Comments on: Making Aliens 2: The Journey

By: bigdan201

bigdan201 — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 19:18:56 +0000

Any long term space voyage would have to take alot of physical needs into account, but also mental needs too. A generational ship in particular raises dangers of people becoming insane and killing each other, or perhaps just.. mentally inhuman. I’ve read about feral children who grew up and survived without normal human contact, and they act more like animals than humans. They’re physically like us, but they go around on all fours, have little to no language, they won’t even recognize themselves in a mirror.
Onto more essays…

By: Athena

Athena — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 03:42:37 +0000

Indeed, the human factor is the hardest to gauge and modulate. Isolation from context can lead to debilitating hallucinations and fugue states. This may be desirable in vision quests, but not in a de facto fragile starship. I believe LeGuin wrote a short story about this, though I cannot recall its title.

By: intrigued_scribe

intrigued_scribe — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 02:48:55 +0000

Brilliant! The observations here effectively enrich and round out the material presented here, particularly where the weighing of the benefits and drawbacks of extended interstellar travel against each other are concerned. The secondary concern of whether the advantages offered by remaining on an ark ship are superior to those which would be available on one world (which Walden2 astutely brings up) ties seamlessly into the primary issues. Also, an additional deciding factor, aside from the practical, technological and biological issues, the question of how well human beings would take to prolonged confinement prominiently stood out, to me. The pragmatic, inevitable and necessary considerations aside, the article does indeed hint at worlds of possibility.

By: Athena

Athena — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 21:50:35 +0000

Leisurely ark visits would work if they had a lot of resources and could travel very fast. Distances between solar systems are enormous even at a significant fraction of the speed of light.

The lack of windows may have been an effort to decrease some of the dangers (radiation, impacts…). Also, in a very large ship. it might preserve the illusion of a complete world.

By: Walden2

Walden2 — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 03:35:38 +0000

I am all for our Ark residents visiting other worlds and
gleaming resources from them – that to me is the point
of living on a giant spaceship rather than a single world,
that you don’t have to rely on one place for your food
and fuel, plus you get to see and learn about all sorts of
alien planets and can just leave if conditions become
dangerous.

That’s the one thing that really bugged me about Heinlein’s
otherwise really great SF novel Orphans of the Sky: Why
was most of the Ship windowless??

By: Athena

Athena — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 22:22:55 +0000

The article considers some of the points you raised, wait till parts 4-6 of this essay (*smiles*). To address some of them:

This article does not discuss ETI. It focuses exclusively on human efforts and ones in the near future at that, which preclude the fancier flights of fancy. As a corollary of this, a being that could live under Jupiter-, Europa- or Venus-like conditions would not be human by any measure that counts.

You are making the assumption that the arcship has infinite renewable resources, almost certainly not the case. Also, countless natural dangers may lurk on planets — but they also lurk in space (radiation, impacts…)

Needless to say, I’m totally with you about the budget of the space program.

By: Walden2

Walden2 — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 03:37:43 +0000

Why would people who have spent their whole lives in a giant,
enclosed artificial environment in space want to land on and
settle a distant planet, especially when there is no guarantee that
any other worlds could support life from Earth? Nor can we
assume that those travelers would have the means or the
desire to terraform another planet.

Would it not be better and safer to roam the galaxy in a
giant space ark, seeing new places and avoiding potentially
hazardous zones. Being stuck on a single dirty little planet
for life seems boring and even cruel by comparison. Most
humans certainly lack a true appreciation for the wider
Cosmos being stuck on Earth, as an example.

Maybe this is why no ETI have made it clear that they
colonized Earth and the rest of the galaxy: Settling down
on a planet with all its uncontrolable natural dangers is both
unnecessary and so gouche. All the truly advanced beings
of the Universe would never soil their feet/tentacles/pads
with actual dirt and breath unfiltered air.

The other idea of adapting our descendants to live in almost
any cosmic environment also has merit, certainly at least to
ensure our survival and gain a knowledge of alien places that
no spacesuited astronaut ever could. It would be hard for the
galaxy to destroy a being that could live on the surface of
Venus or swims in the Europan global ocean or float in the
clouds of Jupiter, or dwells in space itself.

Personally I think that all these ideas will be surpassed by
our technological advancements, the kind that will create Artilects
and rearrange the Sol system into something more useful for
such intelligences.

Just because humans can barely conceive of how to do such
things and seem to inherit a rather primitive fear of the unknown
and those more powerful than us does not mean it has not already
happened somewhere or that our descendants will make them a
reality some day – especially when the galactic parameters change.

After all, we know that in just a few billion years Sol will make life
in the inner planetary system unbearable, so hopefully long before
then somebody has decided that the space program is in need of
a budget increase for conducting a mass exodus. Or maybe they
will find a way to keep our star and others under control and
fusioning properly way beyond its natural years.

Or maybe our descendants wonâ€™t need a sun at all.