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◀ Starships Nearlight Starships ▶

SUBLIGHT STARSHIPS

Generational Ship Starlost

On This Page Show

Introduction

This page is for starships that travel at conventional speeds. The fact that interstellar distances are so astronomically huge means the main problem is the voyages will
take many thousands of years. And that's for the nearby stars, others will take millions of years.

The main problems are that human astronauts will die of old age long before the voyage ends, and most spacecraft are not built to last that long.

The starships in this page come under the headings of "Go Slow", "NAFAL" (not as fast as light) and "Apocee" (far from c). For arbitrary reasons I am defining an
Apocee starship as one which cruises at a speed below 14% of the speed of light (0.14c). This is because that is the speed where the relativistic gamma factor reaches
101% (γ = 1.01). I warned you it was arbitrary.

Go Slow

The first of Gordon Woodcock's methods of interstellar travel is "go slow".

Distance between stars is huge, traveling said distance slower-than-light will take a huge amount of time, human beings have a very limited lifespan. And it is much
easier to travel at 10% the speed of light than it is to travel at 99.99999% the speed of light

"Go Slow" means to focus on the limited human lifespan problem, and be content to travel slowly at 10% c or so.

CANNED MONKEYS DON'T SHIP WELL

Just to be annoying, I'm going to revisit that ever-giving fount of joy, slower than light (STL) interstellar travel. You may
think that, because it's not physically impossible, that it's inevitable that humans will travel this way one day. Sadly, it looks
like blasting your way between the stars the hard way requires magical technology too, just as FTL does.

We've talked about this before on the blog, but unfortunately, the really good conversation was about 800 comments in and
about 8 (?) years ago, so you can't just google it. Here, I'm going to cover two points: why canned monkeys don't ship well,
and what the precursors to STL would look like, so that we'll know if our society ever starts preparing itself to expand into
space at less than the speed of light.

"Canned monkeys don't ship well" refers to the problem of keeping people alive in interplanetary or interstellar space (this for
the two people who didn't know it already). There are a lot of problems, what with providing air, water, food, radiation
protection, decent meteor defenses, a working clothes cleaner, producing food reliably, recycling trash, keeping people
healthy and able to step onto a planet again, and last but not least, completing a human life cycle from conception through
birth to maturity and senescence. Many of these are provided by Earth, and the rest require more space than anyone
currently has on the International Space Station (ISS). That's why, for instance, they don't have a clothes washer on the ISS.
They wear their clothes for a week or so depending on what it is, and throw them out. More insidious problems have to do
with what the lack of gravity does to the health of humans, plants, and animals. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think any plant or animal has successfully
completed a life cycle (seed to seed or animal to animal) entirely in freefall. And, if you read Chris Hadfield's An Astronauts Guide to Life on Earth, he's quite candid
about how extendedly unpleasant it was to reacclimatize to Earth after spending a year in space. It wasn't just reflexes--his feet couldn't tolerate the weight on them,
he had rashes and all sorts of weird symptoms that took days to go away, and weakened bones that took at least a year to go away. It's uncomfortable to get into
freefall, it's painful to get out of freefall after an extended time in it, it's not just humans that have problems, it seems to be most eukaryotes do, and we still need to
figure out how to work around this. Magic, obviously. Just wave that wand, and the problems go away. But what exactly is the wand you're waving? CRISPR?
Vibrating pants? Some wonderful pharmaceutical suitable for plants, humans, and fish (gravipramine? (he said that medication name was a weak joke, apparently a
drug that prevents zero gee nausea))?

Fine, you say, my interstellar ark will spin to make up for this problem. And the ship will be huge, so you can have not just your damned washing machine but vast
pools of water as radiation shields (as in Anathem). This is great. Heck, we'll even assume that you have steering and propulsion systems that can handle pushing
a great sloshing gyroscope in a precise direction for centuries. Yeah, that. It'll be fun to steer your spindizzy when there's a lot of weight moving around inside it. The ▲
wobbling thrust to compensate will be fun too, and keeping this coupled set of chaotic oscillators from going out of control will be easy, of course. All we need is a
magic navigation system, magic because it doesn't just steer a wobbling gyroscope impeccably, it does it for centuries without error, and with rapid collision
avoidance too. Isn't magitech wonderful?

This is where we get into the engineering challenges. I'm certain, for instance, that we can build computers that last 50 or 100 years. After all, the Voyager space
probes are still kind of working, 40 years later. Actually, there's a fun little problem here: a few bespoke resilient computers for expensive space probes won't disrupt
a consumer electronics market built on planned obsolescence, but what if you're building an effectively immortal (to a first approximation) system? Won't that
decimate the local computer industry, when everybody wants a computer that they can pass on to their kids, rather than discarding, just so that a team of engineers
can stay employed making replacements? After all, STL voyages last decades to centuries, and the electronics all have to work forever, with only onboard repairs.
This is actually be one of the precursors to deep space colonization, that computers stop being made to fall apart, but instead are built simultaneously rugged, long-
lived, and easy to repair. Or, of course, we could put an entire computer fabrication facility on every spaceship. I'm sure that won't take much weight. And swapping
out the navigation system every few years should be really easy, too.

That's just one subsystem. If we're talking about a century or millennium long voyage (and note that these are optimistic given our current state of propulsive
affairs), then to a first approximation, every bit of hardware either has to last the entire trip, or has to be totally repairable using the (recycled?) supplies brought
along. Yes, yes, I know, 3-D printing. That will certainly be part of it, but don't you think that there's going to be critical infrastructure that just can't be reprinted ad
nauseum, like critical structural elements and parts of the hull? You'll need really good (dare I say magical?) printing capabilities to reprint a big chunk of the ship
from inside the ship. You'll also need a really efficient materials recycling facility to sort all the waste materials and efficiently remanufacture all the printer
feedstocks. But heck, sorting stuff into pure materials streams and rebuilding it only takes lots of energy, time, know-how, and specialized technology, which is why
we don't yet do this with municipal trash. Actually, trash management is another one of those little precursors: if idiot-proof urban recycling becomes a thing, we'll be
one small step closer to space.

Then we've got the big noise, the interstellar medium and the fun of ramming into it at high speeds. Raising your kids in the middle of a firing range or next to the
containment shell of a nuclear reactor is positively tame in comparison. Interplanetary and interstellar space are astonishingly good vacuums (better than we can
readily make on Earth), but they're not empty. Worse, the stuff in space tends to move really, really fast, which means it has a lot of energy. Bullets travel at around
1 km/sec, but meteors travel at 10 km/sec and above, and an STL spaceship needs to get moving much faster than this to make decent time between the stars.
Even the best steering system can't get a ship (especially a huge, spinning, sloshing ship) rapidly out of the way of some bit of interstellar debris. No, we need
shields, and those shields need to be fixable or replaceable from inside the ship, because humans aren't going to survive very well either out in that shooting gallery.
Yes, anti-micrometeorite armor (like Whipple shields) works on a different principle than terrestrial armor and wouldn't stop a bullet, but even it needs to be
replaced, and a starship will occasionally run into bullet-sized space junk at ultraballistic speeds. So we need magical armor. And magical radiation shielding too,
preferably in the shape of a mobile cowling, so that robots and humans can get outside and work on the starship hull, under cover, and not die rapidly. More magic!
Or heck, I'd settle for a force field at this point.

And yes, there's a rocket firing for years to centuries to push the starship up to speed. How long do real world rockets fire for, again? The starship engine is another
one of those magical technologies. While yes, ion engines have fired continuously for years (on the Dawn space probe, for example), their thrusts are tiny,
equivalent to the weight of a piece or two of paper in your hand. Since space is effectively frictionless, those tiny thrusts add up, but only on relatively light-weight
spacecraft, over interplanetary distances, and over a few years. We need extremely high thrust and for centuries, and it's not clear how to get this. The closest we
might want to get is an Orion drive powered by hydrogen bombs, but then we've got to store those beasts indefinitely. And I'm sure everyone wants to grow up
immediately adjacent to a nuclear test range, protected by some really, really good shielding that will have to be repaired in house, even though it's a wee bit
radioactive.

Then, once we get to the new planet, we've got to land on it, repeatedly. So we need landers that can boost themselves back up to orbit, ideally in a single stage.
That's easy, we're developing SSTO (single stage to orbit) technology now. Right? Well, the little interesting challenge is that your lander has to be full of fuel to take
off again. Indeed, without magic fusion rockets or some such, almost all of the lander's weight when it lands has to be fuel. And it's going to be really hot on landing,
as it decelerates from orbital speed (Mach 10+) down to zero. So you're flying the equivalent of an ostrich egg full of rocket fuel, and decelerating it from Mach 10 to
zero, landing on a totally unimproved landing spot (so the lander either has to be able to hover or land in the water, take your pick), and then take off from that spot
(or the water) again. And if you think the water launch of a supersonic plane is easy, you really should google "XF-2Y Sea Dart." Anyway, making conventional
rocket landers more magitech to work. We could use Orion technology to land and take off, but then the lander is going to have to land, erm, quite a long distance
from wherever the colony is. That's going to be a bit tedious, especially the part where they have to repair the road after every launch or landing.

Finally, we've got the problem of using the toilet. Yes, I know space toilets have come a long way. Here I'm talking about recycling nutrients, all 17 of them. People
have tried living in closed ecosystems since the 1970s, and it's a chore. I saw a description of one DIY experiment that said that the man involved had to produce
feces of the correct weight and composition every day, just to feed the recycling system that fed the plants that fed him. If you've got a small, closed ecosystem, shit
can't just happen, it has to be excreted in precise amounts and on schedule. Earthly ecosystems are resilient to when poop happens because there are huge
surpluses of some nutrients (like nitrogen in the air). This gives us a fair amount of slack in how nutrients get processed. Dead wood can lie around for centuries in
the desert without causing all the plants around it to die from lack of carbon. Unfortunately, when you get into a smaller ecosystem, the surplus nutrient pools are
smaller. So, if there's too much dead wood around (or unprocessed feces) you really could starve, and if you don't have enough oxygen for the microbes to break
down the dead wood, you could suffocate as the microbes got to work recycling your waste. Biosphere 2 ran into problems associated with this. Ideally, you want
the starship's biosphere to be as big as possible for stability. Simultaneously you need to minimize its weight and size to make it easier to send to another star
system. Magic ecosystem handling? That's the easy solution. The hard solution is making sure that everyone on the ship is more capable of running an ecosystem
than are almost all PhD ecologists currently working (that would include me, incidentally).

Speaking of which, the crew: all astronauts, the best of the best, right? Good breeding stock and all? And their grandkids are going to settle the new planet? Well,
erm, yeah. There are problems here too. One is that humans don't breed true, so amazingly talented people tend to have less talented kids; it's called regression to
the mean. In a multigenerational setting, you have to allow for incredibly talented initial crew getting old, becoming incompetent, and passing off their responsibilities
to their less-talented offspring. That's tricky. You also have to allow for people being incapacitated, whether they are young, old, pregnant, sick, or drunk. Yes, drunk.
One of my proposals for dealing with the shortcomings of a closed ecosystem was to designate 10% of the grain crop to making beer, so that people could get
drunk occasionally. The point wasn't that alcoholism was good, it's that if your nutrient cycling is so tight that you can't afford the surplus crop needed for an
occasional party, then you're absolutely incapable of dealing with problems that incapacitate part of the crew, let alone storing surplus food for when it's needed.
Having a system that's resilient to people getting drunk occasionally is one way to make sure that your system can also deal with more serious problems. And, if
there's a crop failure, the grain that would have gone to alcohol can be used for food.

I could go on, but there are three points that really need to be made instead. One is that STL can involve as much magic technology as FTL. It doesn't involve
breaking Einstein, but Einstein's not the only scientific hurdle out there. All sorts of things are permitted by general relativity but physically or logistically impossible.

The second is that our species isn't ready for the stars. We're not magical enough. If we were getting close, the precursors for interstellar technology would already
be around, changing our lives. For instance, if we could almost build a starship, it would be possible for an (evil) magnate to build a secret lair that was impenetrable
to anything including a nuclear blast (starship shielding). His minions could take shelter in that lair, seal the entrances, and live in there under his dynasty for
centuries, with no problem at all (closed ecosystem with indefinite recycling, plus social engineering). Climate change would be a non-issue for the super-rich,
because their castles would be proof against anything the climate or outsiders could throw at them. And we'd have the equivalent of the GNP of Russia to literally
throw away in making a starship that would send a few hundred people on a one way trip to a nearby star, since that's about the level of resources you'd need for a
starship. So yeah, we're not there yet. This isn't to say that you can't write a story using STL, but it would be good if you spread the magic technology more widely
than just in your ship. Why should people have starships in space, but only the Whole Earth Catalog planetside? Starship tech makes for great secret bases and
mechanized armor, if nothing else. And every character won't be able to just fix a toilet, they'll have the whole system piped through their closet composting and
growth chamber to feed them a treat a few weeks later. In an STL enabled world, proving you can take care of your own crap should be a rite of passage akin to
getting a driver's license today.

The final point is one that I'm sure is well-known to SF cognoscenti: there's a reason so many SF writers have used FTL, gravity control, reactionless drives, and
force fields. They make things easy. Instead of getting into the aeroponic weeds about how everybody must cycle their nutrients through the system for centuries,
you just wave at least two of those magic wands and all of the difficult STL technical challenges go away. You can speed from star to star before your life support
runs out, land on planets and take off as many times as you want, and interplanetary and interstellar meteors won't kill you, because you're not about to run into
them at high speed without proper shielding. They're not stupid tropes, just overexposed because they're so gosh darned useful. I may be wrong, but I believe that
the SF writers who originally proposed this tetrad knew enough about science and engineering to have a good idea of the problems they were avoiding by using
them. Sadly, we've since discovered that the problems were even worse than they originally thought. Perhaps later generations of SF aficionados have forgotten
and need to be reminded?

What did I miss? Heat, did you say? Power plants? Shipping corpsicles and thawing on arrival?
From CANNED MONKEYS DON'T SHIP WELL by Frank Landis (2018)
 Lifespan

There are several ways of dealing with the lifespan issue. See sub-sections below

☢
The paper World ships: Feasibility and Rationale suggested this terminology. I am unsure though how common this useage is .

concept map for Crewed Interstellar Spacecraft

Cruise Velocity Population Size

[%c] < 1,000 < 100,000 > 100,000
>10% Sprinter Colony Ship —
< 10% Slow Boat Colony Ship World Ship
< 1% — Colony Ship World Ship

Figure 12
Crewed starship categories versus population size and trip duration
click for larger image

World ship designs from the literature with key values

Dry Mass Propellant Mass Cruise Velocity
Design Population Size
[tons] [tons] [%c]

Enzman world ship [20] 20,000 - 200,000 300,000 3×106 0.9%

Torus world ship [38] 100,000 107 5×107 1%

Dry world ship - Mark 2A [15] 250,000 2.0×1011 8.2×1011 0.5%

Dry world ship - Mark 2B [15] 250,000 5.7×1011 2.3×1012 0.5%

Wet world ship [15] 250,000 2.2×1012 9.0×1012 0.5%

[15] A Bond and AR Martin. World Ships-An Assessment of the Engineering Feasibility. Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, 37:254, 1984.

[20] A. Crowl, K. F. Long, and R. Obousy. The Enzmann Starship: History & Engineering Appraisal . Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, 65(6):185,
2012.

[38] Andreas M Hein, Mikhail Pak, Daniel Pütz, Christian Bühler, and Philipp Reiss. World Ships Architectures & Feasibility Revisited. Journal of the British
Interplanetary Society, 65(4):119–133, 2012.
 SLOWBOAT

SLOWBOAT. A STARSHIP that has no FTL, and therefore take a long, long time to get where it's going.

This poses the problem of what the crew and passengers do in the meantime. If the Slowboat can go nearly the speed of light, and the destination is a nearby
star, they may simply endure a very tedious voyage of a decade or so. But if the Slowboat is even slower, or the destination farther away (and usually both are the
case), more drastic measures have to be taken.

One common option is hybernation. Everyone goes into suspended-animation sleep, to be awakened in a few hundred years. The alternative is a Generation
Ship. Here the ship is basically a HABITAT with a DRIVE engine attached. Crew and passengers form a self-sustaining community, and the Ship (usually a huge
one) is their world till they finally reach the destination.

It often happens that, after a few centuries en route, the inhabitants of a Generation Ship completely forget where they came from, much less where they're
going.

Tough Guide to SF entry for SLOWBOAT

Digital Crew

Since every atom of mass is a penalty, the logical starship would just carry a master computer and no human crew. This avoids the
payload mass of the crew, the habitat module, the life support system, food, water, and everything. The starship might be under a meter
long, which would make this concept the lowest mass of all the slowboat starships.

However, nobody wants wants to read about the adventures of a computer (yes, I know there have been a couple of SF stories on this
theme, but it requires extraordinary skill on the part of the author, and the stories are not wildly popular. With the exception of the Bolo
stories by Keith Laumer et al.).

Enter the "digital crew" concept. You postulate technology capable of "uploading" human brain patterns into a computer. In essence, the
ship's computer is running incredibly advanced simulations of the crew, creating a virtual reality much like that found in the movie The Matrix. This also allows the
author to pontificate upon the nature of reality, ask if we are actually unaware virtual people in a virtual reality, and stuff like that. Authors who have used this concept
include Sean Williams, Shane Dix, and Greg Egan.

The point is the author is allowed to write stories about human beings, but the digital humans and their digital environment take up zero mass.

One could add equipmment capable of manufacturing artificial bodies for the crew from local materials upon arrival at the destination. However, the advantage of a
digital crew ship over a seed ship is the lower ship mass due to the absence of frozen embryos, artificial wombs, and robot mommies. Adding artifical body
manufacturing facilites would reduce or remove the advantage. The only remaining advantage is that the new bodies inhabited by adults instead of babies.

You could regain the advantage if the manufacturing equipment is really tiny. Say a couple of grams worth of nanotechnology self-replicating machines, intended to work
on handy asteroids or other free materials lying around the destination solar system. The nanotechnology bootstraps itself by replicating using in-situ resources as
feedstocks until it has mass of a few tons, then shifts gears to start manufacturing artificial bodies.

ECHOES OF EARTH

But there was a catch: Living humans could not be sent. Even with the Earth’s vastly expanded resources—cheap fusion
power and the new tools of nanotechnology seeming to exponentially expand the horizons every year—there was simply
no way to send thousands of people light-years away from Earth in every direction. Quite aside from the colossal cost,
there was also the issue of lost time as well as the physical and mental well-being of the individuals undertaking such
voyages. Instead, the first wave of survey vessels would represent humanity in the best way possible but would carry no
actual live specimens.

At first it was hoped that sophisticated artificial intelligences would fill the pilot seats, but AI research took longer to deliver
than its engineering counterpart. While vast orbital shipbuilding facilities evolved new generations of drives, power
supplies, and protective magnetic bubbles, programmers explored dead end after dead end, never quite succeeding in
creating the right sort of mind to ensure even one mission’s success, let alone thousands. UNESSPRO could not afford to
throw away trillions of dollars on ships that might die or go AWOL at any moment. With 5 percent of the Earth’s gross
product being channeled into the project, there had to be some sort of guarantee of returns. So they were forced to
explore other options.

By 2048, it was clear that only one of these options promised anything like the sort of reliability required, and that was to
send out electronic facsimiles of humans to the stars, as opposed to flesh and blood. Consciousness research had not
yet managed to re-create an entire person’s mind in an electronic environment, except by inefficient neuron-by-neuron
simulation, but they could decipher a great deal that had once been thought a mystery. The processes underlying
consciousness could be emulated, as could the way emotions and other impulses ebbed and flowed throughout the body.
Memory alone had proven elusive under such reduced conditions, defying all attempts to record it indirectly. The only
efficient way it could be captured and simulated was secondhand, by interviewing the original at length about his or her
past and using physical records to supply the images. Emotions could be attached later, during the fine-tuning phase, to
color the recollection correctly, even though the details might still be slightly askew. Preawakening memory in such a
mind was, at best, a patchwork quilt pieced together from a million isolated fragments.

But that was enough. So-called “engrams” behaved more or less the same as their template minds, the flesh-and-blood artwork by Chris Moore
originals who had devoted six months of their lives to the task of being effectively taken apart and rebuilt inside a
computer. When left to run for long periods, the engrams displayed no greater tendency toward unreliability than those same originals, neither failing at familiar
tasks nor unable to learn. They were, in fact, ideal candidates for any space-faring crew: They did not eat, breathe, excrete, sleep, or grow sick; they took up very
little space—less than a cubic decimeter (as measured in the new Adjusted Planck units created for the international venture)—and weighed less than half a
kilogram; they could adjust easily to the long stretches of time during which nothing happened on an interstellar mission; and they could be trained as easily as a
real person. In fact, it proved no great difficulty to train sixty real astronauts, then copy them as many times as was required to fill the crew registers of 1,000 survey
vessels.

It was the latter detail that aroused the greatest ire among those still concerned about matters of the soul. Each survey vessel had a crew of thirty; there were one
thousand ships; that meant a total survey crew of 30,000 individuals had been selected from that initial pool of just sixty. Roles on each mission were allocated
randomly—while Caryl Hatzis might be the civilian survey manager on the Frank Tipler, on another ship she might have a junior role—but that didn’t remove the fact
that there were in total over 500 Caryl Hatzises in the bubble of surveyed space surrounding the Earth. Were they really all the same person?

From ECHOES OF EARTH by Sean Williams and Shane Dix (2002)

Seed Ship

The next higher mass class of slowboat is the Seed ship aka Embryo Space Colonization via an embryo-carrying interstellar spaceship (EIS). It will tend to have
more mass than a Digital Crew ship and less than a Sleeper Ship.

The starship is tiny, containing a payload of millions of frozen fertilized eggs, artificial wombs, robot factory, and a master computer. No mass is needed for life-support,
habitat modules, or any human crew.

After traveling for thousands of years, the ship lands in a good spot for a colony. The robot factory starts cranking out robots. Robots build the settlement buildings and
start growing food (if the planet is really nasty they might have to spend a few centuries terraforming the planet first). Then the master computer thaws out enough eggs
for the available artificial wombs, brings the babies to term, then tries to convince the babies that the robots are mommy and daddy.

I don't know about you but I suspect that the first generation is going to grow up a little bit emotionally stunted.

☢
The most straightforward method is to cryogenically preserve human embryos. The more difficult but more flexible method is to carry
frozen sperm and egg cells, and do in vitro fertilization at the destination. The most unobtainium method is to carry genetic information in
computer files, then synthesize the required genetic sequences at the destination.

As with all interstellar colonization proposals, there are quite a few technological challenges to solve:

Artificial Intelligence
The ship's computer has to be smart enough to not only pilot the ship, plan the settlement, and coordinate the building; but also be
smart enough to perform parenting duties for all the children. This includes teaching the children survival skills, cultural heritage, and healthy psychological
functioning. Its hands are going to be real full when the children become teenagers.

Robotics

The ship robots will have to be advanced enough to raise and nurture the children, as well as building the settlement and growing crops. They could be
teleoperated drones controlled by the ship's computer.

The side problem is they will have to be manufactured at the destination using in situ resources. The whole idea behind the Seed Ship is to minimize the payload
mass, carrying an army of robots negates this.

Artificial Wombs
An artificial uterus is way beyond our current technology, but it is being worked on. Brave New World is just around the corner. The techno-wombs will be working
overtime until the first generation is old enough to make babies the old fashioned way.

Long-duration Hardware
As with other starship proposals, but with the ship's Artificial Intelligence in particular, the equipment will have to reliably operate for how ever many thousands of
years the journey will take.

Biology
The frozen-embryos/frozen-gametes/genetic-computer-files will need to be protected from cosmic rays and other damaging influences. In addition, the human gut
microbiota is a critical part of the body. On Terra it is obtained from the mother and/or the general environment. At the Seed Ship destination, neither will be
available. The microbiota will have to be recreated along with the babies.

Ethical
Unsurprisingly this entire process opens a can of worms with several sticky moral questions. For one, you are deliberately creating children who will grow up
without (human) parents. Should the children be taught/programmed behaviour biased to colony success, or biased towards freedom? Should their records of
Terra's history be censored? If so, who decides what gets cut? Some of these issues are mentioned in Clarke's The Songs of Distant Earth.

☢
Examples of Seed Ships in science fiction include The Songs of Distant Earth by Sir. Arthur C. Clarke, 2001 Nights chapter Night 4 by Yukinobu Hoshino, Long Shot
by Vernor Vinge, and the movie Interstellar.

If men, and not merely their machines, are ever to reach the planets of other suns, problems of much greater
difficulty will have to be solved. Stated in its simplest form, the question is this: How can men survive a journey which
may last for several thousand years? It is rather surprising to find that there are at least five different answers which
must be regarded as theoretical possibilities—however far they may be beyond the scope of today’s science.

One cannot help feeling that the interstellar ark on its thousand-year voyages would be a cumbersome way of solving
the problem, even if all the social and psychological difficulties could be overcome. There are, however, more
sophisticated ways of getting men to the stars than the crude, brute-force methods outlined above. (Fourth Solution)
After the hardheaded engineering of the last few paragraphs, what follows may appear to verge upon fantasy. It
involves, in the most fundamental sense of the word, the storage of human beings. And. by that I do not mean
anything as naive as suspended animation.

A few months ago, in an Australian laboratory, I was watching what appeared to be perfectly normal spermatozoa
wriggling across the microscope field. They were perfectly normal, but their history was not. For three years, they had
been utterly immobile in a deep freeze, and there seemed little doubt that they could be kept fertile for centuries by
the same technique (this was amazing back in 1955, nowadays we take semen cryopreservation for granted). What
was still more surprising, there had been enough successes with the far larger and more delicate ova to indicate that
they too might survive the same treatment (oocyte cryopreservation was not perfected until 1986). It this proves to be
the case, reproduction will eventually become independent of time.

The social implications of this make anything in Brave New World seem like child’s play, but I am not concerned here
with the interesting results which might have been obtained by, for example, uniting the genes of Cleopatra and
Newton, had this technique been available earlier in history. (When such experiments are started, however, it would
be as well to remember Shaw’s famous rejection of a similar proposal: “But suppose, my dear, it turns out to have my
beauty and your brains?”) *

* We have Shaw's word for it that the would-be geneticist was a complete stranger and not, as frequently stated,
Isadora Duncan.

The cumbersome interstellar ark, with its generations of travelers doomed to spend their entire lives in empty space, was merely a device to carry germ cells,
knowledge, and culture from one sun to another. How much more efficient to send only the cells, to fertilize them automatically some twenty years before the
voyage was due to end, to carry the embryos through to birth by techniques already foreshadowed in today’s biology labs, and to bring up the babies under the
tutelage of cybernetic nurses who would teach them their inheritance and their destiny when they were capable of understanding it.

These children, knowing no parents, or indeed anyone of a different age from themselves, would grow up in the strange artificial world of their speeding ship,
reaching maturity in time to explore the planets ahead of them—perhaps to be the ambassadors of humanity among alien races, or perhaps to find, too late, that
there were no home for them there. If their mission succeeded, it would be their duty (or that of their descendants, if the first generation could not complete the task)
to see that the knowledge they had gained was someday carried back to Earth.

(ed note: in latter science fiction utilizing this technique, they either use scouting robot probes to make blasted sure there exist a habitable planet at the target site
before sending a seedship, or the seedship scans the planet for habitability before creating any embryos. Having the children starve to death because the planet is
uninhabitable is just a little too cruel)

Would any society be morally justified, we may well ask, in planning so onerous and uncertain a future for its unborn—indeed unconceived—children? That is a
question which different ages may answer in different ways. What to one era would seem a cold-blooded sacrifice might to another appear a great and glorious
adventure. There are complex problems here which cannot be settled by instinctive, emotional answers.

From THE PLANETS ARE NOT ENOUGH by Arthur C. Clarke (1955)

VOYAGE FROM YESTERYEAR

 “I want to talk about matters that are of global significance and which affect every individual alive on this planet, and
indeed the generations yet to be born—assuming there will be future generations.” He paused. “I want to talk about
survival—the survival of the human species.”

Congreve went on. “We have already come once to the brink of a third world war and hung precariously over the edge.
Today, in 2015, twenty-three years have passed since U.S. and Soviet forces clashed in Baluchistan with tactical nuclear
weapons, and although the rapid spread of a fusion-based economy at last promises to solve the energy problems that
brought about that confrontation, the jealousies, mistrusts, and suspicions which brought us to the point of war then and
which have persistently plagued our race throughout its history are as much in evidence as ever.

“Today the sustenance that our industries crave is not oil, but minerals. Fifty years from now our understanding of
controlled-fusion processes will probably have eliminated that source of shortages too, but in the meantime shorter-
sighted political considerations are recreating the climate of tension and rivalry that hinged around the oil issue at the
close of the last century. Obviously, South Africa’s importance in this context is shaping the current pattern of power
maneuvering, and the probable flashpoint for another East-West collision will again be the Iran-Pakistan border region,
which our strategists expect the Soviets to contest to gain access to the Indian Ocean in preparation for the support of at
war of so-called black African liberation against the South.”

Congreve paused, swept his eyes from one side of the room to the other, and raised his hands in resignation. “It seems
that as individuals we can only stand by as helpless observers and watch the events that are sweeping us onward
collectively. The situation is complicated further by the emergence and rapid economic and military growth of the Chinese-
Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere, which threatens to confront Moscow with an unassailable power bloc should it come to
align with ourselves and the Europeans. More than a few Kremlin analysts must see their least risky gamble as a final
resolution with the West now, before such an alliance has time to consolidate. In other words, it would not be untrue to
say that the future of the human race has never been at greater risk than it is at this moment.”

Congreve pushed himself back from the podium with his arms and straightened. When he resumed speaking, his tone
had lightened slightly. “In the area that concerns all of us here in our day-to-day lives, the accelerating pace of the space program has brought a lot of excitement in
the last two decades. Some inspiring achievements have helped offset the less encouraging news from other quarters: We have established permanent bases on
the Moon and Mars; colonies are being built in space; a manned mission has reached the moons of Jupiter; and robots are out exploring the farthest reaches of the
Solar System and beyond. But”—he extended his arms in an animated sigh—“these operations have been national, not international. Despite the hopes and the
words of years gone by, militarization has followed everywhere close on the heels of exploration, and we are led to the inescapable conclusion that a war, if it
comes, would soon spread beyond the confines of the surface and jeopardize our species everywhere. We must face up to the fact that the danger now threatening
us in the years ahead is nothing less than that.”

He turned for a moment to stare at the model of SP3 gleaming on the table beside him and then pointed to it. “Five years from now, that automated
probe will leave the Sun and tour the nearby stars to search for habitable worlds … away from Earth, and away from all of Earth’s troubles, problems,
and perils. Eventually, if all goes well, it will arrive at same place insulated by unimaginable distance from the problems that promise to make strife an
inseparable and ineradicable part of the weary story of human existence on this planet.” Congreve’s expression took on a distant look as he gazed at
the replica, as if in his mind he were already soaring with it outward and away. “It will be a new place,” he said in a faraway voice. “A new, fresh, vibrant
world, unscarred by Man’s struggle to elevate himself from the beasts, a place that presents what might be the only opportunity for our race to preserve
an extension of itself where it would survive, and if necessary begin again, but this time with the lessons of the past to guide it.”

An undercurrent of murmuring rippled quickly around the hall. Congreve nodded, indicating his anticipation of the objections he knew would come. He raised a hand
for attention and gradually the noise abated.

“No, I am not saying that SP3 could be modified from a robot craft to carry a human crew. The design could not feasibly be modified at this late stage.
Too many things would have to be thought out again from the beginning, and such a task would require decades. And yet, nothing comparable to SP3 is
anywhere near as advanced a stage of design at the present time; let alone near being constructed. The opportunity is unique and cannot, surely, be
allowed to pass by. But at the same time we cannot afford the delay that would be needed to take advantage of that opportunity. Is there a solution to this
dilemma?” He looked around as if inviting responses. None came.

“We have been studying this problem for some time now, and we believe there is a solution. It would not be feasible to send a contingent of adult humans,
either as a functioning community or in some suspended state, with the ship; it is in too advanced a stage of construction to change its primary design
parameters. But then, why send adult humans at all?” He spread his arms appealingly. “After all, the objective is simply to establish an extension of our
race where it would be safe from any calamity that might befall us here, and such a location would be found only at the end of the voyage. The people
would not be required either during the voyage or in the survey phase, since machines are perfectly capable of handling everything connected with
those operations. People become relevant only when those phases have been successfully completed. Therefore. we can avoid all the difficulties
inherent in the idea of sending people along by dispensing with the conventional notions of interstellar travel and adopting a totally new approach: by
having the ship create the people after it gets there!”

Congreve paused again, but this time not so much as a whisper disturbed the silence.

Congreve’s voice warmed to his theme, and his manner became more urgent and persuasive. “Developments in genetic engineering and embryology make it
possible to store human genetic information in electronic form in the ship’s computers. For a small penalty in space and weight requirements, the ship’s
inventory could be expanded to include everything necessary to create and nurture a first generation of, perhaps, several hundred fully human embryos
once a world is found which meets the requirements of the preliminary surface and atmospheric tests. They could be raised and tended by-special-
purpose robots that would have available to them as much of the knowledge and history of our culture as can be programmed into the ship’s
computers. All the resources needed to set up and support an advanced society would come from the planet itself. Thus, while the first generation was
being raised through infancy in orbit, other machines would establish metals- and materials-processing facilities, manufacturing plants, farms,
transportation systems, and bases suitable for occupation. Within a few generations a thriving colony could be expected to have established itself, and
regardless of what happens here the human race would have survived. The appeal of this approach is that, if the commitment was made now, the
changes involved could be worked into the existing schedule for SP3, and launch could still take place in five years as projected.”

By this time life was flowing slowly back into his listeners. Although many of them were still too astonished by his proposal to react visibly, heads were nodding, and
the murmurs running around the room seemed positive. Congreve nodded and smiled faintly as if savoring the thought of having kept the best part until last.

“The second thing I have to announce tonight is that such a commitment has now been made. As I mentioned a moment ago, this subject has been under study for
a considerable period of time. I can now inform you that, three days ago, the President of the United States and the Chairman of the Eastern Co-Prosperity Sphere
signed an agreement for the project which I have briefly outlined to be pursued on a joint basis, effective immediately. The activities of the various national and
private research institutions and other organizations that will be involved in the venture will be coordinated with those of the North American Space Development
Organization and with those of our Chinese and Japanese partners under a project designation of Starhaven.”

Congreve’s face split into a broad smile. “My third announcement is that tonight does not mark my retirement from professional life after all. I have accepted an
invitation from the President to take charge of the Starhaven project on behalf of the United States as the senior member nation, and I am relinquishing my position
with NASDO purely in order to give undivided attention to my new responsibilities. For those who might believe that I’ve given them some hard times in the past, I
have to say with insincere apologies that I’m going to be around for some time longer yet, and that before this project is through the times are going to get a lot
harder.”

Several people at the back stood up and started clapping. The applause spread and turned into a standing ova- tion. Congreve grinned unabashedly to
acknowledge the enthusiasm, stood for a while as the applause continued, and then grasped the sides of the podium again.

“We had our first formal meeting with the Chinese yesterday, and we’ve already made our first official decision.” He glanced at the replica of the star-robot probe
again. “SP3 now has a name. It has been named after a goddess of Chinese mythology whom we have adopted as a fitting patroness: Kuan-yin—the
goddess who brings children. Let us hop/e that she watches over her children well in the years to come.”

From VOYAGE FROM YESTERYEAR by James Hogan (1982)

RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA

 ‘At first, it was believed that Rama was dead - frozen for so many hundreds of thousands of years that there
was no possibility of revival. This may still be true, in a strictly biological sense. There seems general agreement,
among those who have studied the matter, that no living organism of any complexity can survive more than a very
few centuries of suspended animation. Even at absolute zero, residual quantum effects eventually erase too much
cellular information to make revival possible. It therefore appeared that, although Rama was of enormous
archaeological importance, it did not present any major astropolitical problems.

‘It is now obvious that this was a very naïve attitude, though even from the first there were some who pointed out
that Rama was too precisely aimed at the Sun for pure chance to be involved.

‘Even so, it might have been argued—indeed, it was argued—that here was an experiment that had failed. Rama
had reached the intended target, but the controlling intelligence had not survived. This view also seems very
simple-minded; it surely underestimates the entities we are dealing with.

‘What we failed to take into account was the possibility of nonbiological survival. If we accept Dr Perera’s very
plausible theory, which certainly fits all the facts, the creatures who have been observed inside Rama did not exist
until a short time ago. Their patterns, or templates, were stored in some central information bank, and when the
time was ripe they were manufactured from available raw materials—presumably the metallo-organic soup of the
Cylindrical Sea. Such a feat is still somewhat beyond our own ability, but does not present any theoretical
problems. We know that solid state circuits, unlike living matter, can store information without loss, for indefinite
periods of time.

‘So Rama is now in full operating condition, serving the purpose of its builders—whoever they may be. From our
point of view, it does not matter if the Ramans themselves have all been dead for a million years, or whether they
too will be re-created, to join their servants, at any moment. With or without them, their will is being done and will
continue to be done.
artwork by Bruce Pennington
From RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA by Arthur C. Clarke (1973)

Sleeper Ship

Sleeper ship tend to have more mass than a Seed Ship and less than a Generation Ship.

The crew is frozen into suspended animation, so they do not age nor require food and oxygen during the thousand year journey. Or
spacious living accomodations. The Sleeper Ship does require the mass of the crew, enough mass for a spartan habitat module, and only
enough consumables for the time the crew will be awake.

Poul Anderson warned that frozen crew have a limited shelf life. Naturally-occurring radioactive atoms in the human body will cause
damage. Normally the body will repair such damage, but one in suspended animation cannot. After a few hundred years, enough damage
will accumulate so that a corpse instead of a living person is thawed out at journey's end. This may force one to thaw each crew member
every fifty years or so to allow them to heal the damage, then freezing them again.

If men, and not merely their machines, are ever to reach the planets of other suns, problems of much greater difficulty will have to be solved. Stated in its
simplest form, the question is this: How can men survive a journey which may last for several thousand years? It is rather surprising to find that there are at least
five different answers which must be regarded as theoretical possibilities—however far they may be beyond the scope of today’s science.

Medicine may provide two rather obvious solutions…

(ed note: the first medical solution is immortality)

Perhaps a better answer is that suggested by the story of Rip Van Winkle. Suspended animation (or, more accurately, a drastic slowing down of the body’s
metabolism) for periods of a few hours is now, of course, a medical commonplace. It requires no great stretch of the imagination to suppose that, with the aid of low
temperatures and drugs, men may be able to hibernate for virtually unlimited periods. We can picture an automatic ship with its oblivious crew making the long
journey across the interstellar night until, when a new sun was looming up, the signal was sent out to trigger the mechanisms which would revive the sleepers.
When their survey was completed, they would head back to Earth and slumber again until the time came to awake once more, and to greet a world which would
regard them as survivors from the distant past.

From THE PLANETS ARE NOT ENOUGH by Arthur C. Clarke (1955)

COLD SLEEP

It had been a long time since Terrans had first reached toward other worlds. Three hundred years since the first recorded pioneer flight into the Galaxy. And
even before that there were legends of other ships fleeing the nuclear wars and the ages of political and social confusion which followed. They must have been
either very desperate or very brave, those first explorers—sending their ships out into the unknown while they were wrapped in cold sleep with one chance in
perhaps a thousand of waking as their craft approached another planet. With the use of Galactic overdrive such drastic chances were no longer necessary. But had
his kind paid too high a price for their swifter passage from star to star?

From STAR GUARD by Andre Norton (1955).

Collected in Star Soldiers (2001), currently a free eBook in the Baen free library.

REPAIRING RADIOACTIVE DAMAGE

“We are leaving this star now. We have already pumped the solution back into the upper reservoir. I fear we will be hard-put this time, for the enormous
radiation of this sun declines so slowly, our stored power may not last till we are safely out in the cold regions where we may enter the Sleep. We have discovered a
new radioactive material whose half-life is twenty times that of element ninety-two, We are going again into the Sleep. The atmosphere above has not yet frozen,
but our energy is exhausted. We have been able to freeze sufficient air in the cold rooms of the sleeping quarters to freeze our bodies. We will probably be safe
enough.

“Investigation of those who are sleeping indicates that many of them have died. Tharsarn suggests a twofold reason for this. Many of course did not survive the
original action of the drugs. This was indetectable at the time. Many more have possibly been killed by the atom-smashing rays from space. Even under our
Great Seal (a half-mile thick saturated solution of water and lead nitrate), and half a mile more of solid rock, in the enormous times that have passed,
these rays might well have been deadly. They do not influence the machines, since machines are not as delicate as body chemistry.

“That I have survived, Tharsarn believes to be due to a peculiar susceptibility on my part to the action of the drugs, and to the fact that during the
periods of awakening I have renewed the entire chemical structure of my body, replacing the destroyed atoms with fresh material from the foods I have
eaten. He says that we who awaken have a better chance of ultimate survival.

From THE INCREDIBLE PLANET by John W. Campbell, Jr. (1949)

 From Beyond Mars

From Beyond Mars

Generation Ship

The highest mass type of slowboat tends to be the Generation ship. This is because it has to carry the mass of an entire community
as crew, a habitat module at the minimum the size of a small town, and enough life support for the people for however many hundreds of
years the journey takes. As the ship crawls to its destination, generations of people are born, have children, and die of old age.

A flying asteroid can be defined as a spaceship, using the principle that anything can be a spaceship if you throw it hard enough.

If the generation ship is escaping from some Terra-destroying catastrophe; carrying Terra's scientific and cultural heritage, a
representative sample of animal species, colony equipment and supplies, and a fertile representative sample of humanity, the craft is
termed an Interstellar Ark.

Problems include the later generations refusing to cooperate with their forefather's vision, civil wars that wreck the ship, failure of the
closed ecological life support system, ship arriving at the destination but the current generation does not want to colonize an icky dirty
planet because they like living in their ship and the later generations forgetting where they came from, forgetting where they are going, and indeed forgetting
the fact that they are in a starship. The classic "forgetting you are on a ship" stories are Robert Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky (1941) and Brian Aldiss' Non-Stop
(1958).

☢
In Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's FOOTFALL, the aliens deal with the "forgetful generation" problem by including a group of original crew frozen in suspended
animation. Members of the original crew are periodically woken so they can ensure that the generational crew keeps the faith. The concept is sort of a combination of
sleeper starship and generation starship.

The concept was sort of touched on in Don Wilcox's The Voyage that Lasted 600 Years (1940), though in that story only the captain was frozen. Since he was only a
single person he had a limited influence on the generational tribes.

☢
There are also disturbing ethical questions about the morality of condemning several generations of people to living inside a space-going rock. This can lead to political
problems starting a Generation ship development project in the first place.

Noted SF author Kim Stanley Robinson apparently got very annoyed at people who dismissed the generation ship ethical questions while simultaneously being infected
with a blind faith techno-utopianism over the feasibility of building a generation ship. Currently our technology has utterly failed to build a closed ecological life support
system that can operate longer than a year or so, much less a couple of centuries. The same goes for spacecraft components. The second law of thermodynamics is a
harsh mistress. The techno-utopians have to understand that there is no plan B.

As a sort of wakeup call, Mr. Robinson wrote the deliberately pessimistic novel Aurora about a disastrous generation ship heading for Tau Ceti and all the things that
could and did go wrong. And the novel featured some techno-utopian characters in a most unfavorable light. The more optimistic members of the science fiction
community have been raging at Mr. Robinson ever since.

If men, and not merely their machines, are ever to reach the planets of other suns, problems of much greater difficulty will have to be solved. Stated in its
simplest form, the question is this: How can men survive a journey which may last for several thousand years? It is rather surprising to find that there are at least
five different answers which must be regarded as theoretical possibilities—however far they may be beyond the scope of today’s science.

The third solution was, to the best of my knowledge, suggested over thirty years ago by Professor J. D. Bernal in a long out-of-print essay, The World, the Flesh,
and the Devil , which must rank as one of the most outstanding feats of scientific imagination in literature. Even today, many of the ideas propounded in this little
book have never been fully developed, either in or out of science fiction. (Any requests from fellow authors to borrow my copy will be flatly ignored.)
(ed note: I read that above paragraph in the early 1960s when I was about ten. I struggled hard to find a copy. One of my fondest memories is when a librarian
friend of my mother managed to find a copy and gift it to me for my birthday. Clarke was not exaggerating, the book contains all sorts of fascinating ideas)

Bernal imagined entire societies launched across space, in gigantic arks which would be closed, ecologically balanced systems. They would, in fact, be miniature
planets, upon which generations of men would live and die so that one day their remote descendants would retum to Earth with the record of their celestial
Odyssey.

The engineering, biological and sociological problems involved in such an enterprise would be of fascinating complexity. The artificial planets (at least several miles
in diameter) would have to be completely self-contained and self-supporting, and no material of any kind could be wasted. Commenting on the implications of such
closed systems, Time magazine’s able, erudite science editor Jonathan Leonard once hinted that cannibalism would be compulsory among interstellar travelers.
This would be a matter of definition; we crew members of the two-billion-man spaceship Earth do not consider ourselves cannibals despite the fact that every one of
us must have absorbed atoms which once formed pan of Caesar and Socrates, Shakespeare and Solomon.

One cannot help feeling that the interstellar ark on its thousand-year voyages would be a cumbersome way of solving the problem, even if all the social and
psychological difliculties could be overcome. (Would the fiftieth generation still share the aspirations of their Pilgrim Fathers who set out from Earth so long ago?)
From THE PLANETS ARE NOT ENOUGH by Arthur C. Clarke (1955)

THE IMPOSSIBLE PROBLEMS OF GENERATION SHIPS

Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent piece in Scientific American marks the second time he’s written in as many months about the viability of generation ships as
mankind prepares to explore the stars. That’s not surprising, considering that Robinson’s new book Aurora (which was published in July 2015) tracks a massive
generation ship and its seven or so generations of humans as they make their way to the Tau Ceti system (“only” 12 light-years away) to start a new human colony.
What’s interesting about his two pieces are that they’re both pragmatic verging on pessimistic: He lists so many biological, psychological, and sociological barriers
and complications that readers—of these articles, at least—will be convinced to stay firmly put.

In both pieces (the first published in Boing Boing late last year), Robinson comes to the same conclusion: “There is no Planet B.” For all that generation ship stories
have been a long-enduring subgenre of science fiction, the deck is stacked against us in a myriad of ways: Getting to a habitable planet will take generations. The
humans who keep a generation ship running are most likely not the same ones who will see their new home. Keeping an ark—because it’s so much more than a
mere ship—running is filled with so many variables involving radiation exposure, social systems, and the fragility of the human mind and spirit. With each point,
Robinson returns to the notion that Earth is our only home.

And yet, we can’t stop looking upward and projecting ourselves—in thought, if nothing else—outward to other systems. So, let’s look at each of his obstacles,
because you can bet there’s been a generation ship story that addresses (if not also tries to solve) it.

The ark itself must be:

Big enough to support ecology… Most important, Robinson says, is a fully recycling ecosystem. Not surprisingly, he addresses this in Aurora: The
generation ship is made up of twenty-four biomes recreating different areas of Earth, and carries about two thousand passengers.
…but small enough to travel at quick speeds. This limits the humans’ exposure to cosmic radiation (Space.com put together this neat infographic
explaining just how huge a problem radiation is to space flight.) and minimizes breakdowns in the ark itself. But when Aurora opens, the ship’s chief engineer
and de facto leader, Devi, is finding more problems than she has time to fix. Most of them couldn’t have been anticipated by those who created the ships on
Earth, understandably, but it’s the latter generations who must bear that responsibility. Which brings us into the most vital part of the ark…

Culture of the ship:

More than one generation is needed to keep the ship going. Rather than busy themselves with the effort it takes to raise unique people, generation ship
crews should just take a page from George Zebrowski’s Macrolife and clone everyone! Or you can go the route of Beth Revis’ unsettling but oh-so-compelling
Across the Universe, in which 100 VIPs from Earth are cryogenically frozen on the generation ship Godspeed. Multiple generations spool out during
Godspeed‘s voyage, but their real purpose is to ensure that these cryo-pods stay perfectly preserved. Once unfrozen, these Earthlings will be the first to step
onto their new planet.
Enforced reproduction to maintain population control. You can make this very clear, like on the Syfy miniseries Ascension, which made reproduction
a privilege handed out through computer algorithms and annual fertility festivals. Or you can go the route of Across the Universe‘s Elders, who pump
pheromones into the air and water, and establish mating seasons.
Mandatory jobs. In addition to strictly controlling breeding, Rob Grant’s farcical book Colony sees crew members inheriting their parents’ jobs on the
ship… which goes about as well as you would expect, with later generations developing personal beliefs that distance them from their duties to an
alarming degree.
The establishment of a totalitarian state. Most of the stories try this, and it never works out well—especially when there’s a murder, as in David
Ramirez’s The Forever Watch, and the totalitarian state is trying to cover it up. James P. Hogan’s Voyage from Yesteryear, in particular, shows what
happens when a generation ship full of an authoritarian regime tries to rein in the Chironian branch of humans who have created their own society on a
distant planet.
Psychology of enclosed spaces. A Million Suns, the sequel to Revis’ Across the Universe, addresses the chaos and depression of realizing that
neither you nor your children will ever see anything but the inside of a ship. Long before that, Robert A. Heinlein took this notion to the ultimate extreme
with Orphans of the Sky, in which the remaining survivors on generation ship Vanguard believe that the ship is the entire universe.
Untrustworthy AI. This isn’t in Robinson’s argument, but it’s a useful point. If we trust an artificial intelligence with anything concerning our fate, and it
evolves as we evolve over the generations, the power dynamic will undoubtedly shift. Just ask the crew members in Pamela Sargent’s Earthseed.

Getting to a new planet:

The rights of preexisting life. If the planet is “alive,” Robinson says, humans will have to learn how to exist with any preexisting lifeforms, in ways that will
likely range from innocuous to fatal. We’re talking anything from the prions (essentially “bad” proteins that cause neural degeneration) in Aurora to pterodactyl-
like creatures in the conclusion to Revis’ trilogy, Shades of Earth.
The struggle to terraform. This will take centuries, and will require that the ark, after getting its crew to the planet, continue to function as a shelter and
ecosystem. And if your planet has no sun, like the unfortunately-named Eden in Dark Eden, your generation ship will become a strange place—part prison,
part home base as you wait for a rescue from Earth that may never come.

So, yeah, there are a lot of barriers to generation ships even getting in the sky, let alone to colonizing a new planet. But we’ll keep writing and reading these stories,
because they hold up a mirror to what we need to fix about our own society before we can contemplate starting over on a new world. Personally, I hope we’re still
able to make generation ships a reality, even if I’m long-dead when it happens. While Robinson’s first piece on Boing Boing makes it sound like there is absolutely
no alternate planet for us, his conclusion in Scientific American is more hopeful, or at least conditional:

The preparation itself is a multi-century project, and one that relies crucially on its first step succeeding, which is the creation of a sustainable long-term
civilization on Earth. This achievement is the necessary, although not sufficient, precondition for any success in interstellar voyaging. If we don’t create
sustainability on our own world, there is no Planet B.

From “THERE IS NO PLANET B”: THE IMPOSSIBLE PROBLEMS OF GENERATION SHIPS by Natalie Zutter
(2016)

THE INTERSTELLAR DREAM IS DYING

NOTE FOR 2018 READERS: This is the fourth in a series of open letters to the next century. The series marks a little-known chronological milestone. According
to UN data, life expectancy at birth in 18 countries now exceeds 82 years — meaning babies born in 2018 are more likely than not to see the year 2100.

What will the world be like at the other end of those kids' lives? Today's scientific discoveries, Silicon Valley visions, and science fiction can give us glimpses — and
in this series of digital time capsules, we also recognize that our hopes and fears can shape what the future will become.

Dear 22nd century,

I have no doubt that many of you have lived in, worked in, or at least visited space. To us, it seems likely you'll have at least one moon base, that you're mining
ridiculously mineral-rich asteroids, and that the long hard work of terraforming Mars has begun. You've probably set foot on the more interesting moons of Jupiter
and Saturn. Space may even seem a bit mundane to you — the solar system variety, at least.

The real space question is this: Have you given up on the whole idea of traveling farther, of visiting or settling
planets other than the ones in our solar system? I fear you have.

I'm not talking about the faster-than-light dream. The speed of light is likely just as impassable in your century
as it is in ours. Science fiction that says otherwise is mostly magical thinking. It's likely we can't even get close,
given the titanic amounts of energy it takes to accelerate to even a fraction of the speed of light.

No way around it, each light year — or 6 trillion miles — will take decades to cross, and there are barely any
stars in a 10-light year radius. We're in a celestial suburb. The only way humans have ever seriously
considered getting to the realm of other star systems is in vast starships designed to run for a century or two.
Because they would probably take multiple generations to reach their destination, space nerds call them
generation ships.

But the last few years have not been kind to the generation ships dream. The science seems to be telling us
that generation ships are a dream too far — and science fiction is starting to follow suit.

This is a wrenching thing to have to write. Tales of generation ships have fired my imagination for as long as I
can remember. I love all the tropes — the ones where the Earth-like ships are so vast and old that the
inhabitants, descendants of the original crew, have forgotten they're on their way to another star (such as
Robert Heinlein's classic Orphans of the Sky, in which the vessel is launched in the 22nd century). Or the ones where the colonists are all in cryogenic storage and
one is accidentally woken decades early (like Chris Pratt in the much-maligned 2016 movie Passengers).

My favorite of this last kind of story is also my favorite explanation for why we write. In Allen Steele's Coyote (2002) — also set in the 22nd century — a guy in a
generation ship is accidentally awakened a century too early and can't resume his cryogenic storage. He goes mad from loneliness, tries to drink himself to death,
almost throws himself out of an airlock.

So far, so much like Passengers. But instead of doing what Pratt does — creepily stalking and waking a writer played by Jennifer Lawrence, dooming her to the
same fate — this guy decides to become a writer himself. He fills the interior walls of the ship with a fantasy epic, which after his death becomes a myth beloved by
the children of the colonists on their brand-new planet.

Hell of a legacy, right? I think it reflects the feelings of many of us space-loving nerds in the 21st century: we may not get to see the promised land of interstellar
settlement, but we're happy to consume the stories and dream of the days to come when our descendants fly in generation ships through the heavens.

Because it's almost an article of faith, in these faithless times, that this is our future. For example, in every version of the bestselling computer game Civilization, in
which you lead your people over thousands of years from the dawn of history, you win the game by building a generation ship and launching it at Alpha Centauri. It's
literally the most advanced thing the game makers could think of doing.

In 2011, NASA and DARPA (the Pentagon agency that gave birth to the internet) lent their names to a project called The Hundred-Year Starship. Its aim was to
coalesce the space community behind a goal of launching an interstellar mission by your time: 2112. For generation ship dreamers, it was like Christmas had come.

And then along came Kim Stanley Robinson to stomp over all our dreams and tell us that Santa Claus didn't exist.

Robinson is best known in our time as the author of the Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars, all written in the 1990s, the latter two set in your century).
He's what they call a hard sci-fi guy — he talks to the experts in the field, reads the latest research, does his level best to get the science exactly right. For example,
all of his novels set in the 22nd century feature a flooded, post-climate change Earth. (Again, we're really sorry about that.)

Watching a Hundred-Year Starship conference incensed Robinson. "It was a combination of a scam and a religious meeting," he says, "presented with such an
authoritative sheen, such pseudo-science." So he went to NASA Ames, discovered a lot of internal consternation about the agency's involvement with the project,
talked actual planetary science with actual planetary scientists, and published Aurora in 2015.

Aurora was a mic drop of a book — not merely a rebuttal to decades of generation starship stories, but the ultimate case for why we couldn't and shouldn't try to
settle a planet in another star system. It caused a feud between Robinson and elder science fiction authors that hasn't died down since.

"It was like the Starship was made out of plastic, and I had a baseball bat, and I smashed it to smithereens," Robinson told me. "If people had not reacted in anger, I
would have done something wrong. People think humanity going to the stars is a sign that our species has succeeded. But if it's impossible, if it will consistently fail,
then there will be people wandering around feeling like humanity is a failure. It needed to be said."

Because of all this, it's worth taking a little time to recap the first half of Aurora. (I'll try not to spoil too many of the details, but come on — depending on when you're
reading this, you've had between 3 and 185 years to pick it up already.)

It starts with a generation ship getting close to Tau Ceti, which at 12 light years away is probably the nearest inhabitable star system. (In real life, we know now that
Alpha Centauri is "a weird star with weird planets," Robinson says, and probably unsuitable for humans.) Robinson has given his ship every advantage: two rings
full of vast biomes, a Noah's Ark full of every kind of Earth life, and a chief engineer who's a wiz at solving problems.

Still, problems persist. Stuff breaks down. It's a closed biological system, and the essential element phosphorus is leaking out of the soil somewhere — perhaps, the
engineer muses, in the few grams of ash a family is allowed to keep when a loved one dies. Decelerating the ship as it arrives at Tau Ceti is as big a problem as
accelerating it, and is putting all sorts of weird strains on the ship that its designers didn't anticipate. And the next generation of kids is noticeably sicker and less
smart — probably a result of the island effect.

The colonists arrive at the fourth moon of the fifth planet of Tau Ceti, which they name Aurora. It's Earth-like and oxygen-rich, but everything's a little bit off; they
have to contend with near-constant 60 mph winds, a planet in the sky that makes everything way too bright at night, and week-long eclipses. The first arrivals get to
work building shelters and grumble about wanting to take their helmets off — until someone rips their spacesuit, gets sick and promptly dies.

Pretty soon everyone's sick. Something's alive on the planet, something at the bacterial level, and nobody can identify it. Whatever's in the air or water of this alien
planet, it remains beyond the reach of human science — and that's scarier than a thousand bug-eyed monsters.

Back on the ship, a murderous argument breaks out between the people who want to leave Tau Ceti altogether and head back to Earth, and those who want to
remain. (Think Brexit, but with more kidnappings.) A compromise is brokered, and here's where it gets heartbreaking. As the ecology on board continues to break
down, those who head back to Earth are faced with the nightmare of famine — starvation, rations, eating their pets, suicides, the whole bit.

Just in time, news of new technology arrives via radio waves from Earth — not cryogenic storage, exactly, but slowing down the body's system enough that they can
hibernate like bears. But that doesn't translate into perfect Passengers-style sleep. "Bears can and do die in hibernation," Robinson points out, ever the buzzkill.
The difficult maneuvers the ship has to undertake in order to decelerate back home without shooting through the solar system and out the other side manages to kill
a lot of hibernating humans, too.

Back on Earth, folks are blind to the difficulties the ship went through, and at a gathering not unlike the 100-year Starship conference (rather pointedly filled by men
with beards), one guy insists on sending more ships out into the cosmos. One of Robinson's characters punches him in the face.

You can see why pro-colonization authors such as Gregory Benford vehemently objected to Aurora. But they haven't been able to tear down its central argument:
stuff breaks down. The second law of thermodynamics is unbreakable. You can't just put a closed system in space for a century and hope for the best.

And either the planet at the other end is dead, in which case we'll have to spend centuries terraforming it, or it's alive, and its unseen assassins could kill us in a
hundred ways — just as the invaders in War of the Worlds were killed by Earth's bacteria.

I asked Robinson to respond to Benford's accusation, that he put his thumb on the scale to make interstellar colonization look as unworkable as possible. "Well,
God put his thumb on the scale," he said.

In recent years, science has come down hard on Robinson's side of the debate. And that's all thanks to some grisly experiments on mice.

First researchers blasted their little mouse brains with particles similar to cosmic rays, the kind that will bathe any astronaut on a deep space mission. Result: the
mice became noticeably slower, more forgetful, more confused. It's hard to escape the conclusion that space basically gives you dementia. Send a ship to Tau Ceti
and you may not even have an engineer smart enough to fix all the problems by the end of the voyage.

Maybe we can clad our ships with enough protective material to keep our brains safe, but it's hard to keep cosmic rays at bay without Earth's protective
magnetosphere. "There really is no escaping them," said the oncology researcher in charge of the study.

Besides, there's also a problem with our guts. Earlier this month, NASA published more research where mice were blasted with cosmic radiation, this time in their
small intestines. Result: massive GI damage and tumors.

So much for ships that stay out of planetary magnetosphere range for a century or more. At this point, we're not even sure we can make it to Mars without giving
astronauts cancer. No hibernation device is going to save you from a pre-existing disease.

So is that it for the generation ships dream? Will you remember it as a quaint but unworkable sci-fi idea, like Jules Verne sending his fictional explorers to the moon
via a giant cannon? Do we have to be content with remaining in our solar system unless a convenient wormhole to another one pops up, the way it did in
Interstellar?

Kim Stanley Robinson would like to say yes. His position is that the whole concept is a distraction from the essential task of fixing Earth, our current and only
starship. Aurora contains several translations of a single poem about how you have to learn to be less restless and more satisfied with living in one place, but they
all boil down to one succinct phrase: "there is no Planet B."

But then again, as Robinson's environmental chemist wife Lisa Howland Newell gently chides him when he says this, "never say never. Never say impossible. You
don't know."

Perhaps we can colonize other planets in the equivalent of a slow boat to China — a hollowed-out asteroid, with miles of rock providing the best possible cosmic ray
protection. Robinson invented this form of transport, which he called Terraria, in another book, 2312. If we could learn to be self-sufficient within Terraria, we could
travel to the stars in them, albeit in thousands of years rather than hundreds.

There's the option of sending ships with DNA printers that could reconstruct human beings at the other end, although that too would require technology we don't
currently have. Or perhaps we'll locate the perfect planet before we go by sending hundreds of so-called StarChips — tiny, lightweight sensors that could reach Tau
Ceti in a matter of decades. Because you can go a lot faster when you don't have to take humans with you.

Regardless, there's one side of space Kim Stanley Robinson can't kill and doesn't even want to: the imaginary version. "The galaxy is a great story space in the
same way that Middle Earth is a great story space," he says. "You don't have to give up on the galaxy. You can tell these stories, and you can do a little handwaving,
and you can let your imagination roam — and you can say, look, this story takes place 20,000 years from now. Who the hell knows what we will have done in that
time, if we're still around."

May you continue to create and consume tales of the galaxy for as long as you draw breath.

Yours in interstellar imagination,

2018
From THE INTERSTELLAR DREAM IS DYING by Chris Taylor (2018)

GREGORY BENFORD'S CRITIQUE OF ROBINSON'S AURORA

Human starflight yawns as a vast prospect, one many think impossible. To arrive in a single lifetime demands high speeds
approaching lightspeed, especially for target stars such as Tau Ceti, about twelve light years away.

Generation ships form the only technically plausible alternative method, implying large biospheres stable over centuries. Or
else a species with lifetimes of centuries, which for fundamental biological reasons seems doubtful. (Antagonistic plieotropy
occurs in evolution, ie, gene selection resulting in competing effects, some beneficial in the short run for reproduction, but
others detrimental in the long.) So for at least for a century or two ahead of us, generation ships (“space arks”) may be
essential.

Aurora depicts a starship on a long voyage to Tau Ceti four centuries from now. It is shaped like a car axle, with two large
wheels turning for centrifugal gravity. The biomes along their rims support many Earthly lifezones which need constant
tending to be stable. They’re voyaging to Tau Ceti, so the ship’s name is a reference to Isaac Asimov’s The Robots of Dawn,
which takes place on a world orbiting Tau Ceti named Aurora. Arrival at the Earthlike moon of a super-Earth primary brings
celebration, exploration, and we see just how complex an interstellar expedition four centuries from now can be, in both
technology and society.

In 2012, Robinson declared in a Scientific American interview that “It’s a joke and a waste of time to think about starships or inhabiting the galaxy. It’s a systemic lie
that science fiction tells the world that the galaxy is within our reach.” Aurora spells this out through unlikely plot devices. Robinson loads the dice quite obviously
against interstellar exploration. A brooding pessimism dominates the novel.

There are scientific issues that look quite unlikely, but not central to the novel’s theme. A “magnetic scissors” method of launching a starship seems plagued with
problems, for example. But the intent is clear through its staging and plot.

I’ll discuss the quality of the argument Aurora attempts, with spoilers.

Plot Fixes

The earlier nonfiction misgivings of physicist Paul Davies (in Starship Century) and biologist E.O. Wilson (in The Meaning of Human Existence) about living on
exoplanets echo profoundly here. As a narrator remarks, “Suspended in their voyage as they had been, there had never been anything to choose, except methods
of homeostasis.” Though the voyagers in Aurora include sophisticated biologists, adjusting Earth life to even apparently simple worlds proves hard, maybe
impossible.

The moon Aurora is seemingly lifeless. Yet it has Earth-levels of atmospheric oxygen, which somehow the advanced science of four centuries hence thinks could
have survived from its birth, a very unlikely idea (no rust?—this is, after all, what happened to Mars). Plot fix #1.

This elementary error, made by Earthside biologists, brings about the demise of their colony plans, in a gripping plot turn that leads to gathering desperation.

The lovingly described moon holds some nanometers-sized mystery organism that is “Maybe some interim step toward life, with some of the functions of life, but not
all…in a good matrix they appear to reproduce. Which I guess means they’re a life-form. And we appear to be a good matrix.” So a pathogen evolved on a world
without biology? Plot fix #2.

Plans go awry. Backup plans do, too. “Vector, disease, pathogen, invasive species, bug; these were all Earthly terms…various kinds of category error.”

What to do? Factions form amid the formerly placid starship community of about 2000. Until then, the crew had felt themselves to be the managers of biomes,
farming and fixing their ship, with a bit of assistance from a web of AIs, humming in the background.

Robinson has always favored collective governance, no markets, not even currencies, none of that ugly capitalism—yet somehow resources get distributed,
conflicts get worked out. No more. Not here, under pressure. The storyline primarily shows why ships have captains: stress eventually proves highly lethal. Over
half the crew gets murdered by one faction or another. There is no discipline and no authority to stop this.

Most of the novel skimps on characters to focus on illuminating and agonizing detail of ecosphere breakdown, and the human struggle against the iron laws of
island biogeography. “The bacteria are evolving faster than the big animals and plants, and it’s making the whole ship sick!” These apply to humans, too. “Shorter
lifetimes, smaller bodies, longer disease durations. Even lower IQs, for God’s sake!”

Robinson has always confronted the nasty habit of factions among varying somewhat-utopian societies. His Mars trilogy dealt with an expansive colony, while
cramped Aurora slides toward tragedy: “Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped… that the future has only bad options.”

Mob Rules
Should the ship return to Earth?

Many riots and murders finally settle on a bargain: some stay to terraform another, Marslike world, the rest set sail for Earth. The ship has no commander or
functional officers, so this bloody result seems inevitable in the collective. Thucydides saw this outcome over 2000 years ago. He warned of the wild and often
dangerous swings in public opinion innate to democratic culture. The historian described in detail explosions of Athenian popular passions. The Athenian democracy
that gave us Sophocles and Pericles also, in a fit of unhinged outrage, executed Socrates by a majority vote of one of its popular courts. (Lest we think ourselves
better, American democracy has become increasingly Athenian, as it periodically whips itself up into outbursts of frantic indignation.)

When discord goes deadly in Aurora, the AIs running the biospheres have had enough. At a crisis, a new character announces itself: “We are the ship’s artificial
intelligences, bundled now into a sort of pseudo-consciousness, or something resembling a decision-making function.” This forced evolution of the ship’s computers
leads in turn to odd insights into its passengers: “The animal mind never forgets a hurt; and humans were animals.” Plot Fix #3: sudden evolution of high AI function
that understands humans and acts like a wise Moses.

This echoes the turn to a Napoleonic figure that chaos often brings. As in Iain Banks’ vague economics of a future Culture, mere humans are incapable of running
their economy and then, inevitably, their lives. The narrative line then turns to the ship AI, seeing humans somewhat comically, “…they hugged, at least to the extent
this is possible in their spacesuits. It looked as if two gingerbread cookies were trying to merge.”

Governance of future societies is a continuing anxiety in science fiction, especially if demand has to be regulated without markets, as a starship must. (Indeed, as
sustainable, static economies must.) As far back as in Asimov’s Foundation, Psychohistory guides, because this theory of future society is superior to mere present
human will. (I dealt with this, refining the theory, in Foundation’s Fear. Asimov’s Psychohistory resembled the perfect gas law, which makes no sense, since it’s
based on dynamics with no memory; I simply updated it to a modern theory of information.) The fantasy writer China Mieville has similar problems, with his distrust
of mere people governing themselves, and their appetites, through markets; he seems to favor some form of Politburo. (So did Lenin, famously saying “A clerk can
run the State.”)

Aurora begins with a society without class divisions and exploitation in the Marxist sense, and though some people seem destined to be respected and followed,
nothing works well in a crisis but the AIs—i.e., Napoleon. The irony of this doesn’t seem apparent to the author. Similar paths in Asimov, Banks and Mieville make
one wonder if similar anxieties lurk. Indeed, Marxism and collectivist ideas resemble the similar mechanistic theory of Freudian psychology (both invented by 19th
C. Germans steeped in the Hegelian tradition)—insightful definitions, but no mechanisms that actually work. Hence the angst when things go wrong with a
supposedly fundamental theory.

The AIs, as revealed through an evolving and even amusing narrative voice, follow human society with gimlet eyes and melancholy insights. The plot armature turns
on a slow revelation of devolution in the ship biosphere, counterpointed with the AI’s upward evolution—ironic rise and fall. “It was an interrelated process of
disaggregation…named codevolution.” The AIs get more human, the humans more sick.

Even coming home to an Earth still devastated by climate change inflicts “earthshock” and agoraphobia. Robinson’s steady fiction-as-footnote thoroughness brings
us to an ending that questions generational, interstellar human exploration, on biological and humanitarian grounds. “Their kids didn’t volunteer!” Of course,
immigrants to far lands seldom solicit the views of their descendants. Should interstellar colonies be different?

Do descendants as yet unborn have rights? Ben Finney made this point long ago in Interstellar Migration, without reaching a clear conclusion. Throughout human
history we’ve made choices that commit our unborn children to fates unknown. Many European expeditions set sail for lands unseen, unknown, and quite hostile.
Many colonies failed. Interstellar travel seems no different in principle. Indeed, Robinson makes life on the starship seem quite agreeable, though maybe tedious,
until their colony goal fails.

The unremitting hardship of the aborted colony and a long voyage home give the novel a dark, grinding tone. We suffer along with the passengers, who manage to
survive only because Earthside then develops a cryopreservation method midway through the return voyage. So the deck is stacked against them—a bad colony
target, accidents, accelerating gear failures, dismay… until the cryopreservation that would lessen the burden arrives, very late, so our point of view characters do
get back to Earth and the novel retains some narrative coherence, with character continuity. Plot Fix #4.

This turn is an authorial choice, not an inevitability. Earthsiders welcome the new cryopreservation technologies as the open door to the stars; expeditions launch as
objections to generation ships go away. But the returning crew opposes Earth’s fast-growing expeditions to the stars, because they are just too hard on the
generations condemned to live in tight environments—though the biospheres of the Aurora spacecraft seem idyllic, in Robinson’s lengthy descriptions. Plainly, in an
idyllic day at the beach, Robinson sides with staying on Earth, despite the freshly opened prospects of humanity.

So in the end, we learn little about how our interstellar future will play out.

The entire drift of the story rejects Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s “The Earth is the cradle of mankind, but humanity cannot live in the cradle forever.” – though we do have
an interplanetary civilization. It implicitly undermines the “don’t-put-all-your-eggs-in-one-basket” philosophy for spreading humanity beyond our solar system.
Robinson says in interviews this idea leads belief that if we destroy Earth’s environment, we can just move. (I don’t know anyone who believes this, much less those
interested in interstellar exploration.) I think both ideas are too narrow; expansion into new realms is built into our evolution. We’re the apes who left Africa.

Robinson takes on the detail and science of long-lived, closed habitats as the principal concern of the novel. Many starship novels dealt with propulsion; Robinson’s
methods—a “magnetic scissors” launch and a mistaken Oberth method of deceleration—are technically wrong, but beside the point. His agenda is biological and
social, so his target moon is conveniently hostile. Then the poor crew must decide whether to seek another world nearby (as some do) or undertake the nearly
impossible feat of returning to Earth. This deliberately overstresses the ship and people. Such decisions give the novel the feel of a fixed game. Having survived all
this torment, the returning crew can’t escape the bias of their agonized experience.

Paul Davies pointed out in Starship Century that integrating humans into an existing alien biosphere (not a semi-magical disaster like his desolate moon with
convenient oxygen) is a very hard task indeed, because of the probable many incompatibilities. That’s a good subject for another novel, one I think no one in
science fiction has taken up. This novel avoids that challenge with implausible Plot fix #2.

Realistically considered, the huge problems of extending a species to other worlds can teach us about aliens. If interstellar expansion is just too hard biologically (as
Paul Davies describes) then the Fermi paradox vanishes (except for von Neumann machines, as Frank Tipler saw in the 1970s). If aliens like us can’t travel, maybe
they will expend more in SETI signaling? Or prefer to send machines alone? An even-handed treatment of human interstellar travel could shore up such ideas.

Still, a compelling subject, well done in Robinson’s deft style. My unease with the novel comes from the stacked deck its author deals.
From ENVISIONING STARFLIGHT FAILING by Gregory Benford (2015)

KEEPING GENERATIONS ON TRACK 1

Well, indeed. We sit warm, at ease, breathing sweet air, smoking, drinking, snacking as we feel like it. The artificial gravity is a solid one g underfoot, its vector so
aligned that we cannot detect the slight pressure of our acceleration. Nor do we sense the monstrous outpouring of engine energy by which this mass is driven
starward. Modern technology is subtle as well as powerful.

We are not yet at Bussard velocity, where we can begin scooping up interstellar hydrogen to burn in the fusion reactors. But we have enough fuel of our own to
reach that condition, and afterward to brake at interplanetary speeds as we back down on Alpha Centauri. We have a closed biocycle—every'thing essential to life
can be reclaimed and reused indefinitely, for millions of years if need be—which at the same time is expansible. Boats, machines, robots, computers, instruments,
and in the microfiles virtually all the knowledge of all the human civilizations that ever were, lie waiting for us like Aladdin’s genie.

☢
“Very well.” Amspaugh turns to me. “I suppose you know that our single agendum today is educational policy.”

“I'd heard mention of that, " I reply. “ But, uh, what's the rush? The first babies are scarcely born.”

“They'll keep that up, though,” McVeagh reminds me.

Missy Blades murmurs: "‘And thick and fast they came at last, and more, and more, and more.’ Right up to the legal limit of population, whatever that may be at any
given time. It's still the favorite human amusement. ”

Amspaugh takes pipe and tobacco pouch from various pockets and fumbles with them. “The children will grow," he points out earnestly. "They will require schools,
teachers, and texts. The non-controversial basics pose no problem, I imagine—literacy, science, math, et cetera. But even while the pupils are small, they'll also be
studying history and civics. Presently they'll be adolescent, and start inquiring into the value of what they've been
taught. A few years after that, they'll be franchised adults. And a few years after that, they'll be running the society.

“This isn't a planet, or even an asteroid, where people simply live. The voyage is the ship's entire raison d
’étre. Let the ideal be lost, and the future will be one of utter isolation, stagnation, retrogression, probably
eventual extinction. To avoid that, we're uniquely dependent on education.

“We'll only have a thread of maser contact with Sol, years passing between question and answer. We'll only have
each other for interaction and inspiration; no fruitful contacts with different countries, different ways of living and
thinking. Don't you see how vital it is, Mr. Sanders, that our children be raised right? They must have a proper
understanding, not simply of the technology they need, but of the long-range purpose and significance."

Having stuffed his pipe, he pauses to light it. Orloff talks into the silence: “Basically, what we must decide is what
the history courses should include. Once we know that, we have writers who can put it into textbooks, actors who
can put it on tape, and so forth for every level from kindergarten through college. In the absence of outside
influences, those teachings are likely to be accepted, unchallenged, for generations if not forever. So what ought
they to be?”

“The truth," I blurt.

“What is truth?”

“Why the facts what really happened—”

"Impossible," Amspaugh says gently. “First, there are too many facts for any human skull to hold, every recorded
detail of everybody's day-by-day life since ancient Egypt. You have to choose what's worth knowing, and set up a
hierarchy of importance among those data. Already, then, you see your ‘truth’ becoming a human construct.
Second, you have to interpret. For instance, who really mattered more in the long-term course of events, the Greeks or the Persians? Third, man being what he is,
moral judgments are inevitable. Was it right, was it desirable that Christianity take over Europe, or that it be later faced with such enemies as Mohammedanism and
Communism?

"An adult, intellectually trained and emotionally mature, can debate these questions with pleasure and profit. A child cannot. Yet unless you raise the child with a
sense of direction, of meaning, you'll never get the adult. You'll get an ignoramus, or else a spiritual starveling frantic for some True Belief—a potential revolutionary.
Astra can't afford either kind."

“ The problem was foreseen,” Orloff puts in, “ but we purposely delayed considering it till we should have been en route for a while and gotten some feeling of how
this unique community is shaping up."

"I see," I answer. “At least, I think I see.”

“ Details later,” Amspaugh says. “What we must arrive at is a basic educational philosophy. " He gives me a long look. “The original circle of us know each other
quite well. I think, by and large, we can predict what stand everybody will take. That isn't good. We need a wider range of thoughts. lt’s a major reason why we're
inviting new members in, you the latest.

"So would you like to open the discussion?"

From TALES OF THE FLYING MOUNTAINS (prologue) by Poul Anderson (1970)

KEEPING GENERATIONS ON TRACK 2

The problem with generation ships is that younger generations don’t necessarily respect the concerns of older generations.

Those who initially board the ship may enthusiastically embrace the idea of emigrating to a new planet, even if they won’t live to see the planet themselves. They
believe their descendants will thank them for a fresh start away from whatever troubles plagued the old home world.

But children can be ungrateful. Also oblivious. And careless. Numerous generation ships explode or become uninhabitable because the great-great grandchildren of
the original crew can’t be bothered to do preventive maintenance, or forget what certain switches and dials are for. Many more such ships reach their destinations
but never send out a landing party—the task of building farms and cities sounds like dirty complicated hardship, not to mention that children born in a cozy enclosed
vessel may be terrified by the wide open spaces of an entire world. Either the ships remain in orbit indefinitely, or they slingshot once around the planet and head
straight back for home.

To avoid such difficulties, the generation ships of Tau Ceti have developed a technique for keeping younger generations mindful of the first generation’s intentions:
they paint a line down the middle of the ship, thus dividing the ship’s living areas into “Port-half’ and “Starboard-half.” They then organize contests in which Port
children compete with Starboard children for rote memorization of important knowledge (such as how to run the ship, how to survive on an alien planet, and how to
construct farms, roads, etc.).

Children may not care about pleasing their parents, but they’ll do anything to defeat a rival. Therefore, they throw themselves into the job of learning whatever is
required. They organize themselves into study groups, and use peer pressure on their fellows to make sure everyone is working hard. Each formal competition
brings together both sides in keenly fought challenges to remember exactly what they’re supposed to.

Within three generations, violence usually breaks out. Three generations more, and the two halves have calcified into religious orthodoxies that furiously oppose
each other on tiny points of received doctrine. By the time the ship actually reaches its destination, the Port and Starboard communities are eager to land and
establish themselves so they can wage holy war.

Admittedly, this isn’t a perfect solution to preserving commitment and knowledge down through the generations. However, it has ample historic precedent.

From THE EIGHTFOLD CAREER PATH; OR INVISIBLE DUTIES by James Alan Gardner (2003)

GENERATION SHIP PROCREATION VIABILITY

ABSTRACT
To evaluate the feasibility of long duration, manned spaceflights, it is of critical importance to consider the selection and survival of multi-generational
crews in a confined space. Negative effects, such as infertility, overpopulation and inbreeding, can easily cause the crew to either be wiped out or
genetically unhealthy, if the population is not under a strict birth control.

In this paper, we present a Monte Carlo code named HERITAGE that simulates the evolution of a kin-based crew. This computer model, the first of its kind,
accounts for a large number of free parameters such as life expectancy, age range allowed for procreation, percentage of infertility, unpredictable accidents, etc... to
be investigated proactively in order to ensure a viable mission.

In this first paper, we show the reliability of HERITAGE by examining three types of population based on previously published computations. The first is a generic
model where no birth/population control has been set up, quickly leading to fatal overcrowding. The second is the model presented by Moore (2003), that succeeds
to bring settlers to another Earth under a 200 year-long flight, but the final crew is largely diminished (about a third of the initial crew) and about 20% of them show
inbreeding of various levels. The third scenario is the model by Smith (2014) that is more successful in maintaining genetic diversity for the same journey duration.

We find that both the Moore and Smith scenario would greatly benefit from coupling a kin-based crew together with a cryogenic bank of sperm/eggs/embryos to
ensure a genetically healthy first generation of settlers. Finally, we also demonstrate that if initial social engineering constraints are indeed needed to maintain an
healthy crew alive for centuries-long journeys, it is necessary to reevaluate those principles after each generation to compensate for unbalanced births and deaths,
weighted by the inbreeding coefficient and a need for maximizing genetic diversity.

☢
3. SIMULATIONS

In this section, we present the HERITAGE results for three different cases. The first one concerns an interstellar mission without any control on the population level.
The second simulation tests the numbers suggested by Moore [10] and the third simulation investigates the predictions from Smith [12]. For all simulations, the
duration of the flight was set to 200 years and includes an equal number of men and women. The age of the initial crew members follows a normal distribution
centered around 20 years old. The simulations were looped over 100 voyages to obtain sufficient statistics.

3.1 Results for a Uncontrolled Population

It is an ethical and moral question as to whether a permanent control over the breeding selection and the number of child can be accepted by a multi-generational
crew. In the case of an absence of control, the number of children per women might be more important and we fixed the default parameter to a mean of 3 children
(with a standard deviation value of unity). By using a Gaussian distribution of children per woman, we ensure that there is a reasonable number of offspring per
woman, avoiding illogical situations where the crew would constantly seek for reproduction. However, we let the size of the population and its genetic diversity
uncontrolled, so that there is no enforced regulation of breeding and no self-imposed lower limits by the crew either. We allowed the crew members to breed as
soon as they turn 18 years old until the natural limit of menopause. We stress that this is something of a worst-case scenario: the crew aren’t concerned with
managing resources and have no taboos against incest, which is not realistic. This is a purely theoretical scenario to see how fast the mission could fail without
strict controls.

(ed note: start with 75 men and 75 women. Average number of births per woman: 3. Age of start of procreation: 18. Age of end of procreation 45. Ship capacity 500
people)

Figure 2 shows the evolution of the population within the interstellar ship over 200 years. It appears that the number of crew members steadily increases over time
until a sudden disaster reduces the populace by a third. This is due to the sudden disaster that happened at the 75th year of travel. The population soon recovers
as nothing prevents breeding so the number of offspring continues to rise. The growth of population is almost exponential at the end as nothing, except inbreeding
(not restricted in this section), can stop the multiplication of humans.

The limited number of crew members at the beginning of the mission drives the emergence of consanguinity within the offspring. The first generation of crew
members born inside the vessel starts to reproduce regardless of the family affiliation and the inbreeding coefficient reaches a high value (21.00%) as soon as 30
years after launch.

In conclusions, an uncontrolled crew is likely to develop at a dangerous rate, inducing potentially high consanguinity. Because of the lack of self-imposed limits by
the crew, the colony ship can be overcrowded within 25 years, driving the mission to a fatal end due to the probable development of diseases, a scarcity of food and
internal conflicts due to overpopulation and loss of personal space. We agree with the original findings from Moore: the mission necessitates a control of birth rates
in order not to saturate the space ship. Postponing parenthood until late in the women’s reproductive life is one viable option to delay overcrowding.

FIGURE 2: UNCONTROLLED POPULATION

Crew population for a 200 years long trip with no birth control. Population exceeds ship
capacity after about 25 years. Drop at 75 years is due to a random disaster

☢
3.2 Results for a Moore-Like Population
Based on ETHNOPOP modeling, Moore speculated that a population of 150 – 180 people could survive a 200 years long travel if their reproductive cycle was
restricted to a finite number of child per woman. In this case, the couples were only allowed to reproduce at an advanced age, clustering the population into discrete
age groups, limiting the number of non-productive people within the vessel. Additionally, age clustering helps to maintain genetic variation by lengthening the
generations, resulting in smaller sibships.

(ed note: start with 75 men and 75 women. Average number of births per woman: 2. Age of start of procreation: 35. Age of end of procreation 40. Ship capacity 500
people)

We find that the social engineering principles of Moore work well: births are clearly identified as peaks in the demographic spectra, compensated by a certain
number of deaths shortly after. However the birth/death equilibrium is not maintained using those strict numbers. The number of crew members decreases slowly
with time, only slightly impacted by the catastrophic event predicted by Smith (see Fig. 6). Contrary to what Smith postulated [12], a Moore-like population can
absorb the loss of 30% of its human population on a short period of time. However, if the social engineering principles are not adapted, the crew is doomed to
extinction for longer trips. Nevertheless, at the end of the journey, there is still a crew of about 56 people, with almost the same number of males and females (29
women and 27 men on average).

The biggest problem concerns the appearance of inbreeding at high levels during the interstellar travel. As seen in Fig. 9, age clustering helps reducing the average
level of consanguinity: since procreation can only happen when a settler is at least 35 years old, and lasts for 5 years, it becomes impossible for a daughter to mate
with her father, as the father will be well beyond the allowed procreation window. However, inbreeding due to cousin/cousin or brother/sister breeding is still
possible, together with other combinations. Hence, the maximum inbreeding coefficient reaches 16.51% at the emergence of the second generation of space-born
children. The coefficient remains high during the last years of the journey, with an average consanguinity factor (measured from only those who show a non-zero
coefficient) ≥ 6%, above the security threshold (5%). More alarming is the fraction of the crew showing inbreeding, about 19.74% at the end of the simulation: this
means that about one-fifth of the crew has a deleterious inbreeding coefficient.

In short, the numbers suggested by Moore allow a multigenerational crew to cover a 200 years long journey even if a sudden disaster impacts the space ship. The
demographic sampling of the population thanks to well-defined social engineering concepts works as expected but cannot maintain a genetically healthy crew until
the end of the mission. In order to help the offspring to develop without genetic disorders, the social principles must be re-assessed at each generation, according to
the needs of the crew. As an example, a selective breeding program could potentially fully restore the genetic health of the population.
 FIGURE 6: MOORE-LIKE POPULATION

☢
3.3 Results for a Smith-Like Population

The last model to be investigated is the one presented by Smith [12]. In his paper, statistics applied to large numbers and a unique MATLAB simulation are used to
check whether a crew can be healthy after a 150 years long trip. Smith found that it is possible only if the founding population number lies between 14000 and
44000 crew members. In comparison to Moore studies, Smith accounted for effects of mutation, migration, selection and drift, and found that a larger initial
population is necessary to compensate genetic catastrophes. To test his predictions, we thus put an initial crew of 7000 women and 7000 men in the code and
increased the colony ship capacity to 50000, in order to have a similar crew/capacity ratio with the two previous studies of this paper. All other parameters are the
same

(ed note: start with 7,000 men and 7,000 women. Average number of births per woman: 2. Age of start of procreation: 35. Age of end of procreation 40. Ship
capacity 50,000 people)

We plot in Fig. 10 the evolution of this crew over 6 new generations. Except for the higher numbers, the evolution of the Moore-like population and the prediction by
Smith is very similar, albeit the sharp variation due to the catastrophic event (that we selected to occur at the same time as in the two previous cases, but the reader
must bear in mind that it can happen anytime over the whole 200 years). At best the ship is only at about 54.25% of its maximum capacity and, similarly to the
Moore-like scenario, the population shows a steady decline to end the journey with about 6171 people, which represents ~44.08% of the initial crew. Compared to
the fraction of humans reaching destination in the section above (~37.33%), the Smithlike population appears to be better resilient to a long voyage. However, the
lack of revision of the initial social engineering principles throughout the journey causes the number of deaths to be unbalanced by the number of births. It is a
consequence highlighted by the Monte Carlo approach, as not every woman will give birth to two offspring while every male and female will eventually die.

Results are quite different regarding inbreeding. While the consanguinity coefficient rises sharply after the second generation (12.38% at maximum), the averaged
inbreeding coefficient drops to ~6% at the third generation and stabilizes until the end of the journey. More importantly, the fraction of crew members showing
inbreeding is very small in comparison to a Moore-like population (< 0.22%), which is negligible. The gene diversity from a much larger initial crew prevents the
appearance of a large inbred subset of the crew.

The Smith-like population appears to be more efficient in mixing the genetic pool in order to ensure a safe sixthgeneration to arrive on an exoplanet without severe
inbreeding. The large number of initial crew members is more adapted to resist a sudden disaster and even with a severe catastrophe the viability of the mission is
not compromised. However, there is a steadily decline of the population that indicates a potential risk for the long-term health of the colony. This is due to the non-
adaptivity of the initial social engineering principles that cannot counterbalance the number of deaths and births.

FIGURE 10: SMITH-LIKE POPULATION

4. CONCLUSIONS
As a primary test, we explored three different scenarios: 1) a population that is not under a strict birth/population control, 2) a Moore-like (small crew) population,
and 3) a Smith-like (large crew) population. The first scenario fails to reach the destination due to overcrowding. Without birth control or population limits, the ship’s
crew capacity is exceeded after two generations. Starvation and internal conflicts will lead to the failure of this scenario. The second scenario successfully reaches
destination with a reduced crew (about a third of the initial crew) but inbreeding within the crew members drives about one-fifth of the settlers to be genetically
unhealthy. It is also very unlikely that a Moore-like population can survive much longer space voyages6. Finally, the third scenario is the only one to achieve the
goal of the mission: bringing a genetically healthy crew to another distant planet, despite the fact that a small percentage (< 0.22%) of the spatial settlers have a
non-zero inbreeding coefficient.

As noted in the introduction, viable genetic material can be frozen and preserved for long durations (in principle indefinitely, though there could be a failure rate over
time). This means that even a tiny crew could carry enough genetic material to entirely prevent inbreeding even on long timescales, and would avoid the potential
difficulties of creating artificial wombs and the problems of a lack of human parents to raise the children. Sociologically there’s never been a population born entirely
from in vitro fertilization (IVF), which also has a much greater probability of multiple births (though, by staggering when each crew member is fertilized, the
population numbers can still be controlled). Although IVF is a complex medical procedure which may not be suitable aboard a very small ship, fertilization from
stored sperm is very much simpler. However, it may not be desirable for the mission to have to rely on this method - either sociologically or technologically.

Contrary to what was predicted, all three scenarios are resistant to a sudden disaster that destroys a third of its population. The establishment of social engineering
principles can easily compensate for the loss of population. Yet, it is unsure how a real crew would agree with drastic measures. In addition, the Moore-like and
Smith-like scenarios have a clear decreasing trend over the trip duration, meaning that the initial social engineering principles should not be carved in stone but
must evolve according to the population level at a given time. A potential consequence of this conclusion is that either a hierarchical organization or the entire ship
community should work on regular revisions of the initial principles. The need for enforced social rules might drive debates and delays in defining the new social
principles if a democratic vote is applied, as there would probably be a panel of non-compatible suggestions. The question of a hierarchical structure has strong
 implications, as it can result in a military structure with representatives of the non-democratic selection of the breeding principles. However, the social order of the
spacecraft is beyond the scope of the paper and we therefore limit ourselves to mentioning this problem.

In conclusion, this paper has shown that a Moore-like or a Smith-like population are both viable prospects, especially if the starship includes a cryogenic bank of
frozen sperm, eggs or embryos to ensure the creation of a colony with a new generation of genetically healthy settlers. However, strict social engineering principles
are driving the population of the vessel towards extinction. There is a necessity for adaptive (i.e. to be re-assessed every generation) social engineering principles.

☢
10. J.H. Moore, “Kin-based crews for interstellar multi-generational space travel”, in Interstellar Travel and Multi-Generation Space Ships, K. Yoji, F. Bruhweiler, J.
Moore and C. Sheffield (Eds.), Interstellar Travel and Multi-Generation Space Ships, Collectors Guide Publishing, Burlington, Ontario, Canada, pp.80-88, 2003.

12. C.M. Smith, “Estimation of a genetically viable population for multigenerational interstellar voyaging: Review and data for project Hyperion”, Acta Astronautica,
97, pp.16–29, 2014. doi:10.1016/j. actaastro.2013.12.013.
From HERITAGE: A MONTE CARLO CODE TO EVALUATE THE VIABILITY OF INTERSTELLAR TRAVELS

USING A MULTI-GENERATIONAL CREW

by Frédéric Marin (2017)

Alter Metabolism

A variation of the "Increase Lifespan" technique was in Charles Sheffield's Between The Strokes Of Night. A technique was
discovered that would allow human metabolism to enter the "S-state." In this state, humans age at a rate 1/2000th normal, and perceive
things at the same rate. There was also a protocol that would return an S-state person back to normal metabolism.

So with ships traveling at a slow 10% light speed, the trip to Proxima Centauri seems to take only a few weeks to an S-state person. Of
course to a human in normal state, the trip will take about forty years.

As far as the S-state person is concerned, the ships are travelling faster than light. As long as they always stay in S-state.

To an S-state person, a normal state person moves so fast that they are invisible. To a normal state person, an S-state person appears to be immobile, though they are
actually moving very very slowely. Of course to an S-stater all those normal state persons grow old and die 2000 times faster.

BETWEEN THE STROKES OF NIGHT

"I'll tell you one thing I still don't understand," Peron said. "When I was in S-space, I felt as though I was in a one-gee environment. Now we're in exactly the same
part of the ship, but we're in freefall. I don't see how that can happen."

There was silence for a while, then Kallen made a little coughing noise. "T-squared effect," he said softly.

"What?"

"He's quite right," Sy said calmly. "Good for you, Kallen. Don't you see what he's saying? Accelerations involve the square of the time—distance per second per
second. Change the definition of a second, and of course you change the perceived speed. That's why they can travel light-years in what they regard as a few days.
But you change perceived acceleration, too—and you change that even more. By the square of the relative time rates—"

"—which is another reason the Immortals don't go down to the surface of planets," said Lum. "They want to spend their time in S-space to increase their subjective
lifespans, but then that forces them to live in a very weak acceleration field. They can't take gravity."

"Not even a weak field," added Rosanne. "They'd fall over before they even knew they were off balance. What did you say the time factor was?—two thousand to
one? Then even a millionth of a gravity would be perceived by them as a four-gee field. They have to live in freefall. They have no choice about it. But they perceive
a four-millionth of a gee as normal gravity."

Peron looked around him in disgust. "All right. So everybody saw it easily except me. Try another one. Tell me what's going on outside the ship. One reason I
thought at first that S-space had to be some kind of hyperspace was the view from the ports. When you look out, you don't see stars at all. All you see is a sort of
faint, glowing haze. It's yellow-white, and it's everywhere outside the ship."

This time there was not even a moment's pause.

"Frequency shift," said Sy at once. "Let's see. Two thousand to one. So the wavelengths your eyes could see would be two thousand times as long. Instead of
yellow light at half a micrometer, you'd see yellow at a millimeter wavelength. Where would that put us?"

There was a hush.

"The Big Bang," whispered Kallen.

"The three degree cosmic background radiation," said Rosanne. "My Lord. Peron, you were seeing leftover radiation from the beginning of the Universe—actually
seeing it directly with your eyes."

And it's uniform and close to isotropic," added Lum. "That's why it looked like a general foggy haze. At that wavelength you don't get a strong signal from stars or
nebulae, just a continuous field."

"But it can't be that straightforward." Sy frowned. "The pupils of our eyes provide too small an aperture to deal with millimeter wavelengths. There has to be a lot
more to S-space modification than the obvious changes."

From BETWEEN THE STROKES OF NIGHT by Charles Sheffield (1985)

Increase Lifespan

Finally there is the "Methuselah" concept. Advances in medical technology might increase human lifespan to thousands of years. So
prolonged interstellar trips are more a problem of boredom instead of life-span.

If men, and not merely their machines, are ever to reach the planets of other suns, problems of much greater difficulty will have to
be solved. Stated in its simplest form, the question is this: How can men survive a journey which may last for several thousand years?
It is rather surprising to find that there are at least five different answers which must be regarded as theoretical possibilities—however
far they may be beyond the scope of today’s science.

Medicine may provide two rather obvious solutions. There appears to be no fundamental reason why men should die when they do. It
is certainly not a matter of the body “wearing out” in the sense that an inanimate piece of machinery does, for in the course of a single year almost the entire fabric
of the body is replaced by new material. When we have discovered the details of this process, it may be possible to extend the life span indefinitely if so desired.
Whether a crew of immortals, however well balanced and psychologically adjusted, could tolerate each other’s company for several centuries in rather cramped
quarters is an interesting subject for speculation.

(ed note: the other medical solution is suspended animation)

 From THE PLANETS ARE NOT ENOUGH by Arthur C. Clarke (1955)

NO-DIE

"Now we come to one of the more sobering aspects of our journey," said Jinjur. "Dr. Wang, could you please
give us a short medical briefing."

"Certainly," said Dr. Wang, smiling as he rose and took Jinjur's place at the podium. "This expedition is a long one.
Longer than the normal life-span of the human body, even with all the medical advances we have made. Therefore,
after the initial launch phases of the mission, we will all be treated with the life-extending drug, No-Die. When it has
thoroughly saturated our tissues, it will slow our aging process to one-fourth of normal rate. Thus the forty years that it
will take for us to travel to Barnard will only produce ten years of aging in our bodies.

"Unfortunately, our intelligence will also be lowered by roughly the same factor (this complication was added by the
author for dramatic purposes). That is why No-Die is not used more on Earth. Fortunately, you all have been picked as
persons with higher than normal intelligence, so that the No-Die will merely reduce your functional level to that of a
small child. We will have a semi-intelligent computer on board to keep us out of trouble during the trip out. It will stop
administering the No-Die as we approach Barnard so that we will be back to normal intelligence when we arrive.

"As for sexual matters. The engineers cannot make Prometheus go any faster. So even if they designed the
system for a round-trip journey, No-Die couldn't stave off death long enough to bring us back alive. Thus, this trip is a
one-way journey for all of us. The planets there are not habitable without using highly technical life-support systems to
protect us against the poisonous atmospheres, so this cannot be a colonization mission. There must be no children
born during the mission, and since we cannot count on your intelligent cooperation during the No-Die phase, all of you
will have to undergo surgical operations to ensure that your reproductive organs are blocked."

☢
"We're finally on our way," said Jinjur. "I guess it's time."
Everyone looked uncomfortable.
"I wonder if we'll notice it?" asked George.
"According to most clinical studies of No-Die," said Doctor Wang. "The effects come on so gradually that most
users have no idea they are mentally impaired, unless they are asked to do some difficult task. But even then, there is
a tendency to believe it is only because they are 'tired' or 'sick', not because the No-Die has slowed their mental
processes."
"I'll be just as happy to be fooled," said Jinjur. "I don't think I could stand knowing I was a drooling idiot."
"It won't be that bad," said Dr. Wang. "We all have high IQ's to begin with. Even when we are reduced to twenty-five percent of normal, we'll still be high-grade
imbeciles and can probably even button our own clothing."
David noticed some disgusted expressions and tried to cheer them up.
"Besides, even if we forget how to tell our right shoe from our left, we still have 'Mother' James and the Christmas Bush to take care of us. It can button our
shirts, tie our shoes, and wipe our noses."
Jinjur spoke to her imp. "Start putting the No-Die in the water, James."
"It is done," replied a low whisper.

☢
(ed note: several decades into the mission)

"Laser beam contact!" the computer announced to General Jones, its normally soothing baritone taking an imperative edge.
"Wha?" murmured Jinjur, rousing from her stupor in front of a video screen displaying an old John Wayne battle movie. Deep within her mind she sensed a
martinet screaming at her, "Wake up, you idiot! You're in charge!" She shook her head... This was no way for a commander to act. She floated clumsily across the
control deck to pull herself into the central command seat.
"Report ship status, James!" she rasped in a weak imitation of her parade voice.
James spoke through her hair imp. "I detect low energy laser beams from Earth. It is time to stop. I quit putting No-Die in your water a month ago. It is now time
for the rest of the crew to be taken off." There was a slight pause as the friendly voice of the computer took on a formal note. "As Commander, you have the
authority to countermand this prearranged plan, but you will have to elucidate your objections in detail."
Jinjur blinked at the last few confusing words as James dropped back into his normal voice, "But you do want me to stop the drug, don't you, Jinjur?"
Appalled by her mental weakness at this critical juncture, Jinjur grabbed her thick cap of fuzzy hair and shook her head with her muscular black arms, trying to
wake the numbed brain inside. "Yes! Yes! Do it! Flush out the tanks, get rid of that stuff! I want to be me again!"
"Take it easy, Jinjur," said James. "I'll do it right away. It will take a few months, however, before everyone recovers completely. I'll be looking forward to it. It sure
has been dull playing nursemaid to a bunch of ageless imbeciles."

From THE FLIGHT OF THE DRAGONFLY aka "Rocheworld" by Dr. Robert E. Forward

Laser Sail
In Dr. Robert L. Forward laid it all out in his classic paper "Roundtrip Interstellar Travel Using Laser-Pushed
Lightsails," Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets 21 (1984), pp. 187–195.

The secret is using a Laser Sail, which you will recall is a photon sail beam-powered by a remote laser installation.

The advantage is the starship does not have to carry the mass of the engine and the propellant, you leave it at
home. This makes the task of designing the starship merely incredibly difficult, instead of utterly impossible.

The home system can also add to the laser batteries gradually after the starship's journey starts, as needed (the
inverse-square law will weaken the beam as the range increases). You cannot do this with a self-contained
starship, all of its engines have to be built before the journey starts.

And if a home system's laser battery or two break down, no problem! The resources of the home system are
available to fix it. If a self-contained starship engine breaks down on the other hand, they are in trouble. They do
not have the resources of the home system to help, all alone in interstellar space. They have to fix it themselves
with whatever spare parts they managed to bring along. Or die all alone in the night.

The disadvantage is the starship is at the mercy of whoever is in charge of the laser station back in the Solar
System. If there is a revolution back home and the Luddites seize power, the starship and crew are up doo-doo
pulsar with no gravity generator. Dr. Forward came up with two clever ways of using the home system's lasers to Artwork by Adrian Mann
decelerate the starship into the target solar system. In Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's classic The Mote In God's
Eye the Motie aliens laser sail starship rather pointedly do NOT use Dr. Forwards deceleration methods, because they absolutely do not trust the laser station
controllers back at their homeworld. In Dr. Forward's The Flight of the Dragonfly aka "Rocheworld" political foot-dragging and short-sighted policies almost lead to
disaster for the laser station and starship. In Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes's Encounter With Tiber politics does kill the laser station and starship.

BRAKING THE HARD WAY

“Light sail!” Rod shouted in sudden realization. “Good thinking.” The whole bridge crew turned to look at the Captain. “Renner! Did you say the intruder is moving
faster than it ought to be?”

“Yes, sir,” Renner answered from his station across the bridge. “If it was launched from a habitable world circling the Mote.”

“Could it have used a battery of laser cannon?”

“Sure, why not?” Renner wheeled over. “In fact, you could launch with a small battery, then add more
cannon as the vehicle got farther and farther away. You get a terrific advantage that way. If one of
the cannon breaks down you’ve got it right there in your system to repair it.”

“Like leaving your motor home,” Potter cried, “and you still able to use it.”

“Well, there are efficiency problems. Depending on how tight the beam can be held,” Renner answered.
“Pity you couldn’t use it for braking, too. Have you any reason to believe—”

☢
“Captain, look,” he said, and threw a plot of the local stellar region on the screen. “The intruder came
from here. Whoever launched it fired a laser cannon, or a set of laser cannon — probably a whole mess
of them on asteroids, with mirrors to focus them — for about forty-five years, so the intruder would have
a beam to travel on. The beam and the intruder both came straight in from the Mote.”

☢
(ed note: the lightsail was accelerated by lasers from its homeworld. But it braked by diving into New
Cal's sun.)

“But that’s the point: it’s not right, Captain,” Renner protested. “You see, it is possible to turn in
interstellar space. What they should have done—”

The new path left the Mote at a slight angle to the first. “Again they coast most of the way. At
this point” — where the intruder would have been well past New Cal — “we charge the ship up
to ten million volts. The background magnetic field of the Galaxy gives the ship a half turn, and
it’s coming toward the New Caledonia system from behind. Meanwhile, whoever is operating the
beam has turned it off for a hundred and fifty years. Now he turns it on again. The probe uses
the beam for braking.

“You sure that magnetic effect would work?”

“It’s high school physics! And the interstellar magnetic fields, have been well mapped, Captain.” They didn't do it this way, even though they should have.
Unless you don't trust the guys back home...
“Well, then, why didn’t they use it?”

“I don’t know,” Renner cried in frustration. “Maybe they just didn’t think of it. Maybe they were afraid the lasers wouldn’t last. Maybe they didn’t trust whoever they
left behind to run them. Captain, we just don’t know enough about them.”

(ed note: spoiler alert: the answer is they didn't trust who they left behind to run the laser cannons. So when it came to braking, they did it the hard way.)

(ed note: In Mallove and Matloff's The Starflight Handbook, they note that if the interstellar magnetic fields have not been well mapped, this scheme could
potentially doom the starship to a lonely death.)
From THE MOTE IN GOD'S EYE by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (1975)

AT THE MERCY OF HOMEWORLD

(ed note: the laser transmitter lens was big enough to launch the starship. But the size of the lens has to be increased
for the deceleration phase. Evil political hack Senator Winthrop manages to steal GNASA's budget for expanding the
mirror so he can funnel it into tobacco farmer subsidies in his home state.)

Senator Beauregard Darlington Winthrop III was in his third term of office, and as Chairman of the Senate
Appropriations Committee he wielded an influence only slightly less potent than the Senate Majority Leader. GNASA
officials winced when they heard that budget-hearing time was coming around again.

"Now. Ah'm sure you honorable gentlemen realize that this nation, as rich and as glorious as it is, cannot afford every
space boondoggle there is. Ah trust that you've come up with a budget that realizes that there are people here on the
ground that desperately need money to keep their family businesses alive..."

"He probably means subsidies for the tobacco farmers," thought the Honorable Leroy Fresh, as he prepared to defend
GNASA's budget before the committee.

"There is one item that the Chairman noticed in the preliminary reports that he would like to question the Honorable
Dr. Fresh about, if he may." Without waiting for a reply, Winthrop continued. "I notice this line-item number one
hundred eight, for four hundred million dollars to expand the transmitter lens for the Barnard laser propulsion system. I
didn't notice that in the previous year's budget, and since the mission is not slated to reach Barnard for another twenty
years or so, surely this item could be deferred a year or two to release a few funds to succor the poor people of this
nation?"

Leroy was ready for this one. "May I remind the Chairman, the reason the item was not in last year's budget was
that it was removed by the Senate Appropriations Committee, as it has each year for nearly the past decade.
The transmitter lens doesn't have to be full size at the start of the mission, and can be built slowly as time
passes and the Barnard expedition moves further away, but the lens must be made ready for the deceleration
phase, which requires it to be at maximum diameter. The amount of money in the budget is that needed to
bring us back on schedule."

"But the lasers are turned off, and the Barnard lightsail is merely coasting on its way to its destination. Surely we can
defer work on the lens expansion since it's not being used. Especially since I notice in line-item one hundred ten the
fifty million dollars for the construction of the Tau Ceti lens. The increase in diameter planned for each lens is fifty
kilometers. Surely that indicates that they should have equal budgets. Perhaps we should just make those two lens-
construction items both equal in size at fifty million?" Senator Winthrop looked around at his committee and smiled.

"Is that agreeable, gentlemen? ...Oh, yes. Excuse me, Madam Ledbetter. Is that agreeable, gentlemen and lady?" He
raised a blue pencil and scratched away at his copy of the budget.

"But Senator Winthrop, Sir," Leroy protested. "The Ceti lens is going from a diameter of twenty kilometers to seventy
kilometers, while the Barnard lens is going from three hundred and twenty to three hundred and seventy kilometers.
Even though both have the same increase in diameter, the increase in area of the Barnard lens is eight times
larger than that of the Ceti lens. The cost goes as the square of the diameter."

"Well, Ah must admit Ah'm a little 'square' when it comes to that scientific math, Dr. Fresh, but Ah'm pretty good at
figures when they have a dollar sign in front of them." There was a polite laugh at the Chairman's joke from the
committee and staff. Fresh was silent, knowing that he had lost another skirmish. "After all," said Senator Winthrop
with a smile that seemed entirely sincere over the TV cameras. "That's what we have you scientific types at GNASA
for, to take care of all that 'square root' and 'cube root' type math stuff. And Ah must say," he said, with only a trace of
sarcasm, "You've been doing an excellent job on an austere budget—like the true Greater American patriots that you
are. Now, let's go on to line-item one hundred thirty-three, the million-channel receiver to search for signals from
aliens. Surely a single channel is all that you need. It's obvious. One receiving antenna, one receiving channel..."

(ed note: the stupid, it burns!)

☢
 (ed note: things start to unravel, and Evil Senator Winthrop frantically looks for a way to avoid his fate )

"As Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, what are your plans for completing the transmitter lens for the
Barnard star expedition so the crew can be brought safely to a halt?"

Winthrop didn't know the details, but he wasn't stupid. There was no way that the transmitter lens could be completed
in time. Twenty years ago the construction of the lens had been stopped just short of one-third-diameter. The lens had
to be nearly full-sized if the deceleration technique were to work. Since the diameter had to be tripled, the area had to
increase nine times. Although the ship would not need to start decelerating at Barnard for nearly eight years, the light
beam to carry out that deceleration had to be on its way across the six lightyears between here and there only twenty-
four months from now. There wasn't enough time. That g*******d Gudunov was doomed.

☢
(ed note: Evil Senator Winthrop gets his just desserts, and the new pro-space congress tries to repair the damage )

The first action of the new chairman was to call for testimony from the newly appointed head of the Space Agency, the
Honorable Perry Hopkins.

"I'm pleased to have you with us today, Dr. Hopkins," said Senator Rockwell. "I know we're all concerned about our
brave crew that are approaching Barnard, ready to stop. Now, in the past, this committee, under the leadership of our
distinguished Minority Leader..." here Senator Rockwell turned to nod to Senator Winthrop down near the end of the
table, "...found it expedient for the sake of the small farmers of this nation to defer certain items of expenditure for the
space program. We realize that this may have caused you some problems in the past and we want you to know that
the time has come for the space program to receive the resources that it needs to carry out its mission. Tell us. What
do you need to bring this great nation's crew of astronauts to a successful conclusion of their epic voyage?"

☢
"I wish I could tell you, Senator Rockwell," he started. "But I'm afraid I can't. And I can't because there is no answer.
The previous GNASA administrators have reported to this committee an infinite number of times that work needed to be done on the Barnard transmitter lens. But
that... (careful now, Perry, calm down)... the previous chairman always felt it could be postponed until some future date. Well, gentlemen, that date was two years
ago."

"Do you mean to tell me that there is no way to allow our brave crew to come to a safe landing at their destination?" said Senator Rockwell.

"I don't mean to be melodramatic, Mr. Chairman. And I have exercised my staff for alternatives, but unless someone comes up with a miracle, that crew is as
good as dead."

"But surely with a crash effort..."

"There are only so many robots in space, and due to the low demand for space robots, there is only one space robot factory," said Perry. "Even if we
could speed up the production line by five times, and even if we had some magical way to transport those robots instantly over the ten astronomical
units to the transmitter lens and put them all to work, there isn't enough web and plastic in the solar system to make up for twenty years of neglect. At
best we could get the lens up to sixty percent of the necessary diameter. Even if the lasers were up to power, that would only suffice to strand the crew
some two lightyears beyond Barnard, with no hope of getting back. I'm sorry to bring you such bad news, gentlemen, but it's the best I have!"

☢
(ed note: spoiler alert: they managed to save the crew. Somebody invented a nonlinear material that would frequency triple, turning three infrared photons {at fifteen
hundred nanometer frequency} into one green photon {at five hundred nanometer frequency}. If a laser beam has its wavelength cut by one-third then a lens of a
given size can sent it three times as far. So while the existing transmitter lens is only ⅓rd the size it need be for an infrared laser beam, it is just the right size for a
green laser beam.)
From THE FLIGHT OF THE DRAGONFLY aka "Rocheworld" by Dr. Robert E. Forward

Starwisp

Starwisp is an ultra-low mass interstellar probe, a tiny sail driven by a beam of microwaves. The concept was invented by Dr. Robert L. Forward, and expanded upon
by Dr. Geoffrey A. Landis.

Dr. Forward assumed that the microwave beam would be efficiently reflected by starwisp, so he calculated it would be a superconducting metal mesh with a sail mass of
16 grams and a payload mass of 4 grams; total mass of probe is 20 grams. Dr. Landis found this turned out not to be the case, it would absorb quite a bit of microwaves
and heat up (i.e., the design is thermally limited). In Dr. Landis' design the starwisp is woven out of carbon wires with a sail mass of 1,000 grams, a payload mass of 80
grams, and a diameter of 100 meters.

Acceleration is 24 m/s2, microwave lens 560 km in diameter transmitting 56 GW of power, accelerating the probe to 10% of the speed of light.

Yes, it probably could be weaponized. See Accelerando by Charles Stross.

From Time Magazine April 10, 2000

Click for larger image
 Another form of beamed power propulsion uses beams of microwaves to drive the starship. Microwave energy has the great advantage that it can be made and
transmitted at extremely high efficiencies, although it is difficult to make narrow beams that extend over long distances. Because of the short transmission range,
the starship being pushed by the microwave beam must accelerate at a high rate to reach the high velocities needed for interstellar travel before the starship gets
too far from the transmitting system (which means it can be weaponized). The accelerations required are larger than a human being can stand, so microwave
pushed starships seem to be limited to use by robotic probes. There is one design that looks quite promising. I call it Starwisp, because of its extremely small mass.

Starwisp is a light-weight, high-speed interstellar flyby probe pushed by beamed microwaves. The basic structure of the Starwisp robotic starship is a wire mesh sail
with microcircuits at the intersection of the wires. The microwave energy to power the starship is generated by a solar powered station orbiting Earth. The
microwaves are formed into a beam by a large fresnel-zone-plate lens made of sparse metal mesh rings and empty rings. Such a lens has very low total mass and
is easy to construct.

The microwaves in the beam have a wavelength that is much larger than the openings in the wire mesh of the Starwisp starship, so the very lightweight perforated
wire mesh looks like a solid sheet of metal to the microwave beam. When the microwave beam strikes the wire mesh, the beam is reflected back in the opposite
direction. During the reflection process, the microwave energy gives a push to the wire mesh sail. The amount of push is not large, but if the sail is light and the
power in the microwave beam is high, the resultant acceleration of the starship can reach hundreds of times Earth gravity. The high acceleration of the starship by
the microwave beam allows Starwisp to reach a coast velocity near that of light while the starship still close to the transmitting lens in the solar system.

Prior to the arrival of Starwisp at the target star, the microwave transmitter back in the solar system is turned on again and floods the star system with microwave
energy. Using the wires in the mesh as microwave antennas, the microcircuits on Starwisp collect enough energy to power their optical detectors and logic circuits
to form images of the planets in the system. The phase of the incoming microwaves is sensed at each point of the mesh and the phase information is used by the
microcircuits to form the mesh into a retrodirective phased array microwave antenna that beams a signal back to Earth.

A minimal Starwisp would be a one kilometer mesh sail weighing only sixteen grams and carrying four grams of microcircuits. (The whole spacecraft weighs less
than an ounce—you could fold it up and send it through the mail for the cost of first class postage.) This twenty gram starship would be accelerated at 115 times
Earth gravity by a ten gigawatt (10,000,000,000 watt) microwave beam, reaching twenty percent of the speed of light in a few days. Upon arrival at Alpha Centauri
some twenty years later, Starwisp would collect enough microwave power from the microwave flood beam from the solar system to return a series of high resolution
color television pictures during its fly-through of the Alpha Centauri system.

Because of its small mass, the ten gigawatt beamed power level needed to drive a minimal Starwisp is about that planned for the microwave power output of a solar
power satellite. Thus, if power satellites are constructed in the next few decades, they could be used to launch a squadron of Starwisp probes to the nearer stars
during their "checkout" phase.

From Indistinguishable from Magic by Robert Forward (1995)

Laser-Pushed Lightsail

So your gigantic laser battery at home pushes the laser sail starship to its destination, accelerating it to about half the speed of light. Presumably you want to stop at
your destination instead of streaking through it at 0.5c. But how?

If you were going about an order of magnitude slower, you might be able to use the sunlight from the destination star to put on the brakes. However that ain't gonna be
enough at 0.5c. You'll just pancake into the star at a substantial fraction of the speed of light and be vaporized.

Dr. Philip Norem had a clever idea. Interstellar space has large magnetic fields. So one can use large electrical charges on the starship to make huge light-year wide
sweeping turns by the Lorentz force.

Say you were going to Alpha Centauri. You aim the starship not at the destination, but instead off to one side. How far off depends upon the starship's turning radius.
The laser battery back at the solar system pushed the starship up to relativistic velocities over the next 27 years or so. Then the lasers turn off.

The starship deploys one hundred metal cables, each about 50,000 kilometers long. It then charges them up to 800,000 volts and 3.7×104 coulombs. This is timed to
interact with the interstellar magnetic field (as mapped) so that the starship makes a huge gradual turn, until it is approaching Alpha Centauri from the back door. That is,
so that a line drawn from the starship to Alpha Centauri will pass directly through the solar system and the laser battery.

Meanwhile, the solar system laser battery starts up its barrage long enough in advance so that the leading edge of the laser wavefront will reach the starship just as it is
aligned properly. It then continues the barrage for the years required to bring the starship to a halt exactly at Alpha Centauri.

In Mallove and Matloff's The Starflight Handbook, they note that if the interstellar magnetic fields have not been well mapped, this scheme could potentially doom the
starship to a lonely death. If the starship misses the beam, it just goes sailing off into the Big Dark. The Starflight Handbook has the equations for a starship using the
Lorentz force, if you are interested.

SUPERGREEN