How hard would it be to build a self sustaining generation ship with todays technology?

How hard would it be to build a self sustaining generation ship with todays technology?

Middling, hard in many ways but in others not so hard.

>How hard would it be to build a self sustaining generation ship with todays technology?


not hard from a technological standpoint, just ludicrously expensive. like GDP of most western nations expensive.

We would be talking about a ship that is supposed to run perfectly for as much as 500 years and carry within at least 1000 persons with a lot of complex and heavy equipment.

Also fuel for accelerating and decelerating, for all of that mass.

Saying that is going to be hard is a bit of an understatement, we would have to build it in space in the first place and we don't even have the infrastructure for that, so expect it to be a project that is almost like a modern cathedral; it requires centuries to be achieved.

Building one is not the problem. The simple fact is that over time, things break and wear down.

Even with current technology, and in the earth's atmosphere, would you board a sea faring vessel designed to stay afloat, grow its own food, etc for several hundred years?

Most of the Technology is already availabe.
The only things we would need is a means of propulsion, some AI (or something resembling it) managing the ships system and a few people as a Crew. It doesn't need many adult humans on the ship. New humans can be created via cloning, manufactured in artificial wombs.

So, a generation ship doesn't need to be very big.
If we want to, it would take maybe 15 years to manufacture one and cost no more than a dozen aircraft carriers.
Of course, the second and third one would be much cheaper.

The hardest issue would be gravity but if you have something like a giant centrifuge keeping the cockpit still while the rest spins very rapidly, you could probably generate earth like gravity

Space is a lot more gentle an environment than the sea. Wear and tear in a vacuum is essentially nothing,

Technology is already in existence, nuclear pulse propulsion, deep learning AI, cloning/artificial wombs is totally unneeded.

Build the several million ton starship on the earths surface then launch to orbit, refuel in lunar orbit, etc

Not sure if doing something like a low solar oberth burn is worthwhile

> deep learning ai
> already in existence
Right ok. Guess it's in some DARPA blacksite right?

Pretty hard. Keep in mind that you need to maintain 1g in order for people not to become decrepit and blind. This will happen in matter of months.

No. Things like Watson are already pretty good.

There are ever more advanced AI in operation however.... and guess where they are? The stock market of course! Now they are all in a war trying to trick each other with high frequency stock trading and prediction.

You seriously think the military would have done something like that first?

>Build the several million ton starship on the earths surface then launch to orbit

Build it in orbit. MUCH easier to launch smaller units.

Go full kerbal and use jupiter slingshot to "low" sun orbit for maximum oberth. If it can't survive that it better not be meant to go interstellar.
You'll probably need to do maneuvers like that in whatever star system your are going anyway because stopping might be difficult otherwise...

Just read about it, literally not an ai in any sense.

That ain't true
It is vastly easier & cheaper to build on the Earths Surface

Nuclear pulse propulsion gets better the bigger/heavier the ship is, plus you can just build the whole thing out of steel.

I doubt you'd be travelling that slow, with a proper mass fraction to get up to 1-2% the speed of light, an oberth burn around the sun is probably a waste of time.

>use radiation-electricity nanotechnology to create a core to act as a sun.
>Use said core to feed the autotroph population
>Have rooms for breaking down waste
>Regrow it

Huh. If we had a way to get everything into space not particularly hard. Worse case scenario is accidental incest.

>self sustaining

We can't even do that on Earth in a confined place.

>already pretty good

No, not even in the remotest.

Completely impossible
t. Ecologist

Its actually pretty simple

> nuclear engine based on something with a huge half-life (226RN?)
> radiation-resistant chamber with everything needed to cultivate life (oxygen, water, seed, food, tools, knowledge)
> artificial womb and sperm chambers
> some robo-mommies and daddies to assist infants in their early development
> send capsules to every known earthlike planet

With modern knowledge, we could probably build such a thing with ~1 million $ / chamber, so why not build 100 and send them to every known earthlike planet?

You want to polute the whole galaxy?

>Completely impossible
>t. Ecologist
It doesn't have to be a passively self-sustaining ecology.

We can make most of our food using chemically-fed microbes, starting with hydrogen from electrolysis (powered by nuclear reactors) as the chemical energy source, and small amounts of low-calorie vegetables (and maybe some berries) for variety and flavor can be grown at reasonable energy cost with LED grow lights.

I think livestock like chicken, pigs, and shrimp are a good idea, because the waste of supporting them is something that can be cut in lean times. It gives margin in the food production system.

>with todays technology
> artificial womb and sperm chambers
> some robo-mommies and daddies
Come on, man.

>mine up rock that contains microbes from the surface of Earth
>load up 1 ton spheres of microbe rock into 500km long railguns on the Moon
>shoot them at incredible hihg speeds towards nearby start systems (intercept trajectories of course)
>continue shooting bug balls at stars until human civilization fails (with luck this step lasts for at least 5 years, one shot per hour)
>in a mere 50,000-100,000 years a swarm of several million balls of rock containing microbes in stasis enters each target star system
>vast majority continue through and eventually encounter other stars, but a few thousand interact with planets and are slowed onto orbits circling these stars
>eventually these objects crash land on icy moons, rocky planets, gas giants, etc.
>the ones that land on icy moons eventually sink down into the ice and encounter warm enough conditions that the microbes reanimate and continue eating rock. Eventually they reproduce and move around enough that they encounter the water outside the rock, evolution takes over and through many generations they begin to adapt to their new sub-surface ocean habitat
>the ones that land on rocky planets eventually reproduce and spread into the surrounding rocks and eat those too, and if Earth is anything to go by, they eventually spread across the entire upper few kilometers of the lithosphere of that planet, limited in depth only by temperature
>any that land on habitable worlds will likewise spread and evolve and eventually photosynthesize and become more complex

>tfw this already happened and is how life began on Earth
>tfw we are advanced rock bacteria
>tfw it is almost time to begin the cycle anew

A few memedrives and itll be infinity and beyond.

The ship it's self is not the hard part. It's mostly hard due to the effects of being in space on people and carrying supplies. Also carrying fuel that won't kill someone.

Impossible, as we don't know how to come even remotely close to 100% recycling.

That's true but you also have fewer, virtually no resources at your disposal. On an earthbound ship you could scavenge for drift wood, get food, collect energy to desalinate water, etc etc etc. In space all you can do is collect energy, and maybe not much of that if you get too far away from the sun.

Why would you do this when you could fire Von Neumann nanostarships capable of deceleration and universal assembler self-replication at the nearest dozen stars without having to wipe out the Earth to do it?

We (or rather, the AI that takes over from us) should be capable of doing this in ~50 years.

I don't think it's all that far fetched. There are a few "minor" things that need solving, but its possible.

It will never happen though, as the effort to even start proof of concept testing is too fucking much and way too fucking expensive in the world as it is now.

What if we built a ship in likeness of the earth's self sustaining cycles? The earth is able to sustain itself in part because of the sun right? So what if we built a ship that took advantage of processes like that of the earth's in order to build a seemingly perpetual ship? It would have to be organic to a certain degree however.

Then why not create a ship that functions on solely energy? The earth is a pretty useful blueprint for something of that nature if you think about it. If we could replicate the earth's self sustaining mechanics in a vehicle, imagine how far we could go as a species.

Modern Ships aren't designed for that, It is feasible to do there just is no factor that would make that more viable than returning to harbor every few weeks or getting another shipment of supplies.

Vry hrd

Micrometeors & unfiltered sun radiation.

Because you don't have a sun on the long cruise to another Solar system

Fusion would make it a hell of a lot easier, but it is possible with fission.

>space is a vacuum
Hehe meme

>This guy works at Biosphere 2

"W..We fucked up, guys."

Why not have a lot of bikes that are used to generate energy?

literally impossible, same for the next 10.000 or so years.

why not "simply" drill a long tunnel into one asteroid, set it into rotation and knock it into a gravity assist around the sun and gain delta v at the perhelion with some nukes? would be cheaper than any build from scratch?

ahem orbital mechanics are a bit more complicated than navigating on a 2d plane with one center of gravity far below.... one accidental fart at the apoapsis in the wrong direction and things go very wrong very fast

Just build a rotating cylinder.

Asteroids would probably go flying everywhere when you try to rotate it fast enough to provide gravity.