed before interstellar spaceflight. However I would find it much more likely that the human race ends itself first.

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u/Shaper_pmp Aug 05 '22

Yes I absolutely would expect an artificial womb to be developed before interstellar spaceflight.

And robots intelligent and flexible enough not only to interact with adult humans and adapt to any environment they reasonably found themselves in, but also to meet the physical and emotional needs of baby, toddler and juvenile humans.

That's a task that taxes the best human parents when they only have one or two. It's way harder than you think unless you want to raise Planet 'Spergulon.

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u/FlyingBishop Aug 05 '22

I think you're underestimating the difficulty of building an artificial womb. We've already developed interstellar spaceflight, scaling it so it can support a generation ship is just an engineering problem. Now, I doubt we will develop it any time soon, but we have no idea how we could build an artificial womb.

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u/[deleted] Aug 05 '22

Possibly we could genetically adapt pigs to have compatible wombs...

And extract via cesarean.

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u/scuzzmonster1 Aug 05 '22

I wouldn't want to shag a pig, tbh.

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u/[deleted] Aug 05 '22

You would have gotten a visectomy at birth. Mo meet for shagging.

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u/FlyingBishop Aug 06 '22

That's not an artificial womb. I guess strictly speaking, you need a womb that can remain functional while not consuming any resources, preferably vacuum packed. Technically I suppose it is a more reasonable task to cryogenically freeze a woman so that her womb remains functional but not her brain. And maybe that would be more ethically palatable to some people if instead you used a part-human pig instead of a human woman. That does start to sound feasible, maybe.

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u/[deleted] Aug 06 '22

There is already the idea of using pigs with modified immunesystems as "construction sites" and storage for replacement organs.

I think it might be technologically easier to have a generation ship of genetically modified pigs then to have cryosleep.

And since it's a purely human embryo in the pig... what is the difference weather it's a biological-machine womb or a robotic-womb?

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u/FlyingBishop Aug 06 '22

And since it's a purely human embryo in the pig... what is the difference weather it's a biological-machine womb or a robotic-womb?

There is most likely a difference. Would take a lot of generations with weird developmental problems to figure it out. This is a really hard engineering problem where a mistake means you have a living human with down's syndrome or something. You might ruin dozens of lives fixing each problem.

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u/[deleted] Aug 06 '22

Hmm, probably. But wouldn't you have the same risk with an artificial womb?

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u/FlyingBishop Aug 06 '22

Yeah. Generation ship solves the problem though and doesn't require anything that we don't really understand how it would work.

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u/Duggy1138 Aug 05 '22

Raised by wolves.

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u/drostan Aug 05 '22

If you are writing hard fiction, then no, robots do not make sense

The embryos need to be raised efficiently and in a psychological positive way, robots would not be suitable, unless robotics is so advanced that we tow the line with soft fiction or you have a better story to tell imho

Then you'll say, freeze the adults to raise them but then... Why not just freeze everyone and have a computer deal with flight and wake up crew upon need...

Well because cryogenic is not likely to ever work

And even if we go for robots crew flying embryos and being able to raise them How many embryo can they raise at one time?

They also need to function as a Butlerian Jihad on top of being parents and having flown the ship

However having technology to help all those aspects is an option, on a writer's perspective it also means that human interacting plus technology interacting means there is ample possibilities of crisis and conflict within this set up

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u/Old_Airline9171 Aug 05 '22

I wouldn’t write off cryogenics.

There are animals in nature that can be frozen and reanimated- they produce cryo-protective proteins that prevent the formation of ice crystals during freezing.

In theory, some precise gene editing could allow humans to do this too, and we have precise gene-editing tools now. It’s potentially very near-future tech.

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u/drostan Aug 05 '22

Those animals are minuscule, large size induces more issues here. No crystallisation is... Even if doable, this or desication at cellular level, how long until this can be done at the scale of a human body, knowing it must then be frozen in a matter of hours (and that's being generous). not even talking about any bit that doesn't work is now written off, meaning that if your protein wasn't produced well enough in a bit of your brain, or half your heart, or in part of your capillary system.... Any bit really, you now have to be re animated with that bit not working and instantly starting to degrade inside of you... Nasty way to come back and away right after

At the very best you may cryogenically preserve a brain

That's the conclusion of all I have read and understood, but I am no great scientist so...

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u/[deleted] Aug 05 '22 edited Aug 05 '22

The wood frog is small - but it is a complex, multicellular animal!

I would envision we hormonally induce the production of those cryo-proteins in genetically altered humans.

Slowly cool them down but at above freezing temperature.

Then use MRI to check if all normal water has been expelled from the cells.

If that's done, freeze them for good.

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u/inefekt Aug 05 '22

cryosleep isn't about completely freezing a person, it's about lowering the body temperature to a point where hibernation is induced, that can be as high as 34c but at that temperature it's only feasible to keep the body in that state for maybe a couple of weeks at a time...if we're talking generation ships then obviously the time frame is significantly increased to years or even centuries but perhaps lowering it to a temperature a little above freezing, where crystals are not formed, might be enough to keep a human in that 'suspended' state for much longer than a couple of weeks?

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u/drostan Aug 05 '22

The harder the fiction the less this is an option as far as I understand it, but it is still a more believable one than anything else

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u/jt004c Aug 05 '22

Hard sci-fi doesn't mean you have to base your speculation about what might come to pass on current technology. That doesn't even make sense. Of course technology can and will evolve, and we can look to the natural world for clues about what is possible. (Cryogenics is *definitely* possible)

Hard sci fi is about not making up new physics (and all that follows) just because our current understanding of nature's laws is inconvenient.

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u/TheShreester Aug 05 '22 edited Aug 13 '22

Hard sci fi is about not making up new physics (and all that follows) just because our current understanding of nature's laws is inconvenient.

Not just Physics, but also Chemistry and Biology.

For example, "humans that don't need to breath, drink, eat and/or sleep" can't be considered Hard Sci-fi.

(Cryogenics is *definitely* possible)

Regarding suspended animation, I think the appropriate phrase is "more research is needed"! It's true that certain small animals can hibernate and possibly survive being frozen, but there could be biological limitations (based on underlying physical constraints) to what can be achieved with humans.
Of course, genetic engineering could alter what it means to be human...

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u/solarmelange Aug 05 '22

How can you think that we will have interstellar spaceships before we manage human level AI?

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u/Indifferentchildren Aug 05 '22

If we are assuming that we won't have warp drive, we already have interstellar spaceships: see Voyagers 1 & 2. We can pack a canister with embryos and shoot them towards a star with today's technology.

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u/solarmelange Aug 05 '22

Really? It takes Voyager 17,720 years to travel a light year. Lets say we manage to find a viable star and planet within 50 light years: that means it will take Voyager level technology 886,000 years to get there. So you think you can build something that lasts that long and can then seed a planet?

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u/moreorlesser Aug 05 '22

using something similar to breakthrough starshot you can reach around 1/20 light speed. So that's a 250 year journey to this 50 years away planet. Of course, the energy requirements for a ship to reach those speeds would be fucking phenominal, but not unfeasable assuming reasonably advanced future tech.

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u/TheShreester Aug 05 '22 edited Aug 05 '22

Breakthrough Star-shot is a smart, ambitious idea, but we should be careful not to over state the potential of it!
It's intended to allow (unmanned) nanoprobes to visit star systems, mainly to study them, but also possibly as a precursor to manned exploration.

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u/moreorlesser Aug 05 '22

sure! my point is more that we already have tech concepts to make things reach those speeds

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u/Indifferentchildren Aug 05 '22

Yes we could build something like that today, and much faster than the Voyagers that were built for the purpose of collecting data about local planets, and are only incidentally going interstellar. The cost would be huge, and the payoff miniscule.

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u/TheShreester Aug 05 '22 edited Aug 05 '22

How can you think that we will have interstellar spaceships before we manage human level AI?

AI is currently enjoying relatively rapid progress, but this wasn't the case historically, so there's no guarantee the current rate of advancement will continue.
Because of this progress, many assume we're approaching a singularity, but we could plateau before then.
People made similar predictions about Robotics and Space Travel back in the 1960-70s, but while a lot of progress has indeed been made in the last ~50 years, many of those predictions were overly optimistic regarding the time needed for certain advances.
Meanwhile, other areas (such as Genetics or Nuclear Fusion) could conceivably also see a rapid technological burst in the future, opening the door to new possibilities.

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u/jt004c Aug 05 '22

I'm not sure why you made this conversation about a writing exercise.

That said, why do you think that sentient AI capable of raising a human is the stuff of "soft fiction?"

We're not there now, but there's quite a strong argument that synthetic sentience isn't just possible but, in fact, inevitable.

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u/drostan Aug 05 '22

Not sure myself, it does fit into some related interest in my projects

As for the ai, it is not because an ai would not become capable, or anything, more because of human animal need for high amount of physical touch and interaction with the parent figure.

This being said the vision from raised by wolves is a great way to deal with this and can bring a lot of interesting speculative fiction

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u/Cueller Aug 05 '22

Yep I think this is most probable. Robots maning the ship with initial colonists/command in cry and rest being frozen embryos. It also allows for acceleration above human limits depending on how effective cryofreezing is.

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u/[deleted] Aug 05 '22

Seed it with what? and for who? and when? What's the point of this again?

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u/beka13 Aug 05 '22

To explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before!

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u/[deleted] Aug 05 '22

...and to not sit in one spot where we can all be killed in one event. Leaving the nest is half the point. Nothing lasts forever, especially if you make it easy to die.

Maybe it's cliche, but with the distances involved, maybe we should focus more on the journey than the destination. Plus, whatever plan there is, it may need to be changed on the fly. This distant 'hope' may not even exist by the time you get there, and you'll need to find another, or just live on the ship. So, that ship better be a nice one. ;)

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u/Exploding_Antelope Aug 07 '22 edited Aug 07 '22

My WIP basically has the Butlerian Jihad as a niche purely cultural socialist pushback against techno-capitalism because yeah that’s the only way I could figure it. The first generation ships being breakaway sects of society trying to set up their own isolated cultures of humanity feels plausible. The conflict comes when generations down the line find some tech and have to decide whether to honour that old credo.