colonising another planet or star

Mind exercize:

What would you need to take with you if you are going to colonize a planet in another star system.

Assume your resources are limited, that is, you only have a limited amount of space and weight allowance. Similarly you cannot take a million people. 1000 max.

 

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I don't thnk that interstellar colonisation will be feasible until you have at least a limited form of assembler technology. That is to say, you can't take everything with you, so you will need to make the equipment you need from material in the new system.

So the absolute minimum you would need to take would be a mini-forge, a range of specialised mechanochemical assemblers, and basic mining equipment so you can start extracting material from whatever asteroids you find in the system.

You will also need enough data storage space to keep the wide range of designs and plans you would need to buld the equipment you might find necessary; you could obtain new designs from Earth by radio message if you require them, but you would have to wait years while the mesage went home and returned.

As well as this you need a closed ecolgical life support system (CELSS) for the colonists you have with you; if you have a lot of colonists you will need a massive CELSS and this would take up a lot of your limted room. Better to take just a few colonists and a supply of frozen sperm and ova; if you take, or can manufacture, artificial wombs then the population could be increased somewhat faster. Even more useful would be artificial child care equipment (robot nannies); in fact robot workers of all sots might be useful if they can be made to function relatively autonomously. (if not, then robots will be consderably less useful).

 

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You will need two types of spacecraft in a new system; asteroid miner/tugs and landing craft.

You will probably find that the resources of your new system will be distributed rather widely and far apart; the inner worlds and objects will have high levels of available solar (stellar) energy, and probably metals or other solid elements; while the volatiles would mostly be in the outer system, and the asteroid miner/tug craft would be used to try to gather some of these resources together to make a viable economy in space. Just like in our own solar system, different locations will have something to contribute to a colonisation effort, but these resources will need to be moved from location to location.

The asteroid miner ship (probably using a gravity-tug system) could also be useful in terraforming any suitable worlds. Robert Zubrin has produced a detailed scheme for terraforming Mars using diverted asteroids; this scheme may well work in other planetary systems too.

And a lander craft is obviously desirable; you would need to take enough equipment down to start the process of mining or material gathering, as a suitable planet could provde water, propellant and construction materials. You would probably expect to have to mine the planet for fuel or propellant to take off again. Just don't expect to be popping up and down from orbit to the surface constantly, at least not until the new colony is well established.

 

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I was also pondering about similar problems.

Let's assume our robot technology isn't going to improve that much in the future then we need people for labour. Could we colonize another star system with current technology + 20 years (assuming we can build a starship).

How are we going to keep the people alive after arrival (keeping them alive on the trip is another question) and then let them thrive?

If you take 1000 people you have 1000 mouths to feed and 2000 hands to work. If you only take 100 you obviously have less mouths to feed, but you are also restricted in what you can do regarding workload.

Going down the surface immediately (if the planet even has a breathable sterile atmosphere) seems like a waste of resources but maybe we have to. It will probably be easier first to install a base in space. Possibly mine the resources in space. But these are all longterm projects, so maybe we will be forced down a planet.

But how to feed the people? Bring material for greenhouses which can be closed off from the external environment of the planet (wrong atmosphere, temperature, pathogens, contaminants).

Lifting food back into space will be very costly in the early years of colonization. Maybe we can't stay in space. Unless we come into possession of very efficient technology.

How many greenhouses do you need for 1000 people? A lot. How long will it take before they start producing food? Quite some time. So we need to bring rations for at least 6 months to a year.

Are we going to have meat? We need to bring livestock. But they will eat our 'greens'. Can we afford that?

Do we bring all tools?

Or do we bring the tools to make tools?

What about electricity? We bring a generator of some kind? What kind and how many.

What about maintaining order?

Do we bring guns? Police? Military? Politicians?

Who is going to decide who is doing what? And will they?

Medication. We can't bring supplies forever so we will have to produce new stuff pretty soon. But you can't really bring an entire pharmaceutical industry. Decisions have to be made. Bring back the lottery of life? Where a small wound can possibly be fatal due to infection!

 

there is no heaven.

We will have much greater chance of survival if we spread across the universe and colonize Mars for ex.

 

Mars is not going to do us any good if our sun is going to expand.

 

humans do not live in star years...which is billion of years...humans live in years...by the time the sun has expanded humans need to utilize any resource they can to sustain themselves.

 

so you now see how important colonization is for humans.

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You know the first colony ship we send out is going to be in for a shock. Imagine this:

The first colony ship is sent towards star system X. It is a 500-year trip, and even longer by Earth years due to time dilation. By the time the ship gets to planet X, with the 20th generation of ship occupants, they find that the planet has already been settled by the colonists that were sent out 200 years later with far superior spaceship technology.

Lewis and Clark just barely missed seeing an American ship on the West Coast. Not a great analogy, since ships had been there before... but you get the point.

 

As it happens, I have recently written a short sci-fi story including this very premise;

http://www.voicesoa.net/deceleration-phase/

 

What star system do you have in mind to colonize? And how do you know it has any planets worth colonizing?

 

The question that arises is why a colony ship would be sent in the first place, since no amount of marketing is going get around the fact that 10 or 20 generations will long be dead even before the new system is reached. In the past, all migrations have at heart, been motivated by economic, climate, or political considerations.

Logistically though, a potential course of action would first be to develop telescopic arrays sufficient to detect whatever features that are being sought in a distant system. Then, to systematically examine stars and come up with a list of potential candidates. After that, the next step might be to dispatch lightweight, small, very fast moving probes to conduct a close reconnaissance and report back. From there, a factory ship or fleet would be the next step. I, however, see no need whatever for a colony ship to include colonists – since they will be dead, actually sending them is beyond useless, it’s counterproductive and needlessly drains resources. Rather, the obvious solution would be to send the electronic blueprint necessary to build people from scratch, then have the factory ship at the other end create and raise a first generation of colonists. And if I had any say in the matter, chicks would outnumber dudes by about 5:1 and would be up for anything, if you know what I mean….

 

That is quite a good strategy for the first few centuries of a colony. Childbearing females could outnumber males by an arbitrary amount, and this would ensure that the population would increase more rapidly.

In fact you wouldn't need men at all in the first generation; just frozen sperm.
As for being 'up for' anything, if you mean 'prepared to work as hard as they can at building the colony' then yes, I agree. But perhaps you had something else in mind...

 

Oh no, your supposition is right on the mark :^).....

 

Eburacum45:

You forget the fact that a shipload of pregnant women would not be prime for survival. Not to mention they'd utterly lack the muscle needed to do the hard settlement work. Despite the fact that they are likely to have high technology, there will be a need for tremendous amounts of elbow grease.

 

What abouth a prison ship. A 1000 prisoners are set on a ship with yust enof fuel to be captured by the X stars gravity field.

And abouth the pregnant females, they only loose some capabilities when they are over 5 of the 7 months pregnant, and even they could proberly cary a weight of over a 100 kg on a asteroid, and anything heavier would be to big to carry anyway (asteroids have low gravity).

 

Orcot:

You forget about mass. Mass is invariable. And it would be assumed that gravity would be made for human habitation, considering it is needed for humans to not suffer rapid tissue and muscle degeneration.

 

I wouldn't try colonizing another star. Their surfaces are hot just like our sun. I would much rather look and see if there is an earthlike planet circling that star.

 

It's been done in the stories.

What I see doing is sending a hollowed-out asteroid that can carry enough people to keep a technological society going. Several small towns of a few thousand people can form a nice little country and won't need any input from the rest of the Earth. It can conceivably be more advanced than any country on Earth. Even a rather small asteroid, say the size of Phobos, will have a thousand cubic miles to work with and that can become hundreds of square miles at the very least.

 

Here is a sci-fi page I made a while ago about the various options which might be available for interstellar colonisation one day...
http://www.orionsarm.com/ships/Colony_Ships.html