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The Huffington Post is running a story that provides a bit of comic relief from today's mundane news. Creationist Ken Ham, who recently debated Bill Nye the Science Guy over the origins of the universe, is calling for an end to the search for extraterrestrial life because aliens probably don't exist—and if they do, they're going to Hell anyway. In this story, we learn that aliens, if they exist, are doomed to Hell where not even Jesus can save them. Spock would find this to be illogical.
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Extra-terrestrial Life is Damned, Search is Futile
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(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday July 23 2014, @08:49PM
There may be a very simple reason for generational ships: Population growth.
We are in the very initial phase of space travel, where few selected people just stay in orbit for a few months. However, the next step is already on the horizon: Space tourism. One day there will be space stations which exist solely to attract space tourists who want to have the unique experience of space. Initially only for very wealthy people, but like with every other touristic endeavour, the cost will likely come down to a point where a larger number of people will be able to afford it (not necessarily everyone, but at least everyone with an higher-than-average income). At that point, cost saving will be a major issue, while at the same time, you'll need quite a bit of staff up there to keep the business running. And for cost reasons, part of the staff (especially the low-paid part, like people doing the cleaning) will be left in orbit as long as possible (because each transfer from/to earth will come with an inherent cost). Of course, at the same time, also the amount of supporting material (water, food, air, etc.) to be brought up from earth will be minimized, so the space hotels will become as autarkic as possible.
Ultimately this will inevitably lead to people living on space stations permanently. And as the number of people living permanently grows, so will their average income. But a holiday trip to earth will still be expensive (just as a holiday trip to space is for people on earth). But transfer between different space hotels will be relatively cheap, and therefore there will emerge a new form of business, namely space hotels for people living in space. Of course their attraction will not be just being in space (after all, the typical people visiting there will be there all the time). No, the attraction will be that it is an affordable place for people in space to enjoy the advantages of a hotel (you don't have to care about everything yourself, unlike at home). There will probably also be specific attractions built there (just like tourist places on earth build special attractions which are not really related to the place where they are). Maybe some hotels will offer an artificial earth-like experience (remember, the target group of those hotels will be people who cannot afford to get to earth). Of course these additional space hotels will cause an even larger amount of people living in space. Also, these lower-cost space hotels will have an even higher pressure to become independent from expensive materials brought up from earth. So if a completely autarkic space station is possible at all, this will be the point where it will be reached.
So now you have people living for generations in space, in space stations which do not depend on earth for their basic needs. This of course means that they also will not consume earth resources, thus earth population will probably get to use basically all of the earth resources; that is, even if the space people one day decided to all go back to earth, they couldn't without reducing earth population first. So a growing space population will have to be accommodated by building more space stations (including space stations which are not space hotels any more). Given that by that time, robotic asteroid mining probably is quite standard, and when in space, asteroid-mined materials are actually cheaper than materials brought up from earth, this will not consume any earth-bound resources.
That way, the earth will get surrounded with a growing number of space stations. At some time, the number of space stations will grow enough that it is no longer feasible to keep them orbiting earth, so they'll orbit sun instead. Initially not too far from earth, but exponential growth will eventually cause them to fill up a substantial part of the solar system. Which will be the point where it starts making sense to think of colonizing the space around other stars.
Now of course they will not directly go to far-away stars; they first colonize Proxima Centauri, and continue with other of the closest stars. But over time, farther and farther stars will get colonized.
Note that the speed of the front of colonization will be much slower than the speeds which we can achieve already with current spaceships. BTW, it's likely that they will "settle" near stars because the stars are an excellent energy source.
Of course, if there's an intelligent alien species in the galaxy, it is very likely that this alien species will also start colonizing space. And during this colonization, they'd inevitably, sooner or later, reach a place with humans (either earth before space gets colonized, of some outer space colony. The only thing which could prevent that, apart from the possibility that there are no aliens in the galaxy to begin with, is that they are stopped by yet another species (but in that case, it will be that species we will get contact with, again unless they are stopped by yet another species).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday July 24 2014, @08:04PM
Sorry, but that's unlikely. Emigration even on Earth has never been a way to reduce population. It "sort of" works for getting rid of dissidents, because they are relatively rare. But not as a relief for population pressure. And in space such emigration would be a LOT more expensive than it is on Earth. Population control will be needed even in-system, and as a generation ship....You want a doubling time that is less than the time that it takes you to go between large chunks of resources. Now I admit that I expect that there are a lot more free planets and asteroids than people normally assume, but they still aren't going to be very close to each other, and they're going to be quite difficult to detect at a distance. So I expect the "population doubling" to happen DURING the process of building a new ship, and that the population will be held stable at all other times. I expect that in this kind of controlled environment the right to procreate will be rigidly controlled. (In fact, that's a plausible source of corruption that would lead to the kind of social friction that will end up destroying the ship. Which is one reason a fleet of small habitats linked together by tethers and a common drive/navigation module is a plausible scenario. That way social unrest in one module wouldn't kill everyone. It also makes it easy to split the ship in half for the rebuilding process when you encounter resources.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday July 24 2014, @08:57PM
Did you even read further than the first sentence of my post?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday July 26 2014, @05:52AM
Yes. Even giving a population already living in space (which I presumed as a prerequisite) you can't use it to reduce population pressure. The ships are too expensive. I don't see space getting packed in the foreseeable future. And I see no reason at all why a habitat should prefer to orbit a planet, or even to be in the same solar orbit. (It won't have the same albedo unless you really work at it, so a different orbit would be better from an energy standpoint, but I expect them to be so well insulated that that won't be significant.)
As to whether they will be wealthy...this depends on lots of social choices that can go several different ways. It also depends on what you mean by wealthy.
P.S.: I'm NOT expecting the wandering ships to stay in ANY solar system. A few years, perhaps, if there are some supplies that it's hard to pick up en-route. I'm expecting, however, that they will travel at a slow enough speed that they need to be well adapted to living on wandering asteroids and cometary bodies. This may well mean that controlled fusion will be needed for an energy source. In which case 60 years is grossly optimistic. (The primary energy source needs to be a well developed technology that can be depended upon. Fission is energetic enough, but it's not clear how many fissionable ores are available in wandering asteroids.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.