Just like birds, some species of hoverfly migrate with the seasons. They move to southern Spain in the early autumn and then as far north as Norway in spring (the northern leg is less well understood, and seems to take place over several generations, since each fly only actually lives for a few weeks).
_This paragraph becomes more astonishing as it goes on_
In this context, it is also interesting to think about alignment.
Will people still care about “the mission” 5 generations and billions of kilometers from earth? Will the goal we set even be relevant or make sense at all?
Would you still follow through on a mission Ferdinand II of Aragon sent your grand grand grand grand grand grandfather on in 1498? I probably wouldn’t. These goal would likely not even make much sense to me anymore, or be completely irrelevant in today’s world.
If "the mission" is survive, then yeah probably. I doubt the colonists would hold any loyalty to Earth, but they'ed definitely set up a colony for their own sake.
Also we do have plenty of institutions which have to some degree or another stuck to the mission many lifetimes after their founding. Religious institutions like the catholic church come to mind - obviously much has changed and plenty would argue about how well current behavior matches the founders' intent, but thousands of years later there is still an organization of people working towards a broadly similar goal. Less controversial examples include some construction projects which took centuries, like the Cologne Cathedral.
It should be noted that while none of the original crew would survive the journey, there would be an unbroken chain of people raising new crew members, educating them to the mission, and their adoption of the existing crew's values as their own, and propagating them forward, would be necessary for both their own well being and the group's. There would be little if any outside influence to cause the group to diverge from its mission, and no realistic alternative they would be able to pursue even if they wanted to. There might be ideological drift, but it would probably be a lot less than people who have been free to do whatever they want for the same period of time.
If you're in a middle generation, what's the alternative?
If you're in the middle of a long, slow interstellar journey, there's no chance of a survivable exit from the ship, so reversing course doesn't help you, although it may or may not help your successors. I expect most first wave journeys wouldn't have sufficient fuel to reverse course anyway, so trying to would probably be certain doom for your successors instead of meerly probable doom.
Anybody planning a mission on the timescale of interstellar journies is going to have to accept that they won't have much control of the result. You can pick the destination, and you can provide the initial conditions, and whatever happens, happens. The colony would have to be independent and self-sufficient by necessity, there can't be an expectation of sending spoils of colonization back home.
Even if we got up to 10% of the speed of light, transit time is too long for close coordination.
> Will people still care about “the mission” 5 generations and billions of kilometers from earth? Will the goal we set even be relevant or make sense at all?
That's an interesting point. I have noticed that often ideologically motivated parents don't always produce the same ideologically motivated offspring. They'll have to have very strict rules and some kind of brutal indoctrination to ensure the next generation follows the same path. But the more brutal and severe it is, the more likely it will cause rebellions.
I can already see a tragi-comedic scenario: the new generation overthrows the old guard, slams on the brakes, ship takes years to slow down from almost light speed. Decades later they are finally going back to earth at full speed. Now the next generation looks back at the mess their parents made, rebel, overthrow the old guard, slam on the brakes, decades later they are back flying to the original destination. But not until the next generation decides to bring back the fire of the revolution and turn things around... It all ends with them running out of fuel.
The pessimistic view is that we'll just have to let ChatGPT drive the ship and knock everyone out in cryosleep so they don't mess with the ship.
The odds of the counter revolution deciding to go exactly back on their grandparents original course, out of what is honestly quite a large space is possibilities, seems quite low to me. And even that's assuming the original revolutionaries don't plainly see the cost of turning around; I think it will be pretty obvious. And the first generation of people born in the starship won't exactly be yearning for an Earth they've never known.
Once you're on a starship with just enough fuel to reach the destination, the only real question is what the political organization will be at the end.
> The odds of the counter revolution deciding to go exactly back on their grandparents original course, out of what is honestly quite a large space is possibilities, seems quite low to me
Not if those are the only two known destinations known to support life! Then the choice is binary really - go to destination or go back.
> And the first generation of people born in the starship won't exactly be yearning for an Earth they've never known.
I think they would. I've seen this in second generation immigrants. One would expect they'd completely embrace the new country, culture, environment, but I often see them idealizing or yearning for some mythical version of their old country, even if the parents have already adapted and moved on in the current culture. There are two mechanisms at work there, I think, one is rebellion against the old generation, and also if things are not going perfectly well, yearning for an alternative ("the grass is always greener on the other planet" principle).
anti-aging / life-extension medicine might make a dent in the number of generations you need to get somewhere.
Plus, thinking you need to live near a star, on a planet, is merely a bias for "free" fusion power and gravity that you don't need to maintain.
I'm sure once we get artificial fusion working, the options for living in a community in a big, multi-story, 2 gigatonne, 500k population O'Neil cylinder tethered to a Kuiper belt iceball will look like "a big town with a nightlife, farmland, and a stable climate, with cheap trade and transit options for 'nearby' cylinders"
At which point you can colonize any frozen rock bigger than Rhode Island between here and Wolf 359 'easily' (slowly) whenever you want to move your O'Neill cylinder.
It would require not merely anti-aging, but being able to produce resilient offspring at a later age, otherwise, anti-aging would be detrimental to the project since in the intermediate stages of the journey, non-reproducing adults would be a resource drain.
Or you have your kids early, raise them, and then focus on community tasks (like running the ship) after that.
I don't think I regarded my kind, wise, and friendly grandmother as a 'non-reproducing adult resource drain'... Seems like a cruel way to describe one's golden years.
I think with a lot of these missions, you had the commanders who were idealists, or those seeking fame and fortune, and then you have the all workers who just didn’t have better options.
We’d like to think of our military as volunteer service-people, but the reality is that it’s a pathway out of poverty for many. So how much “choice” to believe in the mission is there?
Remember that we're talking about a generation ship - after a very short fraction of the mission time, everyone will have been born on the ship.
(Does the ship have a class system? Is the ship structured as a commune? Do people "own" bits of it, or is it more of a feudal tenure system? Can you maintain a multigenerational society on a military command structure when there is no external enemy other than the vastness of space? Would you want to?)
I agree with your sentiment, but military service - around the world - is more of an alternative to povery vs. a path out. And we can't build a corporation with a goal more than two quarters out, or a government more than the next midterm election; what are the odds we find 5+ generations of commanders who can stay aligned?
From an American perspective, this is flat-out not the case. The majority of American servicemembers come from the middle three quintiles of income - it is literally a middle-class institution. It IS an alternative means to acquire a college education for the lower middle class, but the bottom quintile, the truly poor, generally do not qualify to serve.
>And we can't build a corporation with a goal more than two quarters out
Yet that is what all the corporations at the top of the market cap lists have done over the previous 30 years. You think Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, TSMC, and a multitude of others only have goals 2 quarters out?
Pharmaceutical businesses where the trials take 5 and 10+ years to bring a medicine to market don't have long term goals? Oil businesses that need a decade to build and cultivate an offshore field. There are so many other examples.
I think the best way for these 100 or 10000 generation voyages is just to bake the motive into something boring like procreation or farming or religion or something.
I think there’s some sci-fi books where humans are doing one of these voyages and our dna is just aliens parking some bitcoin 4 billion years ago.
I wonder if the "generational problem" is a potential reason for the Fermi Paradox. If it is extremely difficult for a species to expend resources on multi-generational projects, then the species horizon is only that which can be spanned in some fraction of a lifetime of that species.
Self-replicating robots are enough to substantiate (motivate? create?) the Fermi paradox, and those can probably be achieved in a reasonable fraction of a reasonable species' lifetime, from foundations that can all be motivated by short term concerns. Humans will be there in a couple centuries, if we don't destroy civilization on the way (but that's the boring resolution to the FP).
I've read the Bobiverse series too :-). Maybe the question then is, do intelligent species have the will to invest the capital and labor required when there is no payoff in those decision-makers lifetimes? I think there are individuals who do, but I think it's an open question if societies can.
Not really human-centric, but intelligent life-centric. Given that the discussion (by this point) was about intelligent life communicating across the universe, ants aren't very relevant, unless you think they're about to start building spaceships.
Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson dealt with a generation ship and the implications of the mission on subsequent generations born on the ship who had no say in signing up for it. Great book!
A good case study for these kinds of multi-generation missions are colonies and outposts. Especially the "put some settlers on an empty island to establish a claim" kind of colony. In that case the most obvious thing to do for each new generation is to continue living there, which aligns well with the goal of the mission. Even if they eventually demand independence the goal that the island doesn't fall into the hands of the French is still met, so that's at least partial success.
The problem comes when it’s time to decelerate the ship. If my great-great-grandfather told me to push this mystical button that’ll change my entire world for my grandchildren ... would I even want to push it? Would my grandchildren even understand what was happening?
Leaving aside the question of automation (does HAL 9000 get to push the button?), there really isn't any alternative. The mission as a whole is fighting the Poisson distribution of encountering random objects in space. The probability of hitting one is very low but not zero. Unless the system is magnetic-ramjet powered, the fuel is finite. Ultimately the choice is between stopping at your predetermined destination or waiting until a rock turns your entire world into a sparse cloud of floating debris. It's like the "what do we do if Earth gets hit by a meteor" question but much, much more acute.
>> These goal would likely not even make much sense to me anymore, or be completely irrelevant in today’s world.
They won't have a choice in destination. The challenge will be maintaining an orderly society on the ship. If that life is all they have then they'll have to deal with it. If they have books, video, or VR of like on a planet they might have any number of reactions...
Perhaps "the mission" is a set of resources and guidelines. To be successful, each generation will need to be able to make meaningful decisions about how to structure themselves, make decisions, manage resources, allocate work, collaborate, and direct the ship(s).
A single generation ship might leave for Alpha Centauri and arrive six thousand years later as a cloud of ships comprising a new nomadic civilization.
> Will people still care about “the mission” 5 generations and billions of kilometers from earth?
Believing in the mission will be akin to people's belief in God/religion these days. You will have "atheists" who will say "You really think there was an Earth?"
>Would you still follow through on a mission Ferdinand II of Aragon sent your grand grand grand grand grand grandfather on in 1498? I probably wouldn’t. These goal would likely not even make much sense to me anymore, or be completely irrelevant in today’s world.
If you are on a ship in the middle of an endless ocean, or interstellar space, with many decades or centuries before reaching somewhere safe then truly what choice do you have?
Depends on to what extent you value continuity of the idea. The idea of returning to Palestine without the precursor of the arrival of the Messiah is a relatively young idea, dating back only to the 19th century. This leaves a pretty big gap between the 613 revolt against Heraclitus to Theodore Herzl. I suppose one could count “next year in Jerusalem” as part of the aspiration. I’m not an expert and could be wrong (or maybe probably I am) but it seems a stretch to me.
>Will people still care about “the mission” 5 generations and billions of kilometers from earth?
How could you not? At whatever point a crew member become disillusioned, it'll likely be too late to turnaround. There'll be a high incidences of interplanetary depression/psychosis as people struggle to deal with leaving the Blue Dot behind, esp. when they see footage from the earth, rainforests, etc. But, nothing counselling won't be able to take care of.
Right now, state propaganda is powerful enough to make young people line up to kill and be killed. So, a little interplanetary panic can be taken care of. In extreme cases, you can have protocols for any crew members who attempts to munity to euthanatized to guarantee the success of the mission.
I enjoyed reading Peter Watts' "The Freeze-Frame Revolution" (and the accompanying online short stories "Hotshot"[1] and "The Island"[2]) about a sublight interstellar ship and its crew - in that example, they have cryogenic storage that allows the same crew that left Earth to live in short spurts and then sleep for eons, but the struggle with disillusionment with the mission is central to the plot.
It also features something like "state propaganda" in the form of the ship's AI which is also programmed to carry out the mission, but it needs the help of the crew. I won't spoil more, but it's one of my favorites!
> people struggle to deal with leaving the Blue Dot behind, esp. when they see footage from the earth, rainforests, etc.
5 generations on, the people on the ship didn't leave anything behind. They were born and will die on the ship, and that will be their baseline. Even in places where life is the hardest here on Earth, in the middle of scorching or freezing deserts, people don't get depressed en-masse seeing nice pictures from elsewhere.
My forefathers were expelled from our lands in the first century AD, and returned just about a century ago. Over 1800 years in exile. During all that time, every generation longed to return, and 1800 times we as a nation prayed for return.
We did it. It took almost two millennia, but we kept our goals and we kept our customs and we kept our values.
Perhaps a similar social structure will help humans inhabit other star systems on generational ships.
If we do, we'll need to have mastered perfect sustainability and 100% recycling. And/or bring a surprisingly large chunk of ecosystem along with us, also living out their generations.
The flies are perhaps more like nomadic humans in the pre-agriculture era. Moving from one seasonal food source to the other.
The Biosphere 2 project was an attempt to see what the smallest self-sustaining ecosystem (that would feed humans and recycle air/water) would be. For a crew of 8 people, the area of plants, crops & wetland covered 3.14 acres.
If I recall correctly, it ran into a number of problems, and they abandoned it when oxygen levels dropped too much. So I don't think this counts as having mastered it.
Made me start wondering if supplies could be picked up in route. The oort cloud (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud) extends most of the way to the next star and presumably extends a similar distance away from the next star. Missions would need to be sent out in advance of the ship to start collecting and making fuel. It could then be accelerated up to catch the generation ship. It seams easily plausible in a science fiction sort of way.
Generation ships can't slow down. They don't have the fuel to slow down and start back up, only to stop at the end.
Also, the supplies should be available in the home system. It costs just as much to send out probes and accelerate the supplies as it does to send the supplies with the ship.
The only exception is that don't have water as fuel, and could travel slowly to the closest icy object, and then do the full burn to speed. It would add years though.
Not necessarily what you really need is enough excess mass of critical elemental components to make up for any gaps in the recycling loop(s) between stars where you can resupply from asteroids.
If there is a need for it, probably, but we'd need to be able to keep people alive for that long first. To date, the longest anyone has been in space has been 14 months. To make it work you'd need to produce food, artificial gravity, etc.
Only a madman would get onto a generation ship on a one-way non-abandonable non-rescuable trip without seeing the proof of a sustainable colony orbiting the earth first.
Given the acceleration and (eco)system bring-up challenges, I suspect it would take more than one generation from "keel laying" to the ship first leaving the solar system. You'd have a generation living in a partly-constructed colony ship while building the rest of it.
You might enjoy Kurzgesagt's video on moving the Sun (and with it the whole solar system) they propose a method that would theoretically let us colonize the galaxy in a reasonable (but not trivial) time frame.
To your exact point though, since we're moving the whole solar system, everyone would be living their whole lives on the/a ship.
It's becoming more and more clear that exceeding the speed of light is not possible. This is almost certainly going to be the only real way to make it to distant locations.
Oil Rigs seem to be, counterintuitively, very good for a bunch of species.
In the Gulf of Texas there’s been ongoing fights between environmentalists (helping species who live under and around the rigs) and environmentalists (protecting the landscape from ugly metal towers).
If it helps species cross oceans where previously they could not, it is also going to be bad for a bunch of species (those that see their niches invaded at the other side of the ocean, or whatever barrier the rigs help cross).
Read the post again, it’s not about the species along the way, but the species living in places that have become open for colonization by the creatures taking advantage of oil rigs for cross-oceanic migration that wasn’t possible before. Kind of like how trans-oceanic navigation turned out great for the Europeans and not so much great for the Native Americans.
My comment wasn't clear - I'm talking about abandoned rigs. So the well is sealed.
Some of the more extreme "environmentalist" (in my opinion extreme) also demand that the ocean floor near the well is scrubbed clean to 'leave no trade' which is good in theory but in practice will wipe out the fish and plant life which has grown up around it.
Instead of saying "wasting", OP should have said "emitting CO2 to the atmosphere", which is the real problem here. Including from refinery flare stacks, and emissions of non-CO2 GHGs like methane from leaks.
Unbalanced fractions aren't so much of a problem as they can be cracked.
To be pedantic, assuming the fuel is used in a combustion engine, there will always be a percentage of the fuel wasted as heat energy. This depends on the thermodynamic efficiency of the engine and various other conditions, of course.
Oil is not part of the dispute parent is talking about. Abandoned rigs provides shelter for a multitude of species and helps marine diversity. On the other hand, they are manmade structures and essentially ocean trash.
There are many types of toxic sludge, the fact that rare organics can live within them not only points to the possibility of life off planet earth, it also hints at potential uses in remediation of human created toxic wastes (binding to heavy metals in wetlands capturing industrial run off, etc.).
The main environmental problem is not the rigs themselves, but the wells and transportation pipeline network of which they were a part. Systems for making sure wells are safely capped at end of life are not robust. Pipelines have similar problems with inspection and end of life closure.
I can't imagine the efficiency that makes such long flights possible in such a tiny form factor. Compared to our drones, it must be multiple orders of magnitude more efficient.
Not sure whether is a matter of efficiency. Efficiency is more about the desired outcome. Insects are small and very low weight. So I would assume wind will give them more push and can carry them for much longer distances even without doing anything on their own. But the price is a lack of control; they have probably little to no influence where they will end up.
Indeed - and let's not forget that these are the ones that successfully landed somewhere - many many others will have landed in the sea, or otherwise died before they could reach a suitable spot.
The ones that landed here hadn't aimed for or planned to find the rig, they were just in the same physical location and found a space to land.
A few years ago in the Mediterranean I observed what initially seemed like an oil spill. Taking a closer look, it turned out to be millions of tiny dead insects. I guess sometimes they do land in the sea?
At the time, I tried to find information about it online, and all I found was an article about it happening on the other side of the Atlantic several years earlier.
There’s a reason most insects have thousands of offspring. Wikipedia states that houseflies have about 5k. Since their population isn’t exponentially exploding, you can assume the chance of reproducing as a fly is something like 1/5000
I'm kind of keen to see if large electric cargo motor gliders might one day become a thing. Traversing great distances via ambient energy harvesting. Maybe even self landing at certain designated airfields to top up on energy and avoid bad weather.
Most of the stratospheric approaches I've seen aren't so much about exploiting low altitude weather phenomenon but rather flying above it. Which of course is exactly what you want for long term remote sensing.
I'm thinking systems that mostly exploit thermals and updrafts, engaging in a kind of bird like automated soaring.
If you look at the nearest survivor to flying insects' ancestors - the springtails - it seems that's been part of their strategy for a very long time. With controlled flight being a much later addition to the basic "getthehellouttahere" reflex.
I suspect that they operate similar to hot air balloons. Land when the wind is going the wrong direction and then maintain altitude when it's going the right direction.
I never knew that insects are capable of crossing oceans...
Seeing close-up pictures of them is always a very humbling experience to me, because it is very obvious how "huge" and complex they are in terms of individual cells. A very visceral experience of Feynmans "there is plenty of room at the bottom" notion.
And then the top comment made me think they must be sending paper documents to these rigs via some light weight flight mechanism. And then I realized I haven’t had my morning coffee yet.
what are the longterm implications of easing the journey of a swarm of insects, does it reduce the attrition, and if so will that have an impact on pollination and predator success at the terminus?
in what less obvious ways does it ease the journey such as energy stowage (in hover flies I presume they depend on their pollen panniers?)
Seasons change primarily North–South, not East–West, right? I think the question is why don't they just go from North American to South America instead of crossing the ocean?
> Just like birds, some species of hoverfly migrate with the seasons. They move to southern Spain in the early autumn and then as far north as Norway in spring (the northern leg is less well understood, and seems to take place over several generations, since each fly only actually lives for a few weeks).
If we go by the article, because there is water between Norway and Denmark. They could cross further south in southern Sweden, but that'd mean they'd have to go around. The Americas is not part of the equation.
Title correction: 'Some flies keep landing on North Sea oil rigs'. I suspect for every fly that lands a very large number doesn't make it. These rigs are the fly equivalent of Ascension.
Just like birds, some species of hoverfly migrate with the seasons. They move to southern Spain in the early autumn and then as far north as Norway in spring (the northern leg is less well understood, and seems to take place over several generations, since each fly only actually lives for a few weeks).
_This paragraph becomes more astonishing as it goes on_
I wonder if that’s how we’ll eventually travel the universe. Generations living their whole lives onboard a ship migrating through space.
In this context, it is also interesting to think about alignment.
Will people still care about “the mission” 5 generations and billions of kilometers from earth? Will the goal we set even be relevant or make sense at all?
Would you still follow through on a mission Ferdinand II of Aragon sent your grand grand grand grand grand grandfather on in 1498? I probably wouldn’t. These goal would likely not even make much sense to me anymore, or be completely irrelevant in today’s world.
If "the mission" is survive, then yeah probably. I doubt the colonists would hold any loyalty to Earth, but they'ed definitely set up a colony for their own sake.
Also we do have plenty of institutions which have to some degree or another stuck to the mission many lifetimes after their founding. Religious institutions like the catholic church come to mind - obviously much has changed and plenty would argue about how well current behavior matches the founders' intent, but thousands of years later there is still an organization of people working towards a broadly similar goal. Less controversial examples include some construction projects which took centuries, like the Cologne Cathedral.
It should be noted that while none of the original crew would survive the journey, there would be an unbroken chain of people raising new crew members, educating them to the mission, and their adoption of the existing crew's values as their own, and propagating them forward, would be necessary for both their own well being and the group's. There would be little if any outside influence to cause the group to diverge from its mission, and no realistic alternative they would be able to pursue even if they wanted to. There might be ideological drift, but it would probably be a lot less than people who have been free to do whatever they want for the same period of time.
If you're in a middle generation, what's the alternative?
If you're in the middle of a long, slow interstellar journey, there's no chance of a survivable exit from the ship, so reversing course doesn't help you, although it may or may not help your successors. I expect most first wave journeys wouldn't have sufficient fuel to reverse course anyway, so trying to would probably be certain doom for your successors instead of meerly probable doom.
Anybody planning a mission on the timescale of interstellar journies is going to have to accept that they won't have much control of the result. You can pick the destination, and you can provide the initial conditions, and whatever happens, happens. The colony would have to be independent and self-sufficient by necessity, there can't be an expectation of sending spoils of colonization back home.
Even if we got up to 10% of the speed of light, transit time is too long for close coordination.
> Will people still care about “the mission” 5 generations and billions of kilometers from earth? Will the goal we set even be relevant or make sense at all?
That's an interesting point. I have noticed that often ideologically motivated parents don't always produce the same ideologically motivated offspring. They'll have to have very strict rules and some kind of brutal indoctrination to ensure the next generation follows the same path. But the more brutal and severe it is, the more likely it will cause rebellions.
I can already see a tragi-comedic scenario: the new generation overthrows the old guard, slams on the brakes, ship takes years to slow down from almost light speed. Decades later they are finally going back to earth at full speed. Now the next generation looks back at the mess their parents made, rebel, overthrow the old guard, slam on the brakes, decades later they are back flying to the original destination. But not until the next generation decides to bring back the fire of the revolution and turn things around... It all ends with them running out of fuel.
The pessimistic view is that we'll just have to let ChatGPT drive the ship and knock everyone out in cryosleep so they don't mess with the ship.
The odds of the counter revolution deciding to go exactly back on their grandparents original course, out of what is honestly quite a large space is possibilities, seems quite low to me. And even that's assuming the original revolutionaries don't plainly see the cost of turning around; I think it will be pretty obvious. And the first generation of people born in the starship won't exactly be yearning for an Earth they've never known.
Once you're on a starship with just enough fuel to reach the destination, the only real question is what the political organization will be at the end.
> The odds of the counter revolution deciding to go exactly back on their grandparents original course, out of what is honestly quite a large space is possibilities, seems quite low to me
Not if those are the only two known destinations known to support life! Then the choice is binary really - go to destination or go back.
> And the first generation of people born in the starship won't exactly be yearning for an Earth they've never known.
I think they would. I've seen this in second generation immigrants. One would expect they'd completely embrace the new country, culture, environment, but I often see them idealizing or yearning for some mythical version of their old country, even if the parents have already adapted and moved on in the current culture. There are two mechanisms at work there, I think, one is rebellion against the old generation, and also if things are not going perfectly well, yearning for an alternative ("the grass is always greener on the other planet" principle).
This is exactly why I found the society of Wool (Silo) fascinating. It explores that brutal indoctrination required for a mission like this.
>that we'll just have to let ChatGPT drive the ship and knock everyone out in cryosleep so they don't mess with the ship.
"Ah! It's good to be awake, Chat! Turn on the outside view so I can see where we are!"
display turns on.. nothing but space to be seen
"Uh, Chat, we seem to be in the wrong place. I can't see the planet we were traveling to!"
....
ChatGPT: "You're absolutely right!"
Kim Stanley Robinson's thesis in Aurora was: no. Subsequent generations would _not_ be happy with their ancestors' choices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(novel)
At some point, some of your ancestors made the choice to migrate and force your family to be born in a different place.
Do you resent them?
No - but I can also, in turn, choose to migrate elsewhere. People born on a generation ship don't have that choice.
anti-aging / life-extension medicine might make a dent in the number of generations you need to get somewhere.
Plus, thinking you need to live near a star, on a planet, is merely a bias for "free" fusion power and gravity that you don't need to maintain.
I'm sure once we get artificial fusion working, the options for living in a community in a big, multi-story, 2 gigatonne, 500k population O'Neil cylinder tethered to a Kuiper belt iceball will look like "a big town with a nightlife, farmland, and a stable climate, with cheap trade and transit options for 'nearby' cylinders"
At which point you can colonize any frozen rock bigger than Rhode Island between here and Wolf 359 'easily' (slowly) whenever you want to move your O'Neill cylinder.
It would require not merely anti-aging, but being able to produce resilient offspring at a later age, otherwise, anti-aging would be detrimental to the project since in the intermediate stages of the journey, non-reproducing adults would be a resource drain.
Or you have your kids early, raise them, and then focus on community tasks (like running the ship) after that.
I don't think I regarded my kind, wise, and friendly grandmother as a 'non-reproducing adult resource drain'... Seems like a cruel way to describe one's golden years.
I think with a lot of these missions, you had the commanders who were idealists, or those seeking fame and fortune, and then you have the all workers who just didn’t have better options.
We’d like to think of our military as volunteer service-people, but the reality is that it’s a pathway out of poverty for many. So how much “choice” to believe in the mission is there?
Remember that we're talking about a generation ship - after a very short fraction of the mission time, everyone will have been born on the ship.
(Does the ship have a class system? Is the ship structured as a commune? Do people "own" bits of it, or is it more of a feudal tenure system? Can you maintain a multigenerational society on a military command structure when there is no external enemy other than the vastness of space? Would you want to?)
>> it’s a pathway out of poverty for many
I agree with your sentiment, but military service - around the world - is more of an alternative to povery vs. a path out. And we can't build a corporation with a goal more than two quarters out, or a government more than the next midterm election; what are the odds we find 5+ generations of commanders who can stay aligned?
From an American perspective, this is flat-out not the case. The majority of American servicemembers come from the middle three quintiles of income - it is literally a middle-class institution. It IS an alternative means to acquire a college education for the lower middle class, but the bottom quintile, the truly poor, generally do not qualify to serve.
>And we can't build a corporation with a goal more than two quarters out
Yet that is what all the corporations at the top of the market cap lists have done over the previous 30 years. You think Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, TSMC, and a multitude of others only have goals 2 quarters out?
Pharmaceutical businesses where the trials take 5 and 10+ years to bring a medicine to market don't have long term goals? Oil businesses that need a decade to build and cultivate an offshore field. There are so many other examples.
Would they know the mission?
I think the best way for these 100 or 10000 generation voyages is just to bake the motive into something boring like procreation or farming or religion or something.
I think there’s some sci-fi books where humans are doing one of these voyages and our dna is just aliens parking some bitcoin 4 billion years ago.
The problem is that you have to un-bake it at the end.
I wonder if the "generational problem" is a potential reason for the Fermi Paradox. If it is extremely difficult for a species to expend resources on multi-generational projects, then the species horizon is only that which can be spanned in some fraction of a lifetime of that species.
Self-replicating robots are enough to substantiate (motivate? create?) the Fermi paradox, and those can probably be achieved in a reasonable fraction of a reasonable species' lifetime, from foundations that can all be motivated by short term concerns. Humans will be there in a couple centuries, if we don't destroy civilization on the way (but that's the boring resolution to the FP).
I've read the Bobiverse series too :-). Maybe the question then is, do intelligent species have the will to invest the capital and labor required when there is no payoff in those decision-makers lifetimes? I think there are individuals who do, but I think it's an open question if societies can.
That's called the percolation hypothesis: https://www.universetoday.com/articles/beyond-fermis-paradox...
I think this is a particularly human-centric perspective on the idea. Do you think ants have the same issue now?
Or, concretely, migrating hoverflies. Interestingly they don't appear to be colonial.
Not really human-centric, but intelligent life-centric. Given that the discussion (by this point) was about intelligent life communicating across the universe, ants aren't very relevant, unless you think they're about to start building spaceships.
Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson dealt with a generation ship and the implications of the mission on subsequent generations born on the ship who had no say in signing up for it. Great book!
A good case study for these kinds of multi-generation missions are colonies and outposts. Especially the "put some settlers on an empty island to establish a claim" kind of colony. In that case the most obvious thing to do for each new generation is to continue living there, which aligns well with the goal of the mission. Even if they eventually demand independence the goal that the island doesn't fall into the hands of the French is still met, so that's at least partial success.
The problem comes when it’s time to decelerate the ship. If my great-great-grandfather told me to push this mystical button that’ll change my entire world for my grandchildren ... would I even want to push it? Would my grandchildren even understand what was happening?
Leaving aside the question of automation (does HAL 9000 get to push the button?), there really isn't any alternative. The mission as a whole is fighting the Poisson distribution of encountering random objects in space. The probability of hitting one is very low but not zero. Unless the system is magnetic-ramjet powered, the fuel is finite. Ultimately the choice is between stopping at your predetermined destination or waiting until a rock turns your entire world into a sparse cloud of floating debris. It's like the "what do we do if Earth gets hit by a meteor" question but much, much more acute.
We are on a generation ship traveling through space …
Obviously you would set up a computer system to rule them all. Disobey and there goes your oxygen.
Kurzgesagt proposes moving the entire solar system, so the generations and kilometers question becomes moot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3y8AIEX_dU
>> These goal would likely not even make much sense to me anymore, or be completely irrelevant in today’s world.
They won't have a choice in destination. The challenge will be maintaining an orderly society on the ship. If that life is all they have then they'll have to deal with it. If they have books, video, or VR of like on a planet they might have any number of reactions...
Perhaps "the mission" is a set of resources and guidelines. To be successful, each generation will need to be able to make meaningful decisions about how to structure themselves, make decisions, manage resources, allocate work, collaborate, and direct the ship(s).
A single generation ship might leave for Alpha Centauri and arrive six thousand years later as a cloud of ships comprising a new nomadic civilization.
Depends if you are the stone facer.
I'm not getting the reference. Did you mean wallfacer?
Yes!
The hoverflies definitely have an advantage in that respect.
They're not consciously thinking about "the mission", just following their instincts.
> Will people still care about “the mission” 5 generations and billions of kilometers from earth?
Believing in the mission will be akin to people's belief in God/religion these days. You will have "atheists" who will say "You really think there was an Earth?"
>Would you still follow through on a mission Ferdinand II of Aragon sent your grand grand grand grand grand grandfather on in 1498? I probably wouldn’t. These goal would likely not even make much sense to me anymore, or be completely irrelevant in today’s world.
If you are on a ship in the middle of an endless ocean, or interstellar space, with many decades or centuries before reaching somewhere safe then truly what choice do you have?
Americans are still largely following the mission of their ancestors ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
An even longer-lasting example: Israel.
Depends on to what extent you value continuity of the idea. The idea of returning to Palestine without the precursor of the arrival of the Messiah is a relatively young idea, dating back only to the 19th century. This leaves a pretty big gap between the 613 revolt against Heraclitus to Theodore Herzl. I suppose one could count “next year in Jerusalem” as part of the aspiration. I’m not an expert and could be wrong (or maybe probably I am) but it seems a stretch to me.
>Will people still care about “the mission” 5 generations and billions of kilometers from earth?
How could you not? At whatever point a crew member become disillusioned, it'll likely be too late to turnaround. There'll be a high incidences of interplanetary depression/psychosis as people struggle to deal with leaving the Blue Dot behind, esp. when they see footage from the earth, rainforests, etc. But, nothing counselling won't be able to take care of.
Right now, state propaganda is powerful enough to make young people line up to kill and be killed. So, a little interplanetary panic can be taken care of. In extreme cases, you can have protocols for any crew members who attempts to munity to euthanatized to guarantee the success of the mission.
My .02.
I enjoyed reading Peter Watts' "The Freeze-Frame Revolution" (and the accompanying online short stories "Hotshot"[1] and "The Island"[2]) about a sublight interstellar ship and its crew - in that example, they have cryogenic storage that allows the same crew that left Earth to live in short spurts and then sleep for eons, but the struggle with disillusionment with the mission is central to the plot.
It also features something like "state propaganda" in the form of the ship's AI which is also programmed to carry out the mission, but it needs the help of the crew. I won't spoil more, but it's one of my favorites!
[1]: http://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Hotshot.pdf
[2]: https://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_TheIsland.pdf
It had been a while since I read Hotshot. Thanks. Freeze Frame Revolution is one of my favorite Watts works, probably right after Blindsight.
It might be best to show lots of videos f mosquitos, leaches, bear attacks, earthquakes, tornadoes, etc.
> people struggle to deal with leaving the Blue Dot behind, esp. when they see footage from the earth, rainforests, etc.
5 generations on, the people on the ship didn't leave anything behind. They were born and will die on the ship, and that will be their baseline. Even in places where life is the hardest here on Earth, in the middle of scorching or freezing deserts, people don't get depressed en-masse seeing nice pictures from elsewhere.
My forefathers were expelled from our lands in the first century AD, and returned just about a century ago. Over 1800 years in exile. During all that time, every generation longed to return, and 1800 times we as a nation prayed for return.
We did it. It took almost two millennia, but we kept our goals and we kept our customs and we kept our values.
Perhaps a similar social structure will help humans inhabit other star systems on generational ships.
If we do, we'll need to have mastered perfect sustainability and 100% recycling. And/or bring a surprisingly large chunk of ecosystem along with us, also living out their generations.
The flies are perhaps more like nomadic humans in the pre-agriculture era. Moving from one seasonal food source to the other.
The Biosphere 2 project was an attempt to see what the smallest self-sustaining ecosystem (that would feed humans and recycle air/water) would be. For a crew of 8 people, the area of plants, crops & wetland covered 3.14 acres.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
If I recall correctly, it ran into a number of problems, and they abandoned it when oxygen levels dropped too much. So I don't think this counts as having mastered it.
They were also quite naturalistic though too, they could have packed more into a smaller area with vertical aeroponics etc to decrease the area.
Made me start wondering if supplies could be picked up in route. The oort cloud (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud) extends most of the way to the next star and presumably extends a similar distance away from the next star. Missions would need to be sent out in advance of the ship to start collecting and making fuel. It could then be accelerated up to catch the generation ship. It seams easily plausible in a science fiction sort of way.
Generation ships can't slow down. They don't have the fuel to slow down and start back up, only to stop at the end.
Also, the supplies should be available in the home system. It costs just as much to send out probes and accelerate the supplies as it does to send the supplies with the ship.
The only exception is that don't have water as fuel, and could travel slowly to the closest icy object, and then do the full burn to speed. It would add years though.
Nomadic humans travelled in a single generation. These flies need to be DTF in order to finish their journey.
Not necessarily what you really need is enough excess mass of critical elemental components to make up for any gaps in the recycling loop(s) between stars where you can resupply from asteroids.
Not sure if this was the intended joke, but that’s how we are already travelling the universe.
If you want to steer the solar system in a new direction, you can use a Shkadov thruster. Why leave home behind when you can just carry it with you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine
If there is a need for it, probably, but we'd need to be able to keep people alive for that long first. To date, the longest anyone has been in space has been 14 months. To make it work you'd need to produce food, artificial gravity, etc.
So maybe we’d see sustainable colonies orbiting the earth first?
We should start with a sustainable colony _on_ earth as a proof of concept. :-)
Nah, not needed. Let's just go straight to Mars. Real men test in production. /s
Only a madman would get onto a generation ship on a one-way non-abandonable non-rescuable trip without seeing the proof of a sustainable colony orbiting the earth first.
Given the acceleration and (eco)system bring-up challenges, I suspect it would take more than one generation from "keel laying" to the ship first leaving the solar system. You'd have a generation living in a partly-constructed colony ship while building the rest of it.
So everyone that founded the US and especially Hawaii?
You might enjoy Kurzgesagt's video on moving the Sun (and with it the whole solar system) they propose a method that would theoretically let us colonize the galaxy in a reasonable (but not trivial) time frame.
To your exact point though, since we're moving the whole solar system, everyone would be living their whole lives on the/a ship.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3y8AIEX_dU
It's becoming more and more clear that exceeding the speed of light is not possible. This is almost certainly going to be the only real way to make it to distant locations.
Here is a great and terrible rabbit hole to fall down:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aniara
There's a movie too with the same name. It does not have good graphical effects, but besides that a very good movie.
What completely and utterly boggles my mind is how these tiny things carry enough energy to make that trip (or each leg). It's absurd.
Same, that was the first time I've heard of this. I mean, it kind of makes sense. "Just" go where flowers bloom. But still, this seems like madness.
Oil Rigs seem to be, counterintuitively, very good for a bunch of species.
In the Gulf of Texas there’s been ongoing fights between environmentalists (helping species who live under and around the rigs) and environmentalists (protecting the landscape from ugly metal towers).
If it helps species cross oceans where previously they could not, it is also going to be bad for a bunch of species (those that see their niches invaded at the other side of the ocean, or whatever barrier the rigs help cross).
If so, I'd say that overall, this is bad.
There's plenty of space not touched by oil-rigs for the open ocean species to live.
Read the post again, it’s not about the species along the way, but the species living in places that have become open for colonization by the creatures taking advantage of oil rigs for cross-oceanic migration that wasn’t possible before. Kind of like how trans-oceanic navigation turned out great for the Europeans and not so much great for the Native Americans.
Can we use raw oil 100% without burning/wasting it?
How much percent recyclable plastic could we extract out of raw oil? Like real recyclable plastic, where it is worth money to do so.
Maybe making more bitumen/asphalt for roads/roofs, or graphite for batteries?
My comment wasn't clear - I'm talking about abandoned rigs. So the well is sealed.
Some of the more extreme "environmentalist" (in my opinion extreme) also demand that the ocean floor near the well is scrubbed clean to 'leave no trade' which is good in theory but in practice will wipe out the fish and plant life which has grown up around it.
> So the well is sealed.
Sometimes. Not all the time though.
> Can we use raw oil 100% without burning/wasting it?
Burning it isn't wasting it, we get a lot of value out of that.
> How much percent recyclable plastic could we extract out of raw oil? Like real recyclable plastic, where it is worth money to do so.
0. There's no such thing as real recyclable plastic, unless you count burning it for heat/power generation.
> Maybe making more bitumen/asphalt for roads/roofs, or graphite for batteries?
Every fraction of oil has some use. But you're unlikely to get perfectly balanced demand for every single thing you can pull out of it.
> Every fraction of oil has some use. But you're unlikely to get perfectly balanced demand for every single thing you can pull out of it.
Oh God not Factorio again
Instead of saying "wasting", OP should have said "emitting CO2 to the atmosphere", which is the real problem here. Including from refinery flare stacks, and emissions of non-CO2 GHGs like methane from leaks.
Unbalanced fractions aren't so much of a problem as they can be cracked.
To be pedantic, assuming the fuel is used in a combustion engine, there will always be a percentage of the fuel wasted as heat energy. This depends on the thermodynamic efficiency of the engine and various other conditions, of course.
Oil is not part of the dispute parent is talking about. Abandoned rigs provides shelter for a multitude of species and helps marine diversity. On the other hand, they are manmade structures and essentially ocean trash.
On the third hand, coral reefs are polypmade structues and essentially ocean poop and excreta.
It's not so much the manmade structures that are problematic, more the associated toxic sludges still residual within structures.
Are there residual devastating toxic sludges in any non-human structures in the ocean
Yes. (Black smokers, white smokers, other discharge points for hydrocarbons .. like tar pits on land, only underwater)
There are also human structures in the ocean that lack toxic sludges.
The volcanic vents are interesting in that, while toxic to most life, separate species have evolved that only live in toxic hot sludge.
There are many types of toxic sludge, the fact that rare organics can live within them not only points to the possibility of life off planet earth, it also hints at potential uses in remediation of human created toxic wastes (binding to heavy metals in wetlands capturing industrial run off, etc.).
Gulf of Texas?
I guess they're talking about "Texas Gulf Coast"? Would be strange to put rigs so close to land though...
This is getting out of hand, now there are three of them!
Aka gulf of Cuba
Islands are good for organisms.
Oil rigs are the worst type of island.
The main environmental problem is not the rigs themselves, but the wells and transportation pipeline network of which they were a part. Systems for making sure wells are safely capped at end of life are not robust. Pipelines have similar problems with inspection and end of life closure.
I can't imagine the efficiency that makes such long flights possible in such a tiny form factor. Compared to our drones, it must be multiple orders of magnitude more efficient.
Not sure whether is a matter of efficiency. Efficiency is more about the desired outcome. Insects are small and very low weight. So I would assume wind will give them more push and can carry them for much longer distances even without doing anything on their own. But the price is a lack of control; they have probably little to no influence where they will end up.
Indeed - and let's not forget that these are the ones that successfully landed somewhere - many many others will have landed in the sea, or otherwise died before they could reach a suitable spot.
The ones that landed here hadn't aimed for or planned to find the rig, they were just in the same physical location and found a space to land.
A few years ago in the Mediterranean I observed what initially seemed like an oil spill. Taking a closer look, it turned out to be millions of tiny dead insects. I guess sometimes they do land in the sea?
At the time, I tried to find information about it online, and all I found was an article about it happening on the other side of the Atlantic several years earlier.
There’s a reason most insects have thousands of offspring. Wikipedia states that houseflies have about 5k. Since their population isn’t exponentially exploding, you can assume the chance of reproducing as a fly is something like 1/5000
The text version of the 'airplane with bullet holes' meme lol
I'm kind of keen to see if large electric cargo motor gliders might one day become a thing. Traversing great distances via ambient energy harvesting. Maybe even self landing at certain designated airfields to top up on energy and avoid bad weather.
A migration of the machines so to say.
Ultra-long endurance drones and balloons for remote sensing are a thing, but this kind of approach doesn't scale well to higher cargo payloads.
Most of the stratospheric approaches I've seen aren't so much about exploiting low altitude weather phenomenon but rather flying above it. Which of course is exactly what you want for long term remote sensing.
I'm thinking systems that mostly exploit thermals and updrafts, engaging in a kind of bird like automated soaring.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-zvzOC8dzA
>they have probably little to no influence where they will end up
sounds like they need to organize into political parties, strength in numbers
If you look at the nearest survivor to flying insects' ancestors - the springtails - it seems that's been part of their strategy for a very long time. With controlled flight being a much later addition to the basic "getthehellouttahere" reflex.
They go high too.
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/06/01/128389587/l...
It helps to be extremely lightweight and small - the smaller you get, the less effort you need to put into just staying aloft.
The smaller you are, the less energy you can store.
Efficiency is a maximization of these ratios.
What happens when we start making drones that small, I wonder.
It's called smart dust. Check Sci-Fi bookshelves.
“Flies Aren’t Real”
Haven’t you noticed fewer birds than you saw when you were younger?
Not to mention they're much more influenced by wind currents.
I suspect that they operate similar to hot air balloons. Land when the wind is going the wrong direction and then maintain altitude when it's going the right direction.
Thermals and wind.
I never knew that insects are capable of crossing oceans...
Seeing close-up pictures of them is always a very humbling experience to me, because it is very obvious how "huge" and complex they are in terms of individual cells. A very visceral experience of Feynmans "there is plenty of room at the bottom" notion.
Here's a paper on the painted lady migration described in the article https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49079-2
I read the title as “Files keep landing…”
And then the top comment made me think they must be sending paper documents to these rigs via some light weight flight mechanism. And then I realized I haven’t had my morning coffee yet.
what are the longterm implications of easing the journey of a swarm of insects, does it reduce the attrition, and if so will that have an impact on pollination and predator success at the terminus?
in what less obvious ways does it ease the journey such as energy stowage (in hover flies I presume they depend on their pollen panniers?)
Birds predate on insects, so presumably some birds follow insects .. is it possible birds started migrating to follow escaping insects??
What is the benefit of crossing the ocean? The lands on both sides are comparable.
Perhaps they were doing it before the Atlantic opened up and they just kept going...
Following the seasons, suggests the article. Insects are pretty temperature sensitive.
Seasons change primarily North–South, not East–West, right? I think the question is why don't they just go from North American to South America instead of crossing the ocean?
> Just like birds, some species of hoverfly migrate with the seasons. They move to southern Spain in the early autumn and then as far north as Norway in spring (the northern leg is less well understood, and seems to take place over several generations, since each fly only actually lives for a few weeks).
No Americas involved.
If we go by the article, because there is water between Norway and Denmark. They could cross further south in southern Sweden, but that'd mean they'd have to go around. The Americas is not part of the equation.
An oily Stephen Maturin.
Title correction: 'Some flies keep landing on North Sea oil rigs'. I suspect for every fly that lands a very large number doesn't make it. These rigs are the fly equivalent of Ascension.
They're a bit small to tag them, unfortunately.