Can you Anons help me out? I am working on a sci fi setting and could use some help keeping it some what realistic

Can you Anons help me out? I am working on a sci fi setting and could use some help keeping it some what realistic.

Let's say we have built a generational ship. We are sending it to colonize a star sysytem that long range scout drones have reported has three planets in its "Goldilocks Zone".
From Closest to Local Star to Farthest.
1. Hot desert planet, Poles are habital year round (Think Mohave like climate), while the rest of the planet is most a lifeless wasteland. Note however that the sand sample the rovers collected say the sand is well over 30% gold. Gravity is 1.38 Earth gravity.

2. Garden world. Has two moons and has five major landmasses. One land mass in the southern hemisphere is the size of all the other combined and is 3/5th grassland. The others are covered in forests and jungles. Rovers didn't detect any land fauna larger than a housecat, but all rover were lost within 2 weeks of being deployed. Reasons unknown.
Gravity is 0.89 Earth gravity and atmosphere will need minor terraforming to make fully breathable but is approved for limited human exposure (pretty low oxegen, would be like being on a high mountain.)

3. A Frozen desert planet. Only discovered lifeform is a moss like plant that grows in thermal crags across the planet. These give off huge amounts of Oxygen. Planet has 2.5 time the amount Earth does. Scans have detected large quantities of nuclear materials on it's north pole. Gravity is 1.05 Earth Gravity.

Let's assume it takes 80 years to reach this system with our special Subspace engines and our ship can safely house up to 200,000 colonists indefinitely. Ship can also manufacture basic goods and tools to start developing colonies if provided the resources.


Now how many colonists should be sent for the trip? How do you manage breeding in-route? Which planet should be colonized first?
Any thing else relevant?

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newscientist.com/article/dn1936-magic-number-for-space-pioneers-calculated/
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Sending living people is stupid. Just bottle a bunch of DNA and have the ship reconstitute it into an appropriate population once it lands.

How would you even properly train them though?

About 10,000 is the sure way to have genetic variety, If I remember correctly.

160.

Got a cite for that?

newscientist.com/article/dn1936-magic-number-for-space-pioneers-calculated/

Thanks!

Warning, if you read the article it actually says that this doesn't take into account destructive inbreeding, genetic timebombs, murders or accidental death, etc. It also says that that magic number of people should be okay, but only if the humans rejoin humanity after that period of time.

So, be aware.

Send 200,000 people to garden world. Its only 80 years, just make sure they have plenty to do

I actually gave this thought and went with uploaded human pysches into the ship. They take turns going through an active period of about a life time in a vitual doman before going dormant. When they reach where they are supposed to get to they were to be rebuilt by the ship.

and then shit happened.

Okay, riddle me this. Why would the crew (now perfectly accustomed to their little world) ever leave the ship, except to look for fuel and raw materials?

You know, a generation ship crew deciding not to leave their insular lives is actually an intriguing idea for a story...

With the tech required to even make a generation ship you might as well just freeze your crew with a brain in a jar method and then grow new bodies for them to use once your're a few months away from your destination.

That doesn't even make sense.

Brains in jars are really economical for travelling for long periods of time. If you can grow bodies to fit your preserved brains into you're good to go on all of your travel needs.

Not that guy but in Clarke's "The Songs of Distant Earth" they used embryos that were developed and taught by robots. What's interesting is that it mentions that normal reproduction was quite traumatic for the first generation as they didn't have any cultural experience or family elders to guide them/give support. They also didn't have any religious context as it was removed from the data sent with them.

This was also done in Anderson's "The Fleet of Stars"(and series) where the psyche is copied into a computer and the ship functions as a body with an autonomous android body available to interact with other people. In a related note a more far out example is in "The Golden Oecumene" series by Wright where humans have advanced cyber-bodies and interface directly with technology and can make full and lesser copies of themselves to attend to various things limited by the available memory and computing power of the system they inhabit, simple AI's can also be upgraded into sapience. Another example is in "The Way" universe by Bear where advanced humans have artificial bodies and children are conceived/programed and raised in a simulated environment and create their own bodies when they are deemed viable/adult.

I'd recommend checking out those books for how their settings were constructed and getting a wider source of ideas for the background tech.

I like that.

I like that a lot.

Crew, who by this time couldn't give a fuck about planets and shit, colonize the planet just long enough and with the express intention of fabricating new parts for the ship.

40 years after arriving the ship is setting up pre-fab mining stations of space rocks. And planning to build a new ship.

make sure to read
You would want as many people as you can safely house while accounting for growth-rate during those 80 years, and then reduce the number by 5-10%, since it's worse to have overburdened life-support than a mere 5-10% less people. Are we assuming a minimum of biomodification beyond what we have now? Life expectancy, length of child-bearing years, and (child) mortality rates matter a lot. Genefixing would drastically reduce child mortality rates, could extend child-bearing years, and would increase life expectancy. Do you want those things to change at all from current values in a first-world country? How much? There are some pretty crazy things you can do with future biotech as well, but it might detract too much from whatever it is you want people to focus on.

If your cylinder ship going to be in interstellar space for 80 years, is it axially lit, or are they planning on having it be lit by the star and it has half the surface area taken up by windows? What other objects are in the system? What shields the planets from impacts? There should be a gas giant at least.

Colonization would start by establishing outposts on P1 and P3 for heavy metal extraction, oxygen and hydrogen extraction (I assume you meant water ice on the frozen planet), and fissile material extraction. Orbit might be established around P2 or at a Lagrange point in the P2/moon system. Spend more time looking for reasons the rovers failed. You don't want to be careless. Anyway, liberal use of aerostats is a given on P1 and P3, perhaps P2 for drone carriers.

You said that the frozen planet was in the Goldilocks Zone, but "frozen" makes that questionable. The equator should at least be livable if it's considered in the Goldilocks Zone.

Go for the Garden world first. Set up your agriculture and long term sustainability. This is your new system home, where you can expand your population. (added benefit of being easier on the elderly's bodies, allowing them to be useful longer and maybe make it feel like it was worth it to them.)

Could gather oxygen from the frozen planet and dump it on the garden world to speed up terraforming. Mine the nuclear material for electricity

Not sure what uses the colony would have for gold at first, but with such a large amount readily available, preliminary mining should be done with rovers. We've gotten very efficient at using gold, so suddenly having a lot of it isn't really a huge priority. Food is the main resource they'll need.

Aurora by KSR includes some of that.

Don't want to spoil anything, cause its one of my favorite SF novels (I'm a sucker for generation ships and a spoiler thing) but basically a big ol generation ship gets sent to Tau Ceti, 2100 people (ish) and they have to deal with the hand they're dealt on arrival.

Coolest part: the narrative is written by the ships computer which developed into something of an AI.