Colonization Requires At Least 10,000 People

Anyone who thinks we'll be hopping planets is deluded. We're designed for earth's atmosphere and this is where we're going to stay.

Obviously the more people you have the greater chance for survival. Is that even a question?

The bare minimum number could be surprisingly low.

As for a generation ship traveling for 2000+ years I'd say the worst thing you could do is introduce religion...at least more than one, anyway. I don't think historical records would become "holy scripture/folk lore" what with it being multi-media (audio, video, etc) and also (I assume) in the same language the colonists use. Any such historical documentation wouldn't be dependent on interpretation as "The Bible" and other ancient religious texts are today.

reply to post by Restricted

Not really true if we can build self contained cities we should be alright . Kinda like on Total Recall when they were on mars I think that is highly likely . Just not anytime soon or anytime in my kids life time probably their kids

Restricted
Anyone who thinks we'll be hopping planets is deluded. We're designed for earth's atmosphere and this is where we're going to stay.

edit on 4/9/2014 by Restricted because: (no reason given)

I somewhat disagree ... we've adapted to the type of atmosphere earth has. No telling how many planets have similar atmospheres.

reply to post by Shadow Herder


Bible?
Myths and stories written by men, how they saw/understood things back then.

Remember according to the old testament, a woman going through her period should be kept in a separate room until it passes because she is unclean....

Jonah lived in a whale , never mind the stomach acids?

Let's respectfully disagree kind Sir.

If you want to know about humankind's history today with our currently available technology and resources, then rely on the history books, and not the bible.


And not on some American history book , but one created by all nations that is accepted.

Now that is a interesting proposal. Send robots filled with genetic cargo...get to planet, build structures, then simply clone out babies, have the AI raise them in facilities learning all important skills, history, communication, etc...then voila..done.

this method could allow for a million babies to be born and raised to be ideal humans for a new world..

reply to post by SaturnFX


Your idea just brought a mixed vision of Terminator and Matrix to my mind, though very doable, and scarily enough I think so with our technology already available....


I wouldn't be surprised if the first 4 people going to Mars would be carrying a crater or two of embryos and a massive incubator.

We need to be thinking outside of the box here, I sure as hell know they are.

Rainbowresidue
reply to post by Shadow Herder

 

Bible?
Myths and stories written by men, how they saw/understood things back then.

Remember according to the old testament, a woman going through her period should be kept in a separate room until it passes because she is unclean....

Jonah lived in a whale , never mind the stomach acids?

Let's respectfully disagree kind Sir.

If you want to know about humankind's history today with our currently available technology and resources, then rely on the history books, and not the bible.


And not on some American history book , but one created by all nations that is accepted.

edit on 9/4/2014 by Rainbowresidue because: Oh, boy, spelling isn't my forte today.

edit on 9/4/2014 by Rainbowresidue because: (no reason given)

I don't think you're understanding what he's trying to say. I agree with the idea behind it and you don't have to be religious or believe in anything but human behavior to understand it.

IF a ship with a population of 10,000 goes off into space, for 2000 years, that's a lot of generations. By year 1,900, All of the original inhabitants would have been long gone and sure you might have books and audio and other "historical objects' to attempt to prove to the new generation that it was all real and they were from some planet they never set foot on or seen in real life because some ancient no nothing that's long been dead is telling them.

Lets be honest with ourselves, There might be a 25-65% belief in what really happened but no one will believe it completely. A planet where water flowed freely? "Sure", A Planet where there was an Atmosphere that protected them from space that was just naturally made? "whatever old man" Humanity just "evolved" on a planet from some "monkey" no one has ever seen? "sounds like a bunch of dumb religious ancients to me who didn't understand science properly"

The point is just like we look at the bible or any other religious/history text of your choice and say "they were just interpreting the world as they knew it without really knowing anything" our future generations will say the same about us, especially the ones we send off on a 2000 Year Journey where all they, their parents, their grand parents and their great grandparents remember is a spaceship.

Rainbowresidue
reply to post by SaturnFX

 

Your idea just brought a mixed vision of Terminator and Matrix to my mind, though very doable, and scarily enough I think so with our technology already available....


I wouldn't be surprised if the first 4 people going to Mars would be carrying a crater or two of embryos and a massive incubator.

We need to be thinking outside of the box here, I sure as hell know they are.

See, I was thinking Bicentennial Man mixed with Star Trek...
ATS...Always go for Dystopian outcomes first. heh.

Anyhow, if we had strong AI. we probably wouldn't even need to send out genetic material...just turn the strong AI into perfect mechanical representations of humanity....might be a dramatic improvement to our flawed biological selves.

We are still a considerable number of years away from that technology though.

reply to post by PsychoEmperor


Thanks for being so kind and gentle.

I understand his and your explanation, but at the same time think, as the song from Five For Fighting goes ...Why not start a new world?

A new world with science, and history and leave all the myths and stories behind.

Don't get me wrong, I loved Peter Pan growing up,but a new civilization starting out fresh, in our time should rely on facts.

Keep the Bible and myths and stories, yes of course at the side, but starting out fresh, they should rely on facts.

Yes,our world is a better place when we believe in the unbelievable, and the mystical, but only to encourage us, not to teach us.

Let's start a new world as the song goes...

Love and Peace

PsychoEmperor
The point is just like we look at the bible or any other religious/history text of your choice and say "they were just interpreting the world as they knew it without really knowing anything" our future generations will say the same about us, especially the ones we send off on a 2000 Year Journey where all they, their parents, their grand parents and their great grandparents remember is a spaceship.

edit on 4/9/2014 by PsychoEmperor because: fixing some typos

I think we would have enough source material to be uncontested. Current religions is based off of a few ancient books written by a handful of people. the history is a strange conjumbled mess of origins, etc.
Here we have high def videos to share, pictures, audio logs, many digitized books, backup systems that in a big ship would require the entire ship (or ships) to turn to dust before such info was lost, most likely also require the home planet to explode also (I would think we would be relaying satellites towards the destination and communicating by photonic bursts for constant information streaming...albeit with definitely lag in informations equaling years)...but point is, the information we would send out today would be of high quality verses the corrupted zero quality information of our current religions.

Now

If during the voyage, a governmental structure arose and purposefully held all the data, removing it from the people, then you could have a problem, with only a few super elites of the colonists knowing the truth, the rest living in a very strange universe where life started on a ship or whatever muddled stories they pass down from gen to gen.

reply to post by Rainbowresidue


Leave the bible and just leave the facts, but as I tried to say in my post, All the "facts" won't be seen as facts after 2000 years in a spaceship.

America will become the lost city of Atlantis, Free flowing water will be a Heavenly Dream, etc etc etc.


By all means start a new world, and I love this thread you created, the only point is that "our facts" will not be their facts regardless of what preventive measures we take.

I want to be clear: I'm not arguing for our religious texts or anything like that. I'm only stating that OUR HISTORICAL TEXTS regardless of how "factual" WE believe they are, will become religious texts after 2,000 years and several generations on a Spaceship far removed from us here on Earth, which to them will be like the Garden of Eden, a mystical fairy tale told to them.

SaturnFX
(I would think we would be relaying satellites towards the destination and communicating by photonic bursts for constant information streaming...albeit with definitely lag in informations equaling years)

Now

If during the voyage, a governmental structure arose and purposefully held all the data, removing it from the people, then you could have a problem, with only a few super elites of the colonists knowing the truth, the rest living in a very strange universe where life started on a ship or whatever muddled stories they pass down from gen to gen.

Well if we have photonic bursts than sure no problem. I was going under the assumption that these 10,000 colonists would be off for 2,000 years with no contact whatsoever from those left here on Earth.

IF THAT is the case, i still contend, regardless of how 'in tact" our information is, it will be ancient and archaic to them. "Why did they put them in audio and visual information when they could have easily implanted them in the Universal Web Consciousness?" or some such.

It is the arrogance of man that we think our generation will ever be thought of as anything but ancient moronic cavemen to our future generations.

Your idea in the change of governmental structure is exactly in line with my thinking as well, things will change. Generations will revolt, Nations will rise, all inside a giant 10,000 strong spaceship in space.

PsychoEmperor
It is the arrogance of man that we think our generation will ever be thought of as anything but ancient moronic cavemen to our future generations.

Oh, I have no doubt whatsoever that we will be seen one day as ancient moron cavemen living in stick and rock homes
(shesh, we didn't even have smart metamaterial homes...what a bunch of monkeys!)

But I do think our stupid ways are being very well preserved now adays...

Hell, these posts alone is now living on the internet, being backed up for posterity by perhaps many huge archive hubs, and one day will serve as humor towards our predecessors.

Sounds like Pandorum where things went (predictably) bad

In 2174, the human population has grown to the point of exceeding the carry capacity of Earth, causing humanity to build a sleeper ship/interstellar ark named Elysium. The mission is to send 60,000 people on a 123-year trip to an Earth-like planet named Tanis to establish civilization there.

I love that movie

reply to post by PsychoEmperor


I appreciate you liking my thread,and I understand,I agree we would become the lost Atlantis after awhile 2000 years or so, at least it wouldn't be all mushed up with myths and lores from something that actually never existed.


I'm more interested in discussing building colonies on other planets, scientifically so to speak.

I'll leave it at that.

Too late and tired to argue, nor do I wish to.

reply to post by Rainbowresidue


We are not leaving the planet, if someone could help in the thread, I can't find the exact quote but former rumored Nazi , NASA Scientist , SS Major and supposed brainchild of the U.S. space program , Verner Von Braun, had some very early negative comments about even reaching the moon, and these comments are difficult to find but when he put into perspective the distance and the shear size of any type of craft that could even hold the fuel source let alone the cost he was very skeptical of the logistics and radiation dangers involved in reaching the moon but of course we open the whole can of worms about that feat, he pretty much said the moon itself was unreachable by man any time soon, and despite all of the later claims , one has to wonder what changed his tune based upon in his expert and in depth mathematical analysis done before the space program.

But I have to believe that we did reach the moon, however, everything man is doing and has been outside of the moonwalks is low earth orbit in nature including the ISS and look at the problems plaguing that effort, if we also listen to another supposed genius, Hawkings, he says we have 1,000 years to get off of the planet, the truth of the matter is I think man is somehow earthlocked and it is not possible to inhabit another planet, the ones that might even be habitable are too far by any of our known means, no matter what bs we are being fed, it is just a dream and a fantasy, it's not quite like sailing across the Atlantic ocean, cosmic background temperatures -455 degrees F, and the uncharted, untested empty space temperatures that will incinerate anything, from what I have read these temperatures are in the range of 1000, to 1, 000, 000 degrees.

So these are things that are hard to plan theoreticals around especially something being frozen or incinerated instantly, not to mention unknown radiation and other materials, that we only speculate on based upon probes etc that might have only got samples.

A few reasons to seriously doubt we will be successfully colonizing another planet... ( I am not even considering the conspiracies out there about us or the government secretly time traveling or dimensionally jumping already to other planets)

We already see what even small amounts of radiation on earth does to a fetus and to chromosomes..

Effects of Radiation on Chromosomes

Forget about those romps in the hay or the crew bay it might only just be for practice with no results

Infertility

What is the temperature of space?

Closest earthlike planet is 6.5 light years away

reply to post by PsychoEmperor


This very scenario was written about back in 1941 by Robert A. Heinlein in an article titled "Universe" and 'Common Sense" later published in a 1963 book titled Orphans of the Sky

What do you mean things can't be skewed?



This isn't the Bible, and the point is that whatever you leave with very easily can/will become skewed over time as you travel further from its point of origin and the things that gave it birth and meaning.

Someone else mentioned Pandorum which is another example.

Something that's completely a-religious can grow the trappings of religion just as easily as something religious can erode into myth the way the Hellenic faith has done.

Personally, I think the best bet is to send enough physical individuals to try to ensure that the warm bodies are there to found a physically viable seed. Then, send enough genetic material along to make sure the physically viable seed colony can build a genetically viable base with a careful breeding program.

Of course, the problem is that you risk running into scenarios like the ones mentioned above where things lose their meaning as society shifts and societal norms and boundaries fall apart over time.

There's no reason that the trip should take 2,000 years if the destination were close enough.

For example, a trip to Alpha Centauri using the the nuclear propulsion system suggested by Project Orion, the trip could be done in a single generation:

At 0.1c, Orion thermonuclear starships would require a flight time of at least 44 years to reach Alpha Centauri, not counting time needed to reach that speed (about 36 days at constant acceleration of 1g or 9.8 m/s2). At 0.1c, an Orion starship would require 100 years to travel 10 light years.

The key is to make the trip as short as possible.