The human population fell to fewer than 10,000--possibly under one hundred--in the last Ice Age [1][-1]. There were almost certainly bands of fewer than 1,000 individuals who had to migrate for generations.
> life will get boring and pointless fast
Maybe on v1000. The first tens could expect a constant war footing against entropy and the unknown.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/h...
[-1] Possible counterfactual: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44818098
Nature produces a truly unlimited amount of novelty, especially if you’re moving through it.
I'm sure it was a lot of fun, in the Dwarf Fortress sense.
The double exclamations signal that an object is on fire in DF.
Medieval builders built Catherdrals that they knew wouldn't be finished in their lifetime.
Heading off on a multi-generation mission with no guarantee of success is not for most people. But there are billions of us. I'm sure they would easily find enough people to crew a mission.
Having said that I worry about the sustainability of these projects. If these are not indefinitely sustainable on arrival, then future generations are doomed to die out with no hope of survival. I’ve no problem with a carefully judged risk, there are no guarantees in life, but there has to at least be a reasonable chance.
The whole "cruel to children" aspect is flawed. It only self-identifies individuals with a world view that is very earth-centric. We need a societal system where such a position is seen as an honorable one. That's why I liked the Antarctica bit of the submission. We ALL need to learn and change.
What makes an object unique then is the specific configuration of the particles that make up that object. This configuration is a form of information.
Fortunately, we already know how to transmit information at the speed of light; no new physics required. This then reduces the problem to transporting the ‘printer’. No generation ship required. You need something that harvests particles locally and can receive a stream of data with what to print. You can bootstrap this, send a tiny particle harvester/printer that can print a slightly larger printer, etc.
That said, we definitely don't have the means to 3D print even relatively simple tissues, last I checked we are still limited to structures thin enough to be kept alive by oxygen diffusion.
One of my open questions on this topic is: given we can cryopreserve small tissue without the freezing-damage problem, why can't we do a repeated process of:
1. cell culture tissue sheets that are ~1mm (or whatever) thick
2. cryopreserve each sheet
3. then assemble those sheets, still frozen
4. then thaw out as per normal procedure for cryopreserved organs
Caveat: I have minimal knowledge of biology, this may be a stupid idea for a whole bunch of reasons I don't even know the names of.
Originally developed in-universe when a bunch of immortal cyborgs got bored on a colonization ship & decided to instruct a precursor probe to print a machine that prints a machine that will print their bodies on site. :)
The engenerator technology is completely safe[1] and can't be misused in any way.
It's easier to see why if you think about Fourier transforms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBnnXbOM5S4&themeRefresh=1
TLDW: an infinitely long wave does not (cannot) have any definite location, but it does have a definite periodic wavelength; conversely, a single impulse noise (a shockwave from e.g. a bullet or an explosion) has a definite location (in the direction of motion and at any given point in time) but no meaningful wavelength.
The more you constrain the possibility space of one, the looser the other becomes in a physical sense, not just the information you have about it.
Look into Assembly Theory as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory They already developed some kind of chemical printer for simple molecules.
It also remains to be seen if you can 'print' a complex biological object, like a human.
There's also no point in talking what can be done today, since such a project would take quite a while, both to assemble and get anywhere close to destination. Just because we cannot do it today doesn't mean it shouldn't be considered as a possible approach since we might get there in 30-50 years, which is nothing for the scales of time we're talking about.
Cryo tech is quite primitive, you are fighting to maintain a structure instead of saving its data and rebuilding it later when tech allows. Imagine 3D printing a benchy and freezing it so it stays "fresh" for 50 years (for some potential use at that time), instead of saving the benchy stl file and printing it in 50 years.
Plans for potential human expansion into our galaxy must include potential tech developments, can't block it to the tech that is available today. The way things are going there's no reason to discard full scan and reassemble of a full human being, in some future. Let alone moving consciousness on other type of more resilient hardware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_(physics)
A particle spins on any number of axes
> You need something that harvests particles locally and can receive a stream of data with what to print
You cannot obtain that data because this spin is impossible to measure)
You assume a human is the same as a chair? seems like a stretch
Do you? I already said what I have in mind. particles are not indistinguishable and "scanning" objects without destroying them not possible in this reality
The most likely way to move in the Universe is through something along the lines of von Neumann probes, which can be small machines sent at relativistic speeds across the whole galaxy, setting up these "spawn" points. Even at 10% speed of light it would take 1 million years to get such probes in strategic points to cover most of our galaxy.
All it takes is one short-sighted group to break something important to protest real (or perceived) injustice.
It already happens in the real world all the time.
I mean think about what we do all day. We stay in our little rooms, pushing some tasks we're told to do, and cherish our friends, spouses, and kids, and then we die without seeing 99.9999% of the spaceship we're already riding (Earth).
Like do you really care how long it takes to get somewhere if it subjectively happens in the blink of an eye? Would you even necessarily be likely to lose your own peer group if you all spent significant time in hibernation travel between meetings?
Many colonies, research stations and logistic hubs have been established with fast and dependable sub-light ships traversing between them.
On such a ship most of the crew is in hibernation at any one time, with just a couple people taking shifts from the hibernation to stand a watch during the flight.
Even with the ships reaching high sub-light speeds, the voyages take decades from outside perspective. But that might not be a problem! If you are one of the crew it might seem like a couple weeks as that's how long you flight crew shift took. If you are a passenger - it takes not time at all, you just go to hibernation & wake up at you destination!
So as long as you are a spacer or part of the wider community (e.q. space scientists who either study a wonder of space or are in transit to another one) this is fine - you will meet you friends again in a couple flight, in days or weeks of subjective time.
But if you befriends someone outside of the community or decide it was enough and settle down, you might never see them again.
Can really recommend the novel - has much more than this topic & quite a few other surprises. :)
Or those people of the past who would for generations not leave their village/county doing the same thing generation after generation.
(small case in point - back in USSR we were happy that we were born in that wonderful country USSR and not in those decadent dangerous inhumane capitalist societies of the West where people were forced to struggle everyday to avoid becoming one of those numerous hungry homeless filling to the brim the dirty decaying cities of the West which they were showing us on the Soviet TV while we were supposedly on a mission to build better/higher/ideal society consisting of a new better entity "Soviet man" - "The Soviet man was to be selfless, learned, healthy, muscular, and enthusiastic in spreading the communist Revolution." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Soviet_man - note how the first 4 qualities work for interstellar, and they are pretty common among various other ideologies and religions, and the specific target for the 5th - for the enthusiasm - is just adjusted according the specific ideology or religion, and "spreading human civilization" wouldn't be even half-bad like some others out there)
Bur personal and in private, it was very different.
>But personal and in private, it was very different.
Deep down unfortunately the ex-Soviet people, me included, are damaged goods :)
If they did rebel it would probably be more along the lines of reaching the target inhabitable planet and refusing to leave the ship. Just grab enough material to set a new course for the next one and keep going.
The next set of rebels would be the ones who actually fulfilled the mission.
Basically an unhollo combination of Kafka and Truman show, keeping the community stable until arrival. :)