51–60 of 330 posts
I love that most of those designs give bigger houses to people in a spaceship than modern houses in the UK on planet earth. Love the designs, doubt democracy would get them through more than 250 days, let alone 250 years.
> love that most of those designs give bigger houses to people in a spaceship than modern houses in the UK on planet earth Would such a project be particularly volume constrained? > doubt democracy would get them through more than 250 days, let alone 250 years I don't. You'd be selecting for extraordinary individuals and educating them. These sorts of societies propagated for hundreds or even thousands of years in an…
As for democracy "These sorts of societies propagated for hundreds or even thousands of years in antiquity just fine" - I don't know of any that practised the consensus driven democracy that almost all these proposals use. Ant if you're reaching into antiquity then not even normal democracies. Unless you're talking about a Athens with their slaves and adult male citizen population having a vote. In which case sure, I can get behind that but that's not what those spaceship designs propose. They all assume all decisions will be unanimous and no one will ever break the law.
In actual fact history proves the opposite and all exploration and conquest is driven by strict hierarchical organisations and the idea that you can fly a spaceship across light years without a captain who can condemn people to death is laughable.
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> we are never leaving this solar system unless we discover some new physics to get around our speed limitations The winning proposal coasts at 0.01c. Propulsion systems--not the speed of light--and thus engineering, not phsyics, are the relevant limitors.
We're one good new religion away from colonizing the solar system. Cathedrals were built over 100s of years. Imaging just living in a massive one and your whole holy purpose is to survive and thrive and spread. It's entirely reasonable we'd have the will to make it happen, and pretty reasonable we'd be able to build it with planet scale effort, but sadly quite difficult to imagine it surviving even dust impacts for 4…
Whipple shields [1].
I doubt the human psyche is capable of such a voyage while being awake the whole time. Even with all the toys and biomes, life will get boring and pointless fast, producing unfulfilled needs, disorder, conflict and revolt. People can't be ants in a colony working for such a narrowly defined goal through a lifetime, especially not multi-generationally. Our existence is based on constant questioning and revolutions. A…
I mean think about what we do all day. We stay in our little rooms, pushing some tasks we're told to do, and cherish our friends, spouses, and kids, and then we die without seeing 99.9999% of the spaceship we're already riding (Earth).
I doubt the human psyche is capable of such a voyage while being awake the whole time. Even with all the toys and biomes, life will get boring and pointless fast, producing unfulfilled needs, disorder, conflict and revolt. People can't be ants in a colony working for such a narrowly defined goal through a lifetime, especially not multi-generationally. Our existence is based on constant questioning and revolutions. A…
You're on a voyage through space in a big spaceship right now!
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> love that most of those designs give bigger houses to people in a spaceship than modern houses in the UK on planet earth Would such a project be particularly volume constrained? > doubt democracy would get them through more than 250 days, let alone 250 years I don't. You'd be selecting for extraordinary individuals and educating them. These sorts of societies propagated for hundreds or even thousands of years in an…
Are you telling me a country is more constrained by space than a spaceship? As for democracy "These sorts of societies propagated for hundreds or even thousands of years in antiquity just fine" - I don't know of any that practised the consensus driven democracy that almost all these proposals use. Ant if you're reaching into antiquity then not even normal democracies. Unless you're talking about a Athens with their s…
At the point that we're building 60 km spaceships, yes, I think that's a possibility.
> you're reaching into antiquity then not even normal democracies
The further back we go the more consensus-driven small societies get. I'm also reaching back due to familiarity. There are plenty of small island communities that did fine for generations on their own.
> They all assume all decisions will be unanimous and no one will ever break the law
Sorry, I missed this in the winning design. Where does it say that?
> all exploration and conquest is driven by strict hierarchical organisations
If you need to bring an army, yes. I don't think we know how hierarchical Polynesian settlers were.
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Follow up work has shown that result is a statistical artifact/does not replicate [1,2,3]. [1] https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article-abstract/229/1/iya... [2] https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/42/2/msaf041/8005733 [3] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.03.25.586640v1
Are there two proposed bottlenecks, one at 900 kya and another at 70 kya? I'd only really heard about the latter.
I doubt the human psyche is capable of such a voyage while being awake the whole time. Even with all the toys and biomes, life will get boring and pointless fast, producing unfulfilled needs, disorder, conflict and revolt. People can't be ants in a colony working for such a narrowly defined goal through a lifetime, especially not multi-generationally. Our existence is based on constant questioning and revolutions. A…
Polynesians took enormous risks to populate the pacific. Medieval builders built Catherdrals that they knew wouldn't be finished in their lifetime. Heading off on a multi-generation mission with no guarantee of success is not for most people. But there are billions of us. I'm sure they would easily find enough people to crew a mission.
I doubt the human psyche is capable of such a voyage while being awake the whole time. Even with all the toys and biomes, life will get boring and pointless fast, producing unfulfilled needs, disorder, conflict and revolt. People can't be ants in a colony working for such a narrowly defined goal through a lifetime, especially not multi-generationally. Our existence is based on constant questioning and revolutions. A…
> doubt the human psyche is capable of such a voyage while being awake the whole time The human population fell to fewer than 10,000--possibly under one hundred--in the last Ice Age [1][-1]. There were almost certainly bands of fewer than 1,000 individuals who had to migrate for generations. > life will get boring and pointless fast Maybe on v1000. The first tens could expect a constant war footing against entropy an…
Nature produces a truly unlimited amount of novelty, especially if you’re moving through it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Polynesians took enormous risks to populate the pacific. Medieval builders built Catherdrals that they knew wouldn't be finished in their lifetime. Heading off on a multi-generation mission with no guarantee of success is not for most people. But there are billions of us. I'm sure they would easily find enough people to crew a mission.
It would be cruel to their children.
Having said that I worry about the sustainability of these projects. If these are not indefinitely sustainable on arrival, then future generations are doomed to die out with no hope of survival. I’ve no problem with a carefully judged risk, there are no guarantees in life, but there has to at least be a reasonable chance.