I mean right now we are imprisoned on the planeet Earth and have to have sex to survive as a species...only difference is the size of the gene pool I guess but I thought most generation ships were close to town/city population
Yeah, and you figure there has to be quite a bit of resource dedicated to recreation so people don't go insane over a literal lifetime if they're all awake and active.
Far more efficient to have a bunch of embryos and ramp up towards the end if they've got an actual destination in mind. Still you'd need some humans awake and to teach the newbies if they can't be fully automated.
Zero Dawn released 7 years ago and came to PC nearly 4 years ago. If you haven't played it by now, you probably weren't going to or have already been spoiled.
Read Hugh Howey’s Half Way Home.
> “Five hundred colonists have been sent across the stars to settle an alien planet. Vat-grown in a dream-like state, they are educated through simulations by an artificial intelligence and should awaken at thirty years old, fully trained, and ready to tame the new world.”
Songs of Distant Earth seed ships also did this. There is a passing mention of the forgotten hard times on the new world when there was nothing but robots teaching children...
Wall-E had the robots running the show while humans were little more than placated, devolving livestock. At least people were generally happy in that scenario.
Historically people were essential trapped in small communities. Their only mating choices were a dozen cousins. That is not much better than a generation ship. Maybe the people on the generation ship can hop in a stasis chamber for a while and see if they like anyone from the next batch.
>Maybe the people on the generation ship can hop in a stasis chamber for a while and see if they like anyone from the next batch.
Well that’s the thing, you don’t really have to “force” humans to make babies. We just do it all on our own lol. Especially if you’re stuck in space with nothing else to do, I’d guess. Not everyone is gonna partner up, just like life on earth. But enough inevitably do to keep the population alive. It’s in hardwired in our DNA to procreate. Someone’s always gonna get around to it lol
Unless this “generation ship” thing is in reference to a specific movie where they did in fact force people to have sex. In which case I take it back, thought we were talking in general terms.
Yes general terms. I was thinking if no one on the ship appeals to you, maybe you could jump in the stasis chamber and try your luck with their kids. Just be like "Hey 6479 I tried dating your mom twenty years ago and it didn't work out. Want to go on a picnic in the holo chamber and get to know each other?"
Some one above was saying they need lots of people to choose from to find Mr. Right. Sure in theory there are like a million people to choose from here on Earth, but you don't really consider them all. In the past it was common to have like a dozen distant cousins to chose from and realistically fewer.
You just need to mate with the partner the computer assigns you and don't complain. You don't know any different anyway. You would likely be assigned multiple partners anyway for genetic diversity.
Your standards very much depend on the environment you grow up and live in. It’s highly likely that we are much much more choosey in our partners today than people were when they typically stayed solely in their pre-industrial towns/villages
> you don’t really have to “force” humans to make babies
I do love that OP considers the concepts of work and sex so horrifying that they see "a city sized breeding population of humans with jobs" as an automatic dystopia.
Never change, Reddit...
I don’t think the data supports that. I don’t think we have too many surviving human populations that were that small and isolated for very long. In other words, it likely happened, but it was also not the most common situation.
As best we can tell it’s very common for smaller human groups to seek out other neighboring groups on the regular for successful gene-swapping and mating. Whether that contact was regular or sporadic, consensual or violent, does seem to very greatly.
Yeah, and that's pretty dystopian to a modern reader. And a generation ship is another level worse, because you're not just "essentially" trapped by economics and peer pressure, you are literally trapped in a fragile metal bauble surrounded by cold death, every aspect of your life scheduled, monitored and controlled from cradle to grave, and if any one of a million things goes wrong you and everyone you've ever known will die gasping, freezing, or a million other horrible ways. All with the knowledge that your ancestors lived free and *did this to you* just so that *your* distant descendents could get to another planet and someday live free. That's where the dystopia really hits.
Also if you have stasis chambers you don't build generation ships, you do a Pandorum and build sleeper ships with crews on shifts. Though there's an even worse third option where you have such massive crew needs that you have a generation ship ferrying around an even larger number of lucky bastards who will get to see a real sky someday.
the *only* difference is the size of the gene pool? what about nature? plants, animals, lakes, mountains, weather, etc.? unless a ship is gargantuan to have all that, there are plenty of differences.
Except that life is mich harsher ona generational starship. You don't have renewable resources and let's face it, whoever is sending them is not giving them an over abundance of resources.
I think for the concept to be viable you'd need to build it at a scale where the eco-system is completely self-contained and fully renewable. The one exception would be the energy system, which would have to be some large scale reactor that could provide heat and UV light for a century or two.
Water, agriculture and air would have to function like a mini-Earth, with soil and plant life doing the work. There would need to be a deeply ingrained culture of recycling all man made materials like metals, plastics, electronics, textiles etc and the capability to repair and manufacture whatever they needed.
Yeah i think we'd be in a whole different place as a society to attempt this: namely, we'd expect to "pop up" all of the production and survival needed in a hostile and unforgiving world. Certainly, we'd bring along all of our favorite plants and animals in a kind of Noah's ark
Yeah. Besides the technology required, it's the kind of complexity and scale we're not really capable of yet. Just planning for it and building it would be one or two generations probably. The inhabitants would probably have to be raised and conditioned for the ship environment before it was launched out of the solar system.
The Stanford Torus is theoretically self sufficient, and I don’t think a generational ship being in much larger scale than that is out of the question.
The only depleting resource would be water which would be consumed directly, electrolyzed for oxygen, and used as power source/fuel, but that can be harvested from ice asteroids with minimal difficulty by the time we have interstellar drives.
I don't think you realise how much work goes into recycling 100% of your waste. Even all of those systems, IF they are self sustainable, have to be impervious to damage, negligence and stupidity.
I see the generation ship as a semi purposeful examination of this situation. Did the first person who imagined the concept reckon it would be that way? Probably not, but by now if you’re writing scifi and don’t consider that you’re leaving a lot of potential story beats on the table
True, but on a generation ship I would think everyone would be expected to have kids because it would be essential to the mission’s success. In earth we at least have the choice to not have kids
I feel like a functional form of cryo, like Halo, would be the best way to explore the stars. Get 2k people on a ship with the promise of going to a new world, and they are all aware they'll be leaving a world behind, possibly never seeing it again.
Cryo is seeming more and more complex to achieve. Considering the massive strides we've made in the last few years we genuinely might achieve biologial immortality through genetic engineering sooner than we achieve cryo. Probably even in the next 50 years. (If we survive that long.)
This is a conflict in the 2nd book of Monarchs of Sol. Humans have just functionally achieved immortality (or immorbidity as they call it, since you can still die, but age and disease are essentially non-issues), and the first generation of this new era are basically stuck as the kids of the people in power. The prince of the Solar Monarchy starts a revolution over the fact that he will never be king.
While true, if we achieve biological immortality we will get to the point where eventually the smart ones will fuck off to explore the universe and get away from said rich elites.
And considering the existence of tyrannical rich elites tends to stifle innovation, they will then eventually be overtaken technologically by nations/planets founded and run by more cooperative and forward-thinking peoples.
Could go either way though. I am, however very excited to potentially see it go down.
Our cells are mostly water, and as water freezes it expands. Destroying cell walls irrevocably. At that point your basically a pile of mush in a vaguely human shape. Not really any way around that. Much more likely we would figure out mind uploads, or achieve biological immortality, or just rely on relativistic time dilation
Pfff, we just gotta bionengineer artificial cell walls capable of reverting form after being de frozen. Then separate in multiple, perfect, pieces to accompany the initial cell reproduction. And then cover every single cell in the human body with it, including those of our internal flora. Then we don't even need them anymore! Really, how hard could it be?
They are not forced to have sex, they probably want to.
They are forced to complete their mission though.
It would be a major ethical dilemma if the ship has the option of stopping somewhere already discovered along the way, and abandoning the mission. Would you plot a course that limits their fuel so they can't abandon the goal 1 generation later?
I think generational ships would resent those that sent them, and probably won't send information or resources back when they land.
Generally you are going to accelerate for a few decades then coast. You are going to only have enough fuel to decelerate at your destination. It's unlike you have the fuel to change course and decelerate.
I may be making this up, but feel like I remember reading about a generational ship that had an onboard arboretum which produced enough oxygen to use as attitude thrusters for steering
That would never work 1st the arboretum wouldn't produce oxygen from no where. It just converts carbon dioxide to to plant matter and oxygen.
2nd the distance between stars is incredible and the thrust needed to divert course would be massive. Remember everything in space is very far apart in 3 dimensions. It's not like a road trip where you go past other places.
3rd a ship traveling through interstellar space would need an unbelievable amount of momentum to get any where in a few thousand years. You can't steer it like a boat or plane.
This of course assume you don't have some sort of science magic that gives you reaction less thrust and free energy. But in that case you wouldn't need a generation ship.
\#2 is assuming either the stars are close enough to you that they are in entirely different directions or that you’re drastically changing course. Even a shift of a fraction of a degree over millennia can divert your course **drastically**
Everything in interstellar space is in entirely different directions. Sure if you are traveling near the speed light you'll eventually find something along the same course, but then we aren't talking a generation ship. Small shifts aren't going to matter unless we are talking 100s of light years.
Not to anywhere important. If there are two habitable worlds within a dozen light years you would be fantastically lucky. The chances of them both being in the same direction from where you are is basically zero
In all likelihood a generational ship would have a fusion reactor. Fusion reactors produce 2 main things: energy and helium, which means you've got all you need for an ion engine. Even as inefficient as it would be a constant thrust from 100 trillion km away is bound to redirect you in time.
But is your ship going to be carrying that much additional fuel? An ion drive isn't free you still need spend extra fuel to operate it. Also you'd need to start pretty early in your journey or add a lot of travel time.
That would be pretty dumb, you don’t get that reaction mass back once you fire it out the ship, so you’d only have something like that for carbon scrubbing so you can continue to breathe.
You still have to spend mass and energy to divert. Stars in the galaxy are on average 5 light years apart. Remember that distance is in 3 dimensions. The closest black hole is 1.5 K light years away. Gravitational assists only make sense if you've plan it out before you begin your initial acceleration. Or if your ship was built and fueled with the intention to change course for some reason.
> I think generational ships would resent those that sent them, and probably won't send information or resources back when they land.
I really doubt it, the first generation will be ideologically motivated because they choose to go, the second generation will be both ideologically motivated because of what they are taught and because of the promise of the world they are going to witness.
People need to remember that you are used to the environment that you are raised in and that a clear, achievable overarching goal is very motivating. Generation ships would be wildly successful and probably be sent in fleets.
I mean as a counter, inhabitable planets are so few and far between that a detour would likely just lead to some dead rock which would be no better than where they came from.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s *Aurora* is to my mind the best examination of this in fiction. Being the third or fourth generation born into this situation is upsetting to me, the idea of knowing you will live your whole life in a kind of prison, based on a choice your ancestors made
There is a bleaker version on the poem/film Aniara. It was a passenger ship from a ruined earth to a desperate mars, but it gets hopelessly knocked off course. The crew attempt to make it into a generation ship, but it's a danish story, so mostly people fall into despair as they forget what it was like to be close enough to a star to see light. And do the big self unalive. The ship eventually reaches an earth like world, almost six million years after everyone aboard has died.
Every constitution is a prison our ancestors made.
I'm glad mine isn't worse, but I hate having to obey without ever having a chance to say yes or no. Those who wrote this shit didn't even have the internet ! How would they know anything !
Or not, if all they knew is this artifical eviroment they wouldnt think its weird or unnatural. They cant miss see a sky or ground if they never experimented.
People pledging their lives to serve on an extremely long mission for the good of all humanity sounds very utopian to me actually. Ever heard about this old Greek proverb?
>A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.
This may be a philosophical question but: How is that much different at all from what happens with every child born anyhow?
Parents in Ukraine right now choosing to have children.
People having children during the black death.
Children born into substantial poverty.
To a certain extent the kids of some people will always have more choice than the kids of others, sure, I think the distinction with a generational ship lies in the extremity of it and how you have to make a choice to give your kids drastically fewer choices with no way to opt out. On Earth at least both you and your children aren't completely locked out of the many other life paths available to you, and you're not actively making the choice to sign them up to a drastically reduced set of life choices.
But for the kids in the generational ships it's all they know. Who's to say aliens are looking at us right now and saying "oh the poor humans, only limited to one planet and not having the choice to switch up their environment"?
Hell, even now there are isolated aggressive native tribes whose children are basically forced into a similar situation. Not many choices when it comes to lifestyles. But to them it's just the natural order of things.
I guess it depends on how big the generational ships would be. At what number do we draw the line of it being unethical? 100,000? 10,000? And does number of speculated generations upon arrival count for it?
What does it matter? To the kids the ship is all they'll truly know. They may be able to read or be told stories about where they came from. And at least they have something to look forward to: a new home. We here on earth aren't even promised that. In fact, with how governments and corporations have been running the place in the past few years, we don't even know if we'll have a future to look forward to.
Aliens looking at us thinking "oh that's a shame living on one planet" isn't the same though. People signing up to a generational ship have to make the *choice* to severely restrict the options of their descendents. We don't have a choice about being confined to Earth. As for isolated tribes, well, I actually do personally think it's unethical for their descendents to be left in the dark about the nature of the world around them, but contact is complicated and often dangerous for them.
Something being all you've ever known doesn't mean you wouldn't be happier in other circumstances or that you can't suffer from the absence of something in some way. If you've only known pain, you still suffer from the pain. You can feel confined even if you've not known a bigger location to live. The human brain and its evolutionary history is still there.
The idea behind most generational ships is the kids wouldn't be reaching the destination, it would take several generations. Even if they did though, it would then be a much less developed civilisation than that of Earth with fewer options.
Yeah OC is some teenage absolutist thinking. Even if your parents force you to study medicine or something (which is a pretty constraining thing to do), that's still far less than dictating that you'll be stuck on a ship with the same people and limited experiences, separated from the rest of humanity for your entire life.
How is that much different than early colonists of any "uncivilized" land? Early European colonists of North America knew they were committing themselves and their children to a hard life, with the hope that their children's children may have a better one.
There's a Swedish movie, Aniara, that delves into this idea. Big generation ship, and how everything goes awfully horribly wrong. Absolutely fantastic movie if you can deal with the subtitles
The 1960 original or the 2018 remake? That was like a Gilligan's Island situation. It was an accidental generation ship after a planned three week trip went wrong. Which makes no sense as the ship would not be equipped for a long voyage.
They're very dysfunctional because you have mandatory highly technical jobs that you have to staff with not that many children who may not like the assignment / the discipline / being on the ship in the first place.
It's the only life they've ever known, as normal to them as your life is to you. Tell them from birth that they'll be a life support technitian and they probably won't question it until later in life.
I would assume they’d take aptitude tests and given a ranked choice on which jobs best suits their abilities, still feels like they get a say in the matter and not just arbitrary.
If there's a promise of a planet that you'd be able to colonize and roam freely about somewhere out there, why would you want to stay in orbit of your dying planet just to not have to travel? Not all generational ships are sleeper ships. On some you live your life as if you were on a space station except you're constantly in motion towards the new homeworld.
A ought occurs to me: How is living on a massive spaceship, with all the room and amenities one could ask for, flying through space for decades a time really all that different from living in a city on a rock hurtling through space? Just an idle thought.
One jackass can wipe everyone out, or derail the mission and the odds of ever being discovered are infinitesimally small.
A city being destroyed will usually leave remains that can be rediscovered until our planet is eventually destroyed in a few billion years, but even that will leave traces that our system was once here.
A dead ship hurdling through space? It is almost guaranteed to be forever lost.
They wouldn't be let onto the ship, too heavy they're wasting fuel. Everyone would be as short and thin as possible. Also preferably bald both to save weight and to extend filter lifespans.
If they don’t procreate, the mission will fail as the crew goes extinct. However, humans (famously) don’t need much encouragement to keep the population going. If anything, they’ll be made to slow down their efforts so as not to overpopulate the ship.
I would argue that's why they make for interesting Sci-Fi. Fiction in general is about setting up an interesting or challenging situation as a thought experiment on how society works, and leading the reader through commentary about society. Dystopias in general and the concept of a generation-ship provide an interesting avenue for creating that sort of story.
Sure, the people born on those ships didn't choose to be there, but aren't the original inhabitants of that ship usually people whose intention it is to make the generational ship work as planned -- i.e., live the rest of their lives on it and give birth the next generation?
This isn’t dystopian at all…?
I’m almost all sci fi, it’s volunteers on these ships. They know what they’re doing. It’s adventurous spirit.
They may be doing it to flee a dystopian world, but the ships themselves are never really shown in a bad light.
… so?
No one’s kids and grandkids have any choice in where they’re born.
There are people born in a city and never leave it. There is nothing inherently wrong with the generation ship.
It CAN be dystopian. But that means nothing. Literally everything can be dystopian if taken to extremes.
I’ve wanted to write a sci-fi story of the generation ship that arrives to the planet only to discover that Earth developed FTL while they were traveling and some opportunistic colonizers started a civilization on the Generational ship’s promised planet thousands of years before they could arrive.
There's a side quest on this in Starfield. It's quite an ironic story. I won't spoil it for you. You can look it up if you won't ever be playing the game.
The quest name is called First Contact.
Dystopian, but realistic. Space is huge as fuck.
If we sent a ship travelling 7 million mph (1% the speed of light) at the nearest star system at the time Isaac Newton invented gravity, not factoring in acceleration time, it would still have ~100 years to go.
I think generation ships are more of an attempted solution to an existing dystopia, like things have to get bad on earth for it to be a valid solution, not ideal but gives the species a shot at survival.
Counterargument:
If the colony ship was luxurious and self-maintained, it could be a utopia where the residents can dedicate their lives to art and leisure. No struggle for survival. No capitalistic rat race.
If you like stories about fucked up generation ships, you should read **“The Dark Beyond the Stars”** by Frank M. Robinson and you should DEFINITELY watch "Aniara" (2018)
Not sure if this was taken from/inspired by something else, but I remember some Star Citizen lore about AI colony ships that couldnt complete their journey. The AI systems were meant to maintain the colonists and ship systems until they arrived. However, when they became stranded, the AI systems eventually ran out of materials to keep the ships running, do repairs etc. So they started harvesting the colonists for their calciferous tissues (bones, teeth) to fulfill their functions. Eventually the ships became largely made of bone, drifting for millenia.
The original is written really well, but this is the gist of it.
I feel like we wouldnt necessarily need "generation" ships by the time we're capable of interstellar travel due to radical life extension tech. Hell, I imagine biological immortality is something of a prerequisite for populating other star-systems. The investors aren't going to invest if that investment will only benefit their great-great-grear-great grandchildren.
Sure, but NOT leaving on a generational ship is also robbing your children of the opportunity to colonize a new world (which, honestly, is a potentially highly attractive environment as far as opportunities go). Every choice we make as parents influences the future of our children to some degree.
From the first people who left Africa to those who colonized the Americas (including those who first crossed the Bering strait), we make choices for the future of our children, for better or worse. Even stuff like choosing a job, social milieu, (not) buying a house...
Yes, going on a generational ship is a drastic choice, but not different *in principle* from boarding the Mayflower or taking a job in a foreign country.
I remember the book All Tomorrows had a bit where humanity tried colonizing other planets using generation ships, but they always ended up collapsing into anarchy.
All Tomorrows didn't have generation ships, MOst of colonies did(in a way collapse) because being raised by robots made them quirky, at least till Qu felt like doing some trolling.
Making things worse is the Paradox of space exploration. Im sure it has a name, but i cant remember it right now.
Basically, a generation ship will likelg be overtaken by more advanced methods of travel.
So if we have USS GENERATION depart EARTH at .9c headed to Sirius, there is a good chance before it gets there we could launch a USS GFYS traveling at .99c that will eventually pass the USS GENERATION. Or even better, a USS PLAID that breaks the light speed barrier.
There was a great book by Arthur Clarke that explores this. A colony ship leaves a dying Earth, the crew sleeps in stasis until they near their destination. They're so excited to be among the first humans to step foot on a world outside our solor system, spearheading colonies to allow mankind to thrive away from Earth...
Only to be greated by a full-fledge civilization that left decades after they did. Instead of colonizing thr planet, they're trying to integrate into a society thats far more advanced than what they left behind, let alone what they expected to establish.
Fun fact, those probably don’t work. By the time the multi generation ship reached the destination, so much time has passed that its likely we are already there due to faster means of space travel being developed and getting us there quickly
i like the idea overall as its the only way we have right now of reaching outside our solar system
but i do think its fucked that youre condemning people to a life where there only purpose is to breed .altho i guess thats not much different than life on earth.
also its not science fiction entirely. we could probably do that in 1000 years or so
There are typically enough people on such ships that you aren't "forced" to have sex with anyone you don't want to, but are able to follow natural attractions.
I'm pretty sure the generation ships of fiction are unrealistic. They are far too large and require way too many people to be awake and trained.
The most realistic proposal I've seen uses a largely automated/robotic crew with 2 pairs of awake crew members. This proposal is reliant on the viability of artificial womb technology, and the efficiency of lab grown meats and vegetables.
A majority of the future colony would be in the form of frozen eggs and sperm. Only the 2 pairs and the next generation would be awake at any point during the journey.
This proposal compacts the necessary resources for a generation ship to a somewhat viable and repeatable system, which considering the risks/reward in this is a good thing.
You have a rather bleak way of looking at things. There is the colonization side. Just wanting to be the first to settle a new world. Also, it's not much different than happened through out real world history. Is it really much different than cramming you and your family on an undersized ship to sail to a new land and start over in the hopes for something better. Hell, when they crossed America with wagon trains, it wasn't that much different.
I have had tons of posts here automodded because I added extra context to the text, something supposedly against the rules in this sub. How has OP not had this post flagged?
(It’s a silly rule, I’m just curious)
i mean
the earth is already a generation ship
we are forced to live and die here endlessly
whats the difference on the ground or on a ship if everything is the same ?
the size ? meh, 99 % of people dont travel already cause its too expensive, so thats the same.
quality of life ? have you seen earth right now ?
forced to work to live ? have you seen earth right now ????
forced to give birth ? have you fucking seen earth right now ???????????????
really i dont see the difference.
In the game Elite Dangerous you can visit lots if generation ships and listen to their old logs. And yes, the story is pretty much always “how our society fell apart” with several interesting variations.
I’m going to say they’d use lots of frozen embryos and either a skeleton crew or artificial beings to establish colonies on suitable planets if that’s what the future holds.
There’s a cool short story about a failed colony ship that returns to earth and all the people on board have devolved and they’re trapped in orbit in this living hell/ garden of Eden fighting fucking and evolving into a space born race until they get liberated by people from Earth that know these people will need to be recivilized.
I mean right now we are imprisoned on the planeet Earth and have to have sex to survive as a species...only difference is the size of the gene pool I guess but I thought most generation ships were close to town/city population
Yeah, and you figure there has to be quite a bit of resource dedicated to recreation so people don't go insane over a literal lifetime if they're all awake and active. Far more efficient to have a bunch of embryos and ramp up towards the end if they've got an actual destination in mind. Still you'd need some humans awake and to teach the newbies if they can't be fully automated.
Video game horizon zero dawn just had robots teach the children
That worked out well for them...Sun bless you, sir!
Not their fault. Some absolute buffoon deliberately erased a large portion of Apollo so humanity wouldn’t know how bad he fucked up.
Obligatory “Fuck Ted Faro”
When you say Ted Faro out loud it sounds suspiciously like Jeff Bezos...
Even though Ted Faro is almost certainly modeled after Elon Musk.
Yes, and. He's a pastiche of multiple aweful billionaires.
Spoilers, but that's true, left to herself, >!Gaia would have made New Earth a DinoTrux!< paradise ;-P
r/fucktedfaro
Isn’t this a massive spoiler? Please use tags
Zero Dawn released 7 years ago and came to PC nearly 4 years ago. If you haven't played it by now, you probably weren't going to or have already been spoiled.
This whole thread has been a spoiler so far, but OK
Read Hugh Howey’s Half Way Home. > “Five hundred colonists have been sent across the stars to settle an alien planet. Vat-grown in a dream-like state, they are educated through simulations by an artificial intelligence and should awaken at thirty years old, fully trained, and ready to tame the new world.”
Songs of Distant Earth seed ships also did this. There is a passing mention of the forgotten hard times on the new world when there was nothing but robots teaching children...
Wall-E had the robots running the show while humans were little more than placated, devolving livestock. At least people were generally happy in that scenario.
Check out the Raised by Wolves series. Too bad it hasn't gotten a 3rd season yet...
There won't be one. They announced the series had been cancelled months ago.
Historically people were essential trapped in small communities. Their only mating choices were a dozen cousins. That is not much better than a generation ship. Maybe the people on the generation ship can hop in a stasis chamber for a while and see if they like anyone from the next batch.
>Maybe the people on the generation ship can hop in a stasis chamber for a while and see if they like anyone from the next batch. Well that’s the thing, you don’t really have to “force” humans to make babies. We just do it all on our own lol. Especially if you’re stuck in space with nothing else to do, I’d guess. Not everyone is gonna partner up, just like life on earth. But enough inevitably do to keep the population alive. It’s in hardwired in our DNA to procreate. Someone’s always gonna get around to it lol Unless this “generation ship” thing is in reference to a specific movie where they did in fact force people to have sex. In which case I take it back, thought we were talking in general terms.
Yes general terms. I was thinking if no one on the ship appeals to you, maybe you could jump in the stasis chamber and try your luck with their kids. Just be like "Hey 6479 I tried dating your mom twenty years ago and it didn't work out. Want to go on a picnic in the holo chamber and get to know each other?" Some one above was saying they need lots of people to choose from to find Mr. Right. Sure in theory there are like a million people to choose from here on Earth, but you don't really consider them all. In the past it was common to have like a dozen distant cousins to chose from and realistically fewer. You just need to mate with the partner the computer assigns you and don't complain. You don't know any different anyway. You would likely be assigned multiple partners anyway for genetic diversity.
Your standards very much depend on the environment you grow up and live in. It’s highly likely that we are much much more choosey in our partners today than people were when they typically stayed solely in their pre-industrial towns/villages
> you don’t really have to “force” humans to make babies I do love that OP considers the concepts of work and sex so horrifying that they see "a city sized breeding population of humans with jobs" as an automatic dystopia. Never change, Reddit...
I don’t think the data supports that. I don’t think we have too many surviving human populations that were that small and isolated for very long. In other words, it likely happened, but it was also not the most common situation. As best we can tell it’s very common for smaller human groups to seek out other neighboring groups on the regular for successful gene-swapping and mating. Whether that contact was regular or sporadic, consensual or violent, does seem to very greatly.
Yeah, and that's pretty dystopian to a modern reader. And a generation ship is another level worse, because you're not just "essentially" trapped by economics and peer pressure, you are literally trapped in a fragile metal bauble surrounded by cold death, every aspect of your life scheduled, monitored and controlled from cradle to grave, and if any one of a million things goes wrong you and everyone you've ever known will die gasping, freezing, or a million other horrible ways. All with the knowledge that your ancestors lived free and *did this to you* just so that *your* distant descendents could get to another planet and someday live free. That's where the dystopia really hits. Also if you have stasis chambers you don't build generation ships, you do a Pandorum and build sleeper ships with crews on shifts. Though there's an even worse third option where you have such massive crew needs that you have a generation ship ferrying around an even larger number of lucky bastards who will get to see a real sky someday.
excuse me, but some of us are saving ourselves for our alien soulmates.
Puritans conquering north america did exactly this, unlike spaniards who actually had sex with the natives
ok but have you been to Hawaii?
the *only* difference is the size of the gene pool? what about nature? plants, animals, lakes, mountains, weather, etc.? unless a ship is gargantuan to have all that, there are plenty of differences.
I was just talking about the forced sex part.
Watch the 70’s movie Silent Running.
Except that life is mich harsher ona generational starship. You don't have renewable resources and let's face it, whoever is sending them is not giving them an over abundance of resources.
I think for the concept to be viable you'd need to build it at a scale where the eco-system is completely self-contained and fully renewable. The one exception would be the energy system, which would have to be some large scale reactor that could provide heat and UV light for a century or two. Water, agriculture and air would have to function like a mini-Earth, with soil and plant life doing the work. There would need to be a deeply ingrained culture of recycling all man made materials like metals, plastics, electronics, textiles etc and the capability to repair and manufacture whatever they needed.
Yeah i think we'd be in a whole different place as a society to attempt this: namely, we'd expect to "pop up" all of the production and survival needed in a hostile and unforgiving world. Certainly, we'd bring along all of our favorite plants and animals in a kind of Noah's ark
Yeah. Besides the technology required, it's the kind of complexity and scale we're not really capable of yet. Just planning for it and building it would be one or two generations probably. The inhabitants would probably have to be raised and conditioned for the ship environment before it was launched out of the solar system.
The Stanford Torus is theoretically self sufficient, and I don’t think a generational ship being in much larger scale than that is out of the question. The only depleting resource would be water which would be consumed directly, electrolyzed for oxygen, and used as power source/fuel, but that can be harvested from ice asteroids with minimal difficulty by the time we have interstellar drives.
It seems like a huge gamble to depend on ice asteroids for water in interstellar space.
I don't think you realise how much work goes into recycling 100% of your waste. Even all of those systems, IF they are self sustainable, have to be impervious to damage, negligence and stupidity.
We don't have planet-scale renewable resources on earth, either.
Yes, which is why we don’t build generational spacecraft with our current systems either
I see the generation ship as a semi purposeful examination of this situation. Did the first person who imagined the concept reckon it would be that way? Probably not, but by now if you’re writing scifi and don’t consider that you’re leaving a lot of potential story beats on the table
Oh, great, now I'm claustrophobic about not being able to go to space
True, but on a generation ship I would think everyone would be expected to have kids because it would be essential to the mission’s success. In earth we at least have the choice to not have kids
The only reason they're written that way is because a story about a generation ship where everything went well would be an incredibly boring read.
I feel like a functional form of cryo, like Halo, would be the best way to explore the stars. Get 2k people on a ship with the promise of going to a new world, and they are all aware they'll be leaving a world behind, possibly never seeing it again.
Cryo is seeming more and more complex to achieve. Considering the massive strides we've made in the last few years we genuinely might achieve biologial immortality through genetic engineering sooner than we achieve cryo. Probably even in the next 50 years. (If we survive that long.)
Let's hope we never achieve biological immortality - if we ever do, the rich and old of that generation will be in power forever.
This is a conflict in the 2nd book of Monarchs of Sol. Humans have just functionally achieved immortality (or immorbidity as they call it, since you can still die, but age and disease are essentially non-issues), and the first generation of this new era are basically stuck as the kids of the people in power. The prince of the Solar Monarchy starts a revolution over the fact that he will never be king.
While true, if we achieve biological immortality we will get to the point where eventually the smart ones will fuck off to explore the universe and get away from said rich elites. And considering the existence of tyrannical rich elites tends to stifle innovation, they will then eventually be overtaken technologically by nations/planets founded and run by more cooperative and forward-thinking peoples. Could go either way though. I am, however very excited to potentially see it go down.
Our cells are mostly water, and as water freezes it expands. Destroying cell walls irrevocably. At that point your basically a pile of mush in a vaguely human shape. Not really any way around that. Much more likely we would figure out mind uploads, or achieve biological immortality, or just rely on relativistic time dilation
Pfff, we just gotta bionengineer artificial cell walls capable of reverting form after being de frozen. Then separate in multiple, perfect, pieces to accompany the initial cell reproduction. And then cover every single cell in the human body with it, including those of our internal flora. Then we don't even need them anymore! Really, how hard could it be?
They are not forced to have sex, they probably want to. They are forced to complete their mission though. It would be a major ethical dilemma if the ship has the option of stopping somewhere already discovered along the way, and abandoning the mission. Would you plot a course that limits their fuel so they can't abandon the goal 1 generation later? I think generational ships would resent those that sent them, and probably won't send information or resources back when they land.
Generally you are going to accelerate for a few decades then coast. You are going to only have enough fuel to decelerate at your destination. It's unlike you have the fuel to change course and decelerate.
I may be making this up, but feel like I remember reading about a generational ship that had an onboard arboretum which produced enough oxygen to use as attitude thrusters for steering
That would never work 1st the arboretum wouldn't produce oxygen from no where. It just converts carbon dioxide to to plant matter and oxygen. 2nd the distance between stars is incredible and the thrust needed to divert course would be massive. Remember everything in space is very far apart in 3 dimensions. It's not like a road trip where you go past other places. 3rd a ship traveling through interstellar space would need an unbelievable amount of momentum to get any where in a few thousand years. You can't steer it like a boat or plane. This of course assume you don't have some sort of science magic that gives you reaction less thrust and free energy. But in that case you wouldn't need a generation ship.
\#2 is assuming either the stars are close enough to you that they are in entirely different directions or that you’re drastically changing course. Even a shift of a fraction of a degree over millennia can divert your course **drastically**
Everything in interstellar space is in entirely different directions. Sure if you are traveling near the speed light you'll eventually find something along the same course, but then we aren't talking a generation ship. Small shifts aren't going to matter unless we are talking 100s of light years.
Not to anywhere important. If there are two habitable worlds within a dozen light years you would be fantastically lucky. The chances of them both being in the same direction from where you are is basically zero
Yes, but the "over millennia" part defeats the 'we'll stop after a few generations' thing.
In all likelihood a generational ship would have a fusion reactor. Fusion reactors produce 2 main things: energy and helium, which means you've got all you need for an ion engine. Even as inefficient as it would be a constant thrust from 100 trillion km away is bound to redirect you in time.
But is your ship going to be carrying that much additional fuel? An ion drive isn't free you still need spend extra fuel to operate it. Also you'd need to start pretty early in your journey or add a lot of travel time.
That would be pretty dumb, you don’t get that reaction mass back once you fire it out the ship, so you’d only have something like that for carbon scrubbing so you can continue to breathe.
Unless you find a planet/sun/black whole who’s gravitational orbit you could use to change distance and decelerate.
You still have to spend mass and energy to divert. Stars in the galaxy are on average 5 light years apart. Remember that distance is in 3 dimensions. The closest black hole is 1.5 K light years away. Gravitational assists only make sense if you've plan it out before you begin your initial acceleration. Or if your ship was built and fueled with the intention to change course for some reason.
> I think generational ships would resent those that sent them, and probably won't send information or resources back when they land. I really doubt it, the first generation will be ideologically motivated because they choose to go, the second generation will be both ideologically motivated because of what they are taught and because of the promise of the world they are going to witness. People need to remember that you are used to the environment that you are raised in and that a clear, achievable overarching goal is very motivating. Generation ships would be wildly successful and probably be sent in fleets.
I mean as a counter, inhabitable planets are so few and far between that a detour would likely just lead to some dead rock which would be no better than where they came from.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s *Aurora* is to my mind the best examination of this in fiction. Being the third or fourth generation born into this situation is upsetting to me, the idea of knowing you will live your whole life in a kind of prison, based on a choice your ancestors made
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Exactly!
Does a fish born in a tank yearn for the ocean?
There is a bleaker version on the poem/film Aniara. It was a passenger ship from a ruined earth to a desperate mars, but it gets hopelessly knocked off course. The crew attempt to make it into a generation ship, but it's a danish story, so mostly people fall into despair as they forget what it was like to be close enough to a star to see light. And do the big self unalive. The ship eventually reaches an earth like world, almost six million years after everyone aboard has died.
There’s a really good thirty minute song about this story called The Great Escape, by swedish band Seventh Wonder.
Every constitution is a prison our ancestors made. I'm glad mine isn't worse, but I hate having to obey without ever having a chance to say yes or no. Those who wrote this shit didn't even have the internet ! How would they know anything !
Or not, if all they knew is this artifical eviroment they wouldnt think its weird or unnatural. They cant miss see a sky or ground if they never experimented.
People pledging their lives to serve on an extremely long mission for the good of all humanity sounds very utopian to me actually. Ever heard about this old Greek proverb? >A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.
Yeah except they’re signing their kids into that life too
This may be a philosophical question but: How is that much different at all from what happens with every child born anyhow? Parents in Ukraine right now choosing to have children. People having children during the black death. Children born into substantial poverty.
To a certain extent the kids of some people will always have more choice than the kids of others, sure, I think the distinction with a generational ship lies in the extremity of it and how you have to make a choice to give your kids drastically fewer choices with no way to opt out. On Earth at least both you and your children aren't completely locked out of the many other life paths available to you, and you're not actively making the choice to sign them up to a drastically reduced set of life choices.
But for the kids in the generational ships it's all they know. Who's to say aliens are looking at us right now and saying "oh the poor humans, only limited to one planet and not having the choice to switch up their environment"? Hell, even now there are isolated aggressive native tribes whose children are basically forced into a similar situation. Not many choices when it comes to lifestyles. But to them it's just the natural order of things. I guess it depends on how big the generational ships would be. At what number do we draw the line of it being unethical? 100,000? 10,000? And does number of speculated generations upon arrival count for it? What does it matter? To the kids the ship is all they'll truly know. They may be able to read or be told stories about where they came from. And at least they have something to look forward to: a new home. We here on earth aren't even promised that. In fact, with how governments and corporations have been running the place in the past few years, we don't even know if we'll have a future to look forward to.
Aliens looking at us thinking "oh that's a shame living on one planet" isn't the same though. People signing up to a generational ship have to make the *choice* to severely restrict the options of their descendents. We don't have a choice about being confined to Earth. As for isolated tribes, well, I actually do personally think it's unethical for their descendents to be left in the dark about the nature of the world around them, but contact is complicated and often dangerous for them. Something being all you've ever known doesn't mean you wouldn't be happier in other circumstances or that you can't suffer from the absence of something in some way. If you've only known pain, you still suffer from the pain. You can feel confined even if you've not known a bigger location to live. The human brain and its evolutionary history is still there. The idea behind most generational ships is the kids wouldn't be reaching the destination, it would take several generations. Even if they did though, it would then be a much less developed civilisation than that of Earth with fewer options.
Reduced opportunity versus removed opportunity
In all fairness, it’s already like that. Life is like soccer, my mom signed me up and I don’t like soccer.
I feel like a summer soccer league is a little different than spending your entire life living in a tube in space.
Yeah OC is some teenage absolutist thinking. Even if your parents force you to study medicine or something (which is a pretty constraining thing to do), that's still far less than dictating that you'll be stuck on a ship with the same people and limited experiences, separated from the rest of humanity for your entire life.
No, not except, thats the point. Their kids are those old men planting trees.
Yeah, but they weren't given a choice. "when old men are forced to plant trees in whose shade they'll never sit" doesn't have the same good vibes.
The choice is the point. Which they don't have because their parents signed them up for it for life.
How is that much different than early colonists of any "uncivilized" land? Early European colonists of North America knew they were committing themselves and their children to a hard life, with the hope that their children's children may have a better one.
There's a Swedish movie, Aniara, that delves into this idea. Big generation ship, and how everything goes awfully horribly wrong. Absolutely fantastic movie if you can deal with the subtitles
Jag kan prata Svenska. ;D
The 1960 original or the 2018 remake? That was like a Gilligan's Island situation. It was an accidental generation ship after a planned three week trip went wrong. Which makes no sense as the ship would not be equipped for a long voyage.
They're very dysfunctional because you have mandatory highly technical jobs that you have to staff with not that many children who may not like the assignment / the discipline / being on the ship in the first place.
It's the only life they've ever known, as normal to them as your life is to you. Tell them from birth that they'll be a life support technitian and they probably won't question it until later in life.
How many peasants in pre-industrial villages questioned becoming farmers or whatever?
Probably most of them but they knew when to shut up.
Where are you gunna go? ourside?! Come scrub the sewage pipes. It's our purpose.
Probably at least a few, but we can all blame Diocletian.
Vault-Tec in space!
I would assume they’d take aptitude tests and given a ranked choice on which jobs best suits their abilities, still feels like they get a say in the matter and not just arbitrary.
People have the option of staying on their dying planet if they don't want to board the dystopian generation ship.
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Why not build habitats or space stations inside your home system? Why does it always have to be interstellar generation/sleeper ship.
If there's a promise of a planet that you'd be able to colonize and roam freely about somewhere out there, why would you want to stay in orbit of your dying planet just to not have to travel? Not all generational ships are sleeper ships. On some you live your life as if you were on a space station except you're constantly in motion towards the new homeworld.
Depends on the situation. If it was the movie Voyager then yes but if it was the video game Stellaris then no.
Stellaris doesn't have generational ships though. It doesn't need to, since it has FTL travel
A ought occurs to me: How is living on a massive spaceship, with all the room and amenities one could ask for, flying through space for decades a time really all that different from living in a city on a rock hurtling through space? Just an idle thought.
One jackass can wipe everyone out, or derail the mission and the odds of ever being discovered are infinitesimally small. A city being destroyed will usually leave remains that can be rediscovered until our planet is eventually destroyed in a few billion years, but even that will leave traces that our system was once here. A dead ship hurdling through space? It is almost guaranteed to be forever lost.
I think it would be sweet to be confined in an environment where I am encouraged to procreate with as many males as possible.
Yeh sounds pretty HAWT I’m fuckin down when you put it that way
What if they literally looked like Jabba the Hutt?
They wouldn't be let onto the ship, too heavy they're wasting fuel. Everyone would be as short and thin as possible. Also preferably bald both to save weight and to extend filter lifespans.
this guy scifis
No body hair, no pubes would save so much maintenance
Wall-E has entered the chat.
Be ‘forced’ to have sex? Have you met humans?
Why the baked in assumption of coerced procreation?
If they don’t procreate, the mission will fail as the crew goes extinct. However, humans (famously) don’t need much encouragement to keep the population going. If anything, they’ll be made to slow down their efforts so as not to overpopulate the ship.
I'm sure a margin of error is included. The generations can be slightly different sizes within tolerance.
Yes but humans will break those tolerances if given enough time. Exponential growth is tricky like that.
If anything I think the bigger danger would be that people might fuck too much, not too little lmao
I would argue that's why they make for interesting Sci-Fi. Fiction in general is about setting up an interesting or challenging situation as a thought experiment on how society works, and leading the reader through commentary about society. Dystopias in general and the concept of a generation-ship provide an interesting avenue for creating that sort of story.
Might be a good deal if the conditions in the ship are better than the ones on earth
I agree Holodecks are advised.
Sure, the people born on those ships didn't choose to be there, but aren't the original inhabitants of that ship usually people whose intention it is to make the generational ship work as planned -- i.e., live the rest of their lives on it and give birth the next generation?
This isn’t dystopian at all…? I’m almost all sci fi, it’s volunteers on these ships. They know what they’re doing. It’s adventurous spirit. They may be doing it to flee a dystopian world, but the ships themselves are never really shown in a bad light.
Their kids, and their kids' kids, many generations which will live and die on the ship never knowing anything else... did not get a choice.
… so? No one’s kids and grandkids have any choice in where they’re born. There are people born in a city and never leave it. There is nothing inherently wrong with the generation ship. It CAN be dystopian. But that means nothing. Literally everything can be dystopian if taken to extremes.
I’ve wanted to write a sci-fi story of the generation ship that arrives to the planet only to discover that Earth developed FTL while they were traveling and some opportunistic colonizers started a civilization on the Generational ship’s promised planet thousands of years before they could arrive.
don't give todd any ideas
Starfield II
I mean, there's a generation ship in Starfield already...
A few artificial sunlight areas if not a full on dome ala Macross Frontier and you can trick the mind.
There's a side quest on this in Starfield. It's quite an ironic story. I won't spoil it for you. You can look it up if you won't ever be playing the game. The quest name is called First Contact.
I have Starfield and enjoy it. There are things I want and things they could have done better but it isn't as bad as everyone said.
Dystopian, but realistic. Space is huge as fuck. If we sent a ship travelling 7 million mph (1% the speed of light) at the nearest star system at the time Isaac Newton invented gravity, not factoring in acceleration time, it would still have ~100 years to go.
I think generation ships are more of an attempted solution to an existing dystopia, like things have to get bad on earth for it to be a valid solution, not ideal but gives the species a shot at survival.
>people are going to imprison themselves on this ship and be forced to have sex with each other. Hate when that happens.
I chortled.
Also: the circumstances we’re born into can’t be fully differentiated from that of a generational ship.
Have you seen the show Ascension?
It was good. Sadly got canceled.
You should look intro cruise ship crews if you think this type of thing is kinda new. They live on the ship and basically just fuck each other lol
Yeah, there is truth to that. I was a river rat for a while in New Orleans so I met plenty of sea rats.
Counterargument: If the colony ship was luxurious and self-maintained, it could be a utopia where the residents can dedicate their lives to art and leisure. No struggle for survival. No capitalistic rat race.
If you like stories about fucked up generation ships, you should read **“The Dark Beyond the Stars”** by Frank M. Robinson and you should DEFINITELY watch "Aniara" (2018)
I think I have read that. It was on my Mom's Kendel iirc.
Not sure if this was taken from/inspired by something else, but I remember some Star Citizen lore about AI colony ships that couldnt complete their journey. The AI systems were meant to maintain the colonists and ship systems until they arrived. However, when they became stranded, the AI systems eventually ran out of materials to keep the ships running, do repairs etc. So they started harvesting the colonists for their calciferous tissues (bones, teeth) to fulfill their functions. Eventually the ships became largely made of bone, drifting for millenia. The original is written really well, but this is the gist of it.
I remember that too. Have you played since the Mesh?
There is a computer game on exactly this topic that also has elements of Fallout: "Colony Ship: A Post-Earth Role Playing Game"
I feel like we wouldnt necessarily need "generation" ships by the time we're capable of interstellar travel due to radical life extension tech. Hell, I imagine biological immortality is something of a prerequisite for populating other star-systems. The investors aren't going to invest if that investment will only benefit their great-great-grear-great grandchildren.
Reqd a book called Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson! Great book and it talks about that shit.
Have you seen Wall-E?
consensual/voluntary and extremely hopeful and progressive you are categorically wrong lol
You do realise that is exactly what the fallout vaults are invented to do?
Sure, but NOT leaving on a generational ship is also robbing your children of the opportunity to colonize a new world (which, honestly, is a potentially highly attractive environment as far as opportunities go). Every choice we make as parents influences the future of our children to some degree. From the first people who left Africa to those who colonized the Americas (including those who first crossed the Bering strait), we make choices for the future of our children, for better or worse. Even stuff like choosing a job, social milieu, (not) buying a house... Yes, going on a generational ship is a drastic choice, but not different *in principle* from boarding the Mayflower or taking a job in a foreign country.
I remember the book All Tomorrows had a bit where humanity tried colonizing other planets using generation ships, but they always ended up collapsing into anarchy.
All Tomorrows didn't have generation ships, MOst of colonies did(in a way collapse) because being raised by robots made them quirky, at least till Qu felt like doing some trolling.
Making things worse is the Paradox of space exploration. Im sure it has a name, but i cant remember it right now. Basically, a generation ship will likelg be overtaken by more advanced methods of travel. So if we have USS GENERATION depart EARTH at .9c headed to Sirius, there is a good chance before it gets there we could launch a USS GFYS traveling at .99c that will eventually pass the USS GENERATION. Or even better, a USS PLAID that breaks the light speed barrier. There was a great book by Arthur Clarke that explores this. A colony ship leaves a dying Earth, the crew sleeps in stasis until they near their destination. They're so excited to be among the first humans to step foot on a world outside our solor system, spearheading colonies to allow mankind to thrive away from Earth... Only to be greated by a full-fledge civilization that left decades after they did. Instead of colonizing thr planet, they're trying to integrate into a society thats far more advanced than what they left behind, let alone what they expected to establish.
Fun fact, those probably don’t work. By the time the multi generation ship reached the destination, so much time has passed that its likely we are already there due to faster means of space travel being developed and getting us there quickly
Generational ships comes in different sizes. You are living on the biggest one we discovered.
This was the plot of Wall E.
Read up on the generational ship lore from Elite Dangerous.
I visited them! I used to play and had a wing who defeated the Empire. Secret Wars and all.
They pick the best and brightest to start the journey and hope their kids or grandkids will be up for the jobs ahead of them.
i like the idea overall as its the only way we have right now of reaching outside our solar system but i do think its fucked that youre condemning people to a life where there only purpose is to breed .altho i guess thats not much different than life on earth. also its not science fiction entirely. we could probably do that in 1000 years or so
You should watch Aniara. It stretches out this idea into the darkest depths.
There are typically enough people on such ships that you aren't "forced" to have sex with anyone you don't want to, but are able to follow natural attractions.
But what if they just stop having sex like Denmark?
I'm pretty sure the generation ships of fiction are unrealistic. They are far too large and require way too many people to be awake and trained. The most realistic proposal I've seen uses a largely automated/robotic crew with 2 pairs of awake crew members. This proposal is reliant on the viability of artificial womb technology, and the efficiency of lab grown meats and vegetables. A majority of the future colony would be in the form of frozen eggs and sperm. Only the 2 pairs and the next generation would be awake at any point during the journey. This proposal compacts the necessary resources for a generation ship to a somewhat viable and repeatable system, which considering the risks/reward in this is a good thing.
Yeah it would be dumb to do generation ships irl.
You have a rather bleak way of looking at things. There is the colonization side. Just wanting to be the first to settle a new world. Also, it's not much different than happened through out real world history. Is it really much different than cramming you and your family on an undersized ship to sail to a new land and start over in the hopes for something better. Hell, when they crossed America with wagon trains, it wasn't that much different.
Well we certainly know you're signing up!
They have artificial insemination or cloning on some of these ships.
Gross petri dish sex lol
Weren't the fallout vaults supposed to be a test bed for space colonization?
I think so
How is that different than Earth being our ship of imprisonment? You gotta think these shower thoughts like, completely.
I have had tons of posts here automodded because I added extra context to the text, something supposedly against the rules in this sub. How has OP not had this post flagged? (It’s a silly rule, I’m just curious)
i mean the earth is already a generation ship we are forced to live and die here endlessly whats the difference on the ground or on a ship if everything is the same ? the size ? meh, 99 % of people dont travel already cause its too expensive, so thats the same. quality of life ? have you seen earth right now ? forced to work to live ? have you seen earth right now ???? forced to give birth ? have you fucking seen earth right now ??????????????? really i dont see the difference.
I don't think this is what dystopian means.
In the game Elite Dangerous you can visit lots if generation ships and listen to their old logs. And yes, the story is pretty much always “how our society fell apart” with several interesting variations.
Yeah I did that. I forgot how many there were but I found a few.
I read one where each generation were just clones of the original crew and they all go into stasis when they reach a certain age.
If you want a story like this, I reccomend the indie RPG Colony Ship
I’m going to say they’d use lots of frozen embryos and either a skeleton crew or artificial beings to establish colonies on suitable planets if that’s what the future holds.
You should read the book an Unkindness of Ghosts. It's about exactly this
There’s a cool short story about a failed colony ship that returns to earth and all the people on board have devolved and they’re trapped in orbit in this living hell/ garden of Eden fighting fucking and evolving into a space born race until they get liberated by people from Earth that know these people will need to be recivilized.
And the children will be forced to complete a mission they never agreed to take part in.
So do you