A colony ship's crew

[SMJB]

Alright, I've been kicking around this idea for a while. You know how one of the ideas for interstellar colonization is to send out a ship full of fertilized ovum that'll be grown in artificial wombs and raised by robots once the ship reaches the destination (and sets up some sort of habitat for human occupation, one hopes)? Well, it occurs to me that if the robots are intelligent, intuitive, and human enough to raise human children, there's little point of sending humans in the first place. So (assuming robots being human enough isn't the case) what if we sent a human crew of, say, thirty or so adults that would then raise the children?

So, what sort of crew are we looking at? What do they do for the intervening decade or three to keep from going stir crazy? I have some ideas, but want to see what y'all come up with.

The ship I plan on them using is basically a Valkyrie ship with a 250m habitation ring, but which is also assisted with a laser-pushed solar sail during the acceleration phase and a magnetic sail during the deceleration, because antimatter is expensive in this 'verse.

[Jerry the Vampire]

The point of sending people Is to spread humanity so it's less likely for us to become extinct.

[Simon_Jester]

That is your opinion. Others might not share it.

With respect to SMJB, it's at least credible that (with massive supporting automation) thirty people could raise enough children successfully, who would raise enough children, who would raise enough children, etc... to get a working colony going. Finding thirty people who can cooperate well enough to spend ten years without going crazy might actually not be that hard, either- that's getting up to the size of traditional hunter-gatherer bands, which were fairly stable and functional. You'd want to lock them in a room together for a few years in Sol system to make sure they're compatible, but it's doable.

What would they do for fun? Good question. Play tennis? Read from the masses of literature and stories and news that's being beamed to them via comm laser from Earth? Spend eight hours a day playing Counterstrike? Write the Great Interstellar Novel? No idea. Depends on what kind of people you recruit, and honestly you'd probably want many different sorts of people on the crew, to avoid having all your kids grow up under exactly the same sort of parent.

[Broomstick]

So, what sort of crew are we looking at? What do they do for the intervening decade or three to keep from going stir crazy? I have some ideas, but want to see what y'all come up with.

I'd suggest the crew being majority female, since women are the bottleneck on future reproduction. On the other hand, you don't want men to be too much of a minority. Say, 20 women and 10 men.

Bank lots of sperm. And eggs. Or frozen embryos. The two parent + extended family model is the classic human method, but there's no reason you have to restrict the gene pool to 10 men and 20 women.

As for keeping from going nuts: there is maintenance to do, cross training, cooking, prep for landing at some point, education of children, music, art production (probably mostly computer based art due to space and material limitations), athletics of some sort (you need to stay healthy on a trip like that), talking, card games, sexual intercourse...

[Eternal_Freedom]

With only thirty crew, embryos/eggs-and-sperm are a must, thirty people isn't enough of a gene pool.

Plus, this does all rely on having a target you can reach in one generation. If it takes longer than that your problems multiply considerably.

[Broomstick]

30 is a large enough gene pool for a few generations, especially if they were genetically diverse to start with. The problem with taking 2-3 generations is that you wind up with people who lack experience in living on a planet. That could be a detriment.

I suppose you could have the interstellar ship "park" for a generation then set out again with a new crew of 30 to settle another world. But that would be another story, wouldn't it?

[Eternal_Freedom]

True.

[SMJB]

In the OP I already stated that they will be bringing a large supply of sperm and eggs with them, and fake wombs to boot.

[Broomstick]

In that case, it might be more important to have diverse age among the crew as well, from newly adult to (at the start of the voyage) middle age. Normal human societies have a large range of ages and maintaining a normal society as a foundation for the new colony is arguably important.

[Simon_Jester]

For multi-generation journeys* it is really appealing to look into some kind of suspension/hibernation technology. Sure, it might take fifty billion dollars and take decades to develop the tech, but we're talking about that kind of cash outlay anyway before you can even think about interstellar colonies. It gives the bioscientists something to do while the plasma physicists frantically try to figure out how to build a compact fusion reactor or whatever.

So picture the following: the ship carries genetic material for like 50000 racially diverse and genetically desirable people (so that you can just randomly produce kids from a huge sample of parents). It carries the artificial wombs for... I don't know, 1000 kids at once, though not all that capacity is likely to be in use at once in the early generations.

It carries a crew of, say, 100 people, who form five twenty-person crews, each of which is responsible for a "shifts" of ten years. During the voyage, each crew spends about ten years awake and forty in cryogenic suspension. This also provides redundancy, since in a pinch you can thaw out the next shift's engineer and ask him to stand two watches, if yours has a heart attack.

At the destination, the entire crew is thawed out and take on the responsibility of childrearing plus whatever exploration and construction tasks cannot possibly be delegated to even relatively smart machines. They raise the first crop of babies (100 adults suggests no more than a few hundred children) until the eldest hit the age of about... 10-15 (at which point they can start helping in the rearing of more children), and so on. At some point the population of the colony reaches a level where reproduction via 'unskilled labor' methods starts to take over from the artificial wombs, but use of the artificial wombs and genetic material on the ship would still probably be encouraged, as would surrogate-mothering of babies conceived from the genetic material on the ship. Genetic diversity is important after all.



*(Which seem rather likely; we will probably be able to send a colony ship to Alpha Centauri at 0.05c, taking 80 years to get there, a lot more than 80 years before we develop the technology to do it at 0.2c and take 'only' 20 years to get there. The colony still gets there faster if you start sooner)

So, what sort of crew are we looking at? What do they do for the intervening decade or three to keep from going stir crazy? I have some ideas, but want to see what y'all come up with.

I'd suggest the crew being majority female, since women are the bottleneck on future reproduction. On the other hand, you don't want men to be too much of a minority. Say, 20 women and 10 men.

As noted, extensive use of reproductive technology is assumed for this plan- the thirty people aren't there as breeders, they're there to raise the huge number of children being conceived by artificial insemination in petri dishes and carried to term in artificial wombs.

[SMJB]

It would be rather nice to be able to freeze these people and wake them up at the destination--but short of genetic engineering, is there any theoretical method for that scientists consistently believe would work?

[Simon_Jester]

To be fair, genetically engineering people to go into hibernation might actually turn out to be easier than building faster starships.

Basically, we run up against a hard limit- for realistic starship propulsion in the foreseeable future, trip times are so long that you really want either a working generation ship, life extension, or a hibernation system so the crew can sleep in shifts. The core concept of having a small crew alive to raise a huge number of children is actually fairly sensible if you can make artificial wombs work properly- the problem is simply that we're very unlikely to see interstellar voyages happening in less than 20-30 years of time, which really starts to push the limit of how long a single adult crew can run the ship and still be functional to raise the children at the destination.

[Jerry the Vampire]

I have seen a few theoretical suggestions for suspended animation but no practical ones anytime soon.

[SMJB]

Well, the good news is that this ship isn't launching "anytime soon", so if a majority of scientists can agree that the concept behind it is sound and at least theoretically practical, that should be good enough.

[Nitrophage]

Full-on freezing the people is not gonna be easy, maybe not even possible, for several reasons (put simply, beings such as ourselves are made mostly of liquid, and complex machines tend not to work so well when you change their state of matter But cryogenic temperatures may not be necessary. Many mammals (read ''very similar to us on a small scale'') hibernate, and while in animals hibernation length is limited by fat storage a simple stomach tube could solve that. What's more, cooling the body without getting near freezing has been used short term in medicine for years proving that the same basic principles apply to humans

So let's think about applying this. Assume that a future hibernation system can reduce metabolism to 1/10 of normal. Take a starship with average speed of 5%C. Finally, assume a 10 light year trip (expecting a true earth like planet in that distance is very optimistic, but my guess is you'd have a fair chance of finding somewhere at least as liveable as Mars). This gives you a total ageing of 20 years, fairly tolerable with a young crew and good medical technology. Of course you'd want to alter these assumptions to fit your own universe, but I think the basic concept stands, at least for short journeys. Just remember relativity if you go much faster than this.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Full-on freezing the people is not gonna be easy, maybe not even possible, for several reasons (put simply, beings such as ourselves are made mostly of liquid, and complex machines tend not to work so well when you change their state of matter But cryogenic temperatures may not be necessary. Many mammals (read ''very similar to us on a small scale'') hibernate, and while in animals hibernation length is limited by fat storage a simple stomach tube could solve that. What's more, cooling the body without getting near freezing has been used short term in medicine for years proving that the same basic principles apply to humans

As I understand it, modern cryonics vitrifies the body, which is cooling it to a low temperature without freezing through a gentle process and use of blood-replacing chemicals. Obviously we would not even attempt such a voyage without first demonstrating that cryonic preservation/hibernation/resuscitation is viable.

[Irbis]

What would they do for fun? Good question. Play tennis? Read from the masses of literature and stories and news that's being beamed to them via comm laser from Earth?

Why beamed? Modern laptop can hold months of videos worth on 1 TB drive, or hundreds of games each capable of providing weeks of entertainment. Even today, I can fill 10 laptops with enough entertainment for 50 people for a decade, give it 10 years of hard drive and compression advancement and you can quite possibly do it with just one.

As for games, as much as I like CS and Team Fortress, competitive games (as opposed to cooperation ones) might not be very good idea in small, closed environment.

So picture the following: the ship carries genetic material for like 50000 racially diverse and genetically desirable people (so that you can just randomly produce kids from a huge sample of parents).

And here, the story dips onto dystopian 'who exactly is desirable and who decides it' level?

To be fair, genetically engineering people to go into hibernation might actually turn out to be easier than building faster starships.

How?

I really don't see building new, non-existing in nature mechanisms (so we can't even copy them from DNA of animal that already has it) into something as complex as humans as easy, or even easier than building fast ships. The only way I see genetic engineering helping in travel is by extending human lifespan, which should be considerably easier to do than the above.

[Simon_Jester]

Why beamed? Modern laptop can hold months of videos worth on 1 TB drive, or hundreds of games each capable of providing weeks of entertainment. Even today, I can fill 10 laptops with enough entertainment for 50 people for a decade, give it 10 years of hard drive and compression advancement and you can quite possibly do it with just one.

They might occasionally want to read or see something new, that is not just canned information from ten years ago in their frame of reference? It's not like the cost of the comm system is going to be a major cost of the project.

As for games, as much as I like CS and Team Fortress, competitive games (as opposed to cooperation ones) might not be very good idea in small, closed environment.

Hard to say. It's not like we haven't seen people locked in confined environments do things like play chess, which is a competitive game. I was just throwing something out there.

So picture the following: the ship carries genetic material for like 50000 racially diverse and genetically desirable people (so that you can just randomly produce kids from a huge sample of parents).

And here, the story dips onto dystopian 'who exactly is desirable and who decides it' level?

Eh, easy. You want people with [the equivalent of] an IQ over 120, good physical condition, no obvious and significant genetic disorders or carriers for same. Do a survey of the planetary population, find millions of people who qualify, and choose completely at random. Problem solved.

To be fair, genetically engineering people to go into hibernation might actually turn out to be easier than building faster starships.

How?

I really don't see building new, non-existing in nature mechanisms (so we can't even copy them from DNA of animal that already has it) into something as complex as humans as easy, or even easier than building fast ships. The only way I see genetic engineering helping in travel is by extending human lifespan, which should be considerably easier to do than the above.

We have little idea of how hibernation in humans could be made to work. We can describe it biologically, it violates no known laws, but building it in is going to take a lot of very major jumps in bioscience capability.

The problem is that we have even less idea of how a beam-core antimatter rocket would work. We can describe it physically, it violates no known laws, but building it is going to take a lot of very major jumps in engineering capability.

It's possible, not certain, that hibernation in humans will win the race- say, that we'll be able to genetically alter humans more or less to suit our fancy by 2100, but will still be having trouble implementing lightweight fusion or antimatter reactors.

[Irbis]

They might occasionally want to read or see something new, that is not just canned information from ten years ago in their frame of reference? It's not like the cost of the comm system is going to be a major cost of the project.

Point one - why would they want to read something new? Do people not enjoy Tolkien, written 3/4 of a century ago? Today, on Earth entertainment is such massive avalanche it's impossible for a human to assimilate it all, even just things (games, movies, books) produced in 2013 would need a lifetime to assimilate.

Point two - progress. Canning all data is good idea because your colony will be stuck with gear, Earth will move. Imagine we sent expedition 10 years ago - they would be still using Windows XP, not 3 generations later Win 8. You can send them some patches, but would their computers even run new programs? It's getting close to impossible to find new stuff working on old XP PCs. Another factor - when your ship moves away, bandwidth drops, and you can send slower and slower - while content rises in size and complexity. Single BluRay disc holds as much data as whole small HDD of 10 year old PC - no, canning is better, IMHO.

Hard to say. It's not like we haven't seen people locked in confined environments do things like play chess, which is a competitive game. I was just throwing something out there.

Chess is slow, logic game pitting 2 people. Modern PC competitive games depend on success of whole team, are fast and release a lot of adrenaline. There is reason why gamer base of truly competitive games like DotA or LoL are considered angriest, rudest, worst gaming community out there.

Eh, easy. You want people with [the equivalent of] an IQ over 120, good physical condition, no obvious and significant genetic disorders or carriers for same. Do a survey of the planetary population, find millions of people who qualify, and choose completely at random. Problem solved.

Problem is, 'genetic disorders' can be easily used to exclude quite a lot of ethnic groups depending on how we define them. Hell, even skin colour confers significant advantages in environments it was adapted to.

We have little idea of how hibernation in humans could be made to work. We can describe it biologically, it violates no known laws, but building it in is going to take a lot of very major jumps in bioscience capability.

Yes, but my point was, we have far better grasp on how to double lifespan today. I can only see hibernation ever getting hold if machines doing it take less space than extra supplies for that period instead, which might be a problem.

The problem is that we have even less idea of how a beam-core antimatter rocket would work. We can describe it physically, it violates no known laws, but building it is going to take a lot of very major jumps in engineering capability.

I'd say less than engineering humans to that degree, and that before storm that might erupt on genetic manipulation long before we get there. Starting with obvious ethical question, 'are they still human and is modifying them justified'? Longevity dodges it as convincing people it should be legal is going to be much easier.

[Simon_Jester]

They might occasionally want to read or see something new, that is not just canned information from ten years ago in their frame of reference? It's not like the cost of the comm system is going to be a major cost of the project.

Point one - why would they want to read something new? Do people not enjoy Tolkien, written 3/4 of a century ago? Today, on Earth entertainment is such massive avalanche it's impossible for a human to assimilate it all, even just things (games, movies, books) produced in 2013 would need a lifetime to assimilate.

I don't know, but it seems only courteous to offer them the option. Perhaps they will be curious as to what the greatest hit singles of the year 2150 sound like. I know I am.

Point two - progress. Canning all data is good idea because your colony will be stuck with gear, Earth will move. Imagine we sent expedition 10 years ago - they would be still using Windows XP, not 3 generations later Win 8. You can send them some patches, but would their computers even run new programs? It's getting close to impossible to find new stuff working on old XP PCs.

And a five-minute .mp3 file still runs on both systems.

Another factor - when your ship moves away, bandwidth drops, and you can send slower and slower - while content rises in size and complexity. Single BluRay disc holds as much data as whole small HDD of 10 year old PC - no, canning is better, IMHO.

And a five-minute .mp3 file isn't any bigger than it was fifteen years ago.

Another thing I'd like to point out is that the massive escalation we're seeing today in computer hardware, data storage density, and constant progressive obsolescence of file formats... that's not a permanent part of the human condition. It's something very much present in our lives, which span the transition from paper-dominated information storage in 1980 to cloud-dominated storage in 2020, and Moore's Law applying with a vengeance.

The experience of interstellar colonists in the year 2100 might be quite different. By that point, they may well already have "good enough" computer hardware, such that backwards compatibility actually becomes more important than steadily updating the software to take advantage of new capabilities of the hardware.

Hard to say. It's not like we haven't seen people locked in confined environments do things like play chess, which is a competitive game. I was just throwing something out there.

Chess is slow, logic game pitting 2 people. Modern PC competitive games depend on success of whole team, are fast and release a lot of adrenaline. There is reason why gamer base of truly competitive games like DotA or LoL are considered angriest, rudest, worst gaming community out there.

I don't know, it may be more because of the excess number of teenagers with too much time on their hands playing the game, too. That said, you're not wrong about this as such- I simply do not know.

It would probably be wise to do enough psychological screening beforehand to eliminate this problem, though- a hypothetical crewman who might get mad enough to cause problems over a game of Quake is also one who might get mad enough to cause problems over the last pot of decent coffee on the ship or whatever.

Eh, easy. You want people with [the equivalent of] an IQ over 120, good physical condition, no obvious and significant genetic disorders or carriers for same. Do a survey of the planetary population, find millions of people who qualify, and choose completely at random. Problem solved.

Problem is, 'genetic disorders' can be easily used to exclude quite a lot of ethnic groups depending on how we define them. Hell, even skin colour confers significant advantages in environments it was adapted to.

So set the job of defining it up to a large, broad, international commission. With instructions to exclude only conditions that are actually life-threatening or crippling. If they pop out an answer like "excessively dark skin is a genetic disorder," shoot the commission and start another one; good riddance to the bunch of fucking racists you accidentally put on it before.

[Irbis]

I don't know, but it seems only courteous to offer them the option. Perhaps they will be curious as to what the greatest hit singles of the year 2150 sound like. I know I am.

Voyager transmit rate back to Earth is 160 bps. That's bits per second. Sending 10 megabyte audio file to it would take 524288 seconds, or about 6 days 4 hours of sending nothing but the file. That's assuming we send it with zero errors. Turns out sending signals to a place where they are barely over background radiation level requires you to be slow to be understood.

And a five-minute .mp3 file still runs on both systems.

Except today music is sold in lossless formats such as FLAC, that would severely tax XP computers. Sure, you can convert it, but how long you can do that? For example, both Voyagers cameras were permanently deactivated because all computers that could understand their file formats failed and/or were long since scrapped.

And a five-minute .mp3 file isn't any bigger than it was fifteen years ago.

Pardon me? 15 years ago you had tinny 64 kbit/s files, today you have 192 kbit/s - three times larger and more power-wise expensive. And that's music alone. 15 years ago you were lucky if your "HD" widescreen video file was 640x320 in 65K colours, today standard is 1920x1080 in 16M colours. Back then, you could fit 40 minutes on 650 mb VideoCD, now we can get hours on 25 gb BRDs. You'd need 100-200 VCDs to fit the same video as today.

Another thing I'd like to point out is that the massive escalation we're seeing today in computer hardware, data storage density, and constant progressive obsolescence of file formats... that's not a permanent part of the human condition. It's something very much present in our lives, which span the transition from paper-dominated information storage in 1980 to cloud-dominated storage in 2020, and Moore's Law applying with a vengeance.

Take a look at this graph. The trend isn't slowing, it's rising. Because it turns out better computers = faster and better the aids helping to design next generation of them. And the obsolescence is simple consequence of progress in mathematics and physics, not some evil conspiracy.

The experience of interstellar colonists in the year 2100 might be quite different. By that point, they may well already have "good enough" computer hardware, such that backwards compatibility actually becomes more important than steadily updating the software to take advantage of new capabilities of the hardware.

Compare programs on Xbox 360 and PS3, closed platforms that remained relatively stable. As humans got better in writing on them, the complexity and speed rose. Even if we somehow reach plateau in computing power, software and to smaller extent hardware will continue to evolve. Care to say how you will ship next operating system, twice as efficient as old one, to colonists when even simple song will take days? No, that scenario has 0.001% of probability, IMHO.

I don't know, it may be more because of the excess number of teenagers with too much time on their hands playing the game, too. That said, you're not wrong about this as such- I simply do not know.

That is mostly caused by 18-25 year old people, roughly university age, so technically past teenager stage. That said, 'rage' is primary activity in these games in common opinion.

It would probably be wise to do enough psychological screening beforehand to eliminate this problem, though- a hypothetical crewman who might get mad enough to cause problems over a game of Quake is also one who might get mad enough to cause problems over the last pot of decent coffee on the ship or whatever.

How your screening will determine how someone is going to behave in 10-20 years? Via crystal ball? No, my point was it was best to remove any friction points that might lead to problems down the way, being trapped with building-sized space with X same individuals for years isn't normal environment, so there is no need to potentially aggravate it.

So set the job of defining it up to a large, broad, international commission. With instructions to exclude only conditions that are actually life-threatening or crippling. If they pop out an answer like "excessively dark skin is a genetic disorder," shoot the commission and start another one; good riddance to the bunch of fucking racists you accidentally put on it before.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The problem is, some of these can be life threatening. What are you going to do with adaptations helpful in some parts of the world, harmful in others? Say, resistance to malaria tied to sickle cell anaemia? What if the world to be settled is cold and commission argues for Scandinavian/Russian/Canadian natives accustomed to climate - do we throw it out in name of plurality?

And I still say life extension is easier than programming in entirely new functions, we roughly know how to do it today, we just lack the means to do it.

[Simon_Jester]

I don't know, but it seems only courteous to offer them the option. Perhaps they will be curious as to what the greatest hit singles of the year 2150 sound like. I know I am.

Voyager transmit rate back to Earth is 160 bps. That's bits per second. Sending 10 megabyte audio file to it would take 524288 seconds, or about 6 days 4 hours of sending nothing but the file. That's assuming we send it with zero errors. Turns out sending signals to a place where they are barely over background radiation level requires you to be slow to be understood.

Voyager also has something like a 100-watt transmitter, in the radio spectrum. The planet Earth is not limited in this way; we are perfectly capable of using, say, a giant diode laser, with vastly more power, and which stands out from the background much, much better. Do some actual reading on the potential of interstellar communications via laser before you make up your mind on this subject.

And a five-minute .mp3 file still runs on both systems.

Except today music is sold in lossless formats such as FLAC, that would severely tax XP computers. Sure, you can convert it, but how long you can do that? For example, both Voyagers cameras were permanently deactivated because all computers that could understand their file formats failed and/or were long since scrapped.

Almost by definition, any interstellar colony project will involve a certain amount of long range planning. I would think that providing for computers which remain physically able to communicate with the colony ship would be among the least of our problems.

Hell, we'd want to preserve that capacity anyway, because it's idiotic for us to send these hugely expensive expeditions off into the void without even trying to make provisions for them to tell us anything interesting they might discover. Like "crap, target system is occupied by evil aliens." Or "hey, target system is occupied by friendly aliens, here's their really sweet blueprints for a reactionless drive!"

Retaining the capability for this isn't exactly some kind of bizarre, insurmountable problem.

Take a look at this graph. The trend isn't slowing, it's rising. Because it turns out better computers = faster and better the aids helping to design next generation of them. And the obsolescence is simple consequence of progress in mathematics and physics, not some evil conspiracy.

And you expect this trend to continue indefinitely? Can hardware processing power continue doubling every 12-24 months for the next hundred years without hitting physical limits? Or, hell, us reaching the point where we no longer give a shit about 'improving' the technology?

Just to take a trivial example, by the year 2050 we will be perfectly able to store video formats in a way so indistinguishable from perfection that no sane human being would care about trying to double the pixel density again. I don't care how many times the technology advances after that, there's no fundamental reason for the file formats to change unrecognizably.

Compare programs on Xbox 360 and PS3, closed platforms that remained relatively stable. As humans got better in writing on them, the complexity and speed rose. Even if we somehow reach plateau in computing power, software and to smaller extent hardware will continue to evolve. Care to say how you will ship next operating system, twice as efficient as old one, to colonists when even simple song will take days? No, that scenario has 0.001% of probability, IMHO.

Again, this assumes that we can keep doubling efficiency indefinitely, or that doing so will even be worth the effort. It costs real money and labor to develop a new operating system; if the system does everything a human being could plausibly want,

The point I'm trying to make is that modern computers are very much the opposite of a mature technology- they are growing with incredible speed. We shouldn't automatically assume that this trend will continue for a century or more into the future just because it's such a dominating force within our own lifetimes.

By analogy, think about the speed of transportation from 1800-2050. In 1800 all travel was on foot or horseback, or on a sailing ship. Moving more than about 10 mph was unsustainable. The 1800s saw growing proliferation of railroads and steamships that were just plain faster- by up to an order of magnitude. By the late 1960s, it was routine to fly on jet aircraft at speeds just short of that of sound. People naturally assumed the next step would come soon.

It didn't.

It turns out there are good reasons not to increase travel speed much further than that. It's expensive, intrinsically so, in terms of fuel, energy, and design effort. It hits diminishing returns, because the practical difference between crossing the Atlantic in two hours and crossing it in six is relatively small. Digital communications took out another bite of that, because nowadays if you want instantaneous presence in England you use Skype, and would never consider the cost of buying a ticket on a hypersonic transport subway, even if one were available.

Transportation technology has pretty well matured.

Please at least seriously consider the possibility that this will happen with computer hardware and software. And personally, I predict that any future space colonies will not be launched until a date far enough in the future that we will be decidedly after the point at which computer technology has matured. After the point at which a good computer is the equivalent of, say, a screwdriver: it's a tool whose compatibility with the screws you actually use is more important than having the latest and greatest model that incorporates the new industry standard in torque and grip design.

It would probably be wise to do enough psychological screening beforehand to eliminate this problem, though- a hypothetical crewman who might get mad enough to cause problems over a game of Quake is also one who might get mad enough to cause problems over the last pot of decent coffee on the ship or whatever.

How your screening will determine how someone is going to behave in 10-20 years? Via crystal ball? No, my point was it was best to remove any friction points that might lead to problems down the way, being trapped with building-sized space with X same individuals for years isn't normal environment, so there is no need to potentially aggravate it.

This is true within reason.

It would be comparatively trivial, too, to study this sort of thing by locking people into a room for a few years. Figure out what the indicators are for people who will freak out in confinement, versus people who are stable and play well with their roommates.

The psychological aspects of making the journey practical are right up there with the physical aspects- but probably a lot cheaper to resolve.

So set the job of defining it up to a large, broad, international commission. With instructions to exclude only conditions that are actually life-threatening or crippling. If they pop out an answer like "excessively dark skin is a genetic disorder," shoot the commission and start another one; good riddance to the bunch of fucking racists you accidentally put on it before.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The future equivalent of the UN? Presumably this is a global project, it will be managed globally. If it's not, if some single group actually CAN monopolize access to this spaceship, and does not need the rest of the world's help to launch it... well, at that point we could seriously think in terms of multiple blocs launching their own damn colony expeditions, instead of all needing identical access to the same one and causing a political logjam.

Again, these are not problems harder to solve than building a beam-core antimatter rocket. They're almost childish by comparison.

The problem is, some of these can be life threatening. What are you going to do with adaptations helpful in some parts of the world, harmful in others? Say, resistance to malaria tied to sickle cell anaemia?

We're not taking malarial mosquitoes with us to this new planet, are we?

What if the world to be settled is cold and commission argues for Scandinavian/Russian/Canadian natives accustomed to climate - do we throw it out in name of plurality?

I'd say yes- but require all the adult crew who intend to live on the target planet to pass rigorous arctic survival training.

And I still say life extension is easier than programming in entirely new functions, we roughly know how to do it today, we just lack the means to do it.

This seems entirely credible- either problem may well be solved long before we decide to build beam-core antimatter rockets.

[Broomstick]

And a five-minute .mp3 file still runs on both systems.

Except today music is sold in lossless formats such as FLAC, that would severely tax XP computers. Sure, you can convert it, but how long you can do that? For example, both Voyagers cameras were permanently deactivated because all computers that could understand their file formats failed and/or were long since scrapped.

What? I thought the cameras were disabled for reasons of power conversation. Also, it's not like there's much to photograph in near interstellar space, the power is being used for instruments that actually produce data.

And a five-minute .mp3 file isn't any bigger than it was fifteen years ago.

Pardon me? 15 years ago you had tinny 64 kbit/s files, today you have 192 kbit/s - three times larger and more power-wise expensive. And that's music alone. 15 years ago you were lucky if your "HD" widescreen video file was 640x320 in 65K colours, today standard is 1920x1080 in 16M colours. Back then, you could fit 40 minutes on 650 mb VideoCD, now we can get hours on 25 gb BRDs. You'd need 100-200 VCDs to fit the same video as today.

And yet... we still have people using the plain text format. I think for quite a few things we'll have minimum formats that computers of the future will continue to understand.

Another thing I'd like to point out is that the massive escalation we're seeing today in computer hardware, data storage density, and constant progressive obsolescence of file formats... that's not a permanent part of the human condition. It's something very much present in our lives, which span the transition from paper-dominated information storage in 1980 to cloud-dominated storage in 2020, and Moore's Law applying with a vengeance.

Take a look at this graph. The trend isn't slowing, it's rising. Because it turns out better computers = faster and better the aids helping to design next generation of them. And the obsolescence is simple consequence of progress in mathematics and physics, not some evil conspiracy.

This trend will not continue indefinitely.

It would probably be wise to do enough psychological screening beforehand to eliminate this problem, though- a hypothetical crewman who might get mad enough to cause problems over a game of Quake is also one who might get mad enough to cause problems over the last pot of decent coffee on the ship or whatever.

How your screening will determine how someone is going to behave in 10-20 years? Via crystal ball? No, my point was it was best to remove any friction points that might lead to problems down the way, being trapped with building-sized space with X same individuals for years isn't normal environment, so there is no need to potentially aggravate it.

Funny, though, various agencies have been studying this problem even during our time period. This is not an insurmountable problem.

The problem is, some of these can be life threatening. What are you going to do with adaptations helpful in some parts of the world, harmful in others? Say, resistance to malaria tied to sickle cell anaemia? What if the world to be settled is cold and commission argues for Scandinavian/Russian/Canadian natives accustomed to climate - do we throw it out in name of plurality?

It's not determined how much being "accustomed" to climate is a matter of genetics vs. adaption available to all humans. There have been some dark skinned people of tropical descent who have done quite well in the arctic, one example being Matthew Henson. Rather than trying to determine an exact profile of what humanity needs on a distant world it would be easier just to send a wide variety of traits.

[PeZook]

There's plenty of people in cold climates who are not in tune with them and just compensate with technology. In fact it's probably most of them, beyond things like heightened resistance to local disease and lighter skin color to allow for better use of sunlight to produce important vitamins: the rest is knowledge that comes from living in such a climate since you were a child, and knowledge like "how to dress in order not to get sick during Polish winter" is not necessrily translatable to "how to survive living in alien permafrost for years", anyways.

[Irbis]

What? I thought the cameras were disabled for reasons of power conversation. Also, it's not like there's much to photograph in near interstellar space, the power is being used for instruments that actually produce data.

From NASA Voyager FAQ website: camera was turned off to save power, but is kept that way because system that was supposed to decode images doesn't exist anymore. And anyway, my point was about obsolescence of formats. How many people today would be able to read Laserdisc? MiniDisc? ZIP?

And yet... we still have people using the plain text format. I think for quite a few things we'll have minimum formats that computers of the future will continue to understand.

*shrug* I never objected to that. In fact, by the thing I alluded to be blocked by trying to send single music file for a week I meant text communication. Still, what can you send by it? A short novelette between more important messages?

This trend will not continue indefinitely.

That might be, but to get to a barrier stopping growth in compitung power we would need to hit at once barriers in physics (hardware), mathematics (software) and economy (cost). Also, system loaded on a ship would need to be lightweight, take little space, energy and be resistant to errors. This alone might make latest consumer formats from Earth less viable.

Funny, though, various agencies have been studying this problem even during our time period. This is not an insurmountable problem.

And yet, after 60 years of trying we have little to show for it except for a string of completely debunked models trying to predict various aspects, much less whole

It's not determined how much being "accustomed" to climate is a matter of genetics vs. adaption available to all humans. There have been some dark skinned people of tropical descent who have done quite well in the arctic, one example being Matthew Henson. Rather than trying to determine an exact profile of what humanity needs on a distant world it would be easier just to send a wide variety of traits.

But he had access to all survival gear he could get easily with himself. The question to planner of such starship would be - do we pack extra supplies that might easily add hundreds of millions to ship's launch, or do we try to pick people with genetic advantages that would need less of them?

There's plenty of people in cold climates who are not in tune with them and just compensate with technology. In fact it's probably most of them, beyond things like heightened resistance to local disease and lighter skin color to allow for better use of sunlight to produce important vitamins: the rest is knowledge that comes from living in such a climate since you were a child, and knowledge like "how to dress in order not to get sick during Polish winter" is not necessrily translatable to "how to survive living in alien permafrost for years", anyways.

Yeah, but the technology in this case costs energy to get to orbit, then to another world, and can run out. Even simple vitamin supplements would need to last colonists how long before they can turn their attention from manufacturing of vital colony components to starting less essential chemical production?

Plus, the problem might not be simple skin colour controversy. You want to promote diversity among the colonists? The most diverse genetic code is found in Africans. The more north/south you go, the less diverse DNA. Should we exclude people of say Inuit and Aborigine descent on the grounds their ancestors were a small group with not enough diversity among them?