That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. They are launching a project called the 100 Year Starship. The idea is to get civilians of various stripes (futurists, business folks, sci-fi authors), and military and government folks together to think out a 'business model' for creating a starship that could make the trip to some nearby star (hopefully with a habitable port of call).
Here's the DARPA press release
And a Popular Science article on same.
The text of the DARPA release:
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the NASA Ames Research Center announced their 100-Year Starship Study in October. This study is examining the business model needed to develop and mature technologies that would enable long-distance manned space flight a century from now. Anticipated to last one year, the study kicked off in January with a Strategic Planning Workshop.
“For generations, people have been excited and inspired by exploration,” said Dave Neyland, Director of DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office. “This study hopes to inspire research of interstellar space travel, something with a very long time horizon. Through it, we hope to excite and encourage a younger generation that was not yet born when man first walked on the moon.”
The workshop brought together 29 visionaries with diverse backgrounds from aerospace engineer to science fiction author. Their mission was to steer efforts to develop a business model, establish a charter and develop the organizational construct needed to affect this long-term strategy. Over the course of two days, members met and discussed the requirements for seeding research that would enable interstellar flight.
“We picked the 100-Year Starship name because it would require a long-range sustainable effort to get our species to other stars,” said Neyland. “Looking at history, most significant exploration, like crossing oceans or continents for the first time, was sponsored by patrons or groups outside of government. We’re here because we’d like to start with a mechanism that gets this long-range project out of the government, and make sure it is an energized and self-sustaining enterprise.”
Workshop members addressed a wide range of issues, such as why humans should visit the stars, the risks involved, the economic and socio-political-religious obstacles, and the type of governance structure needed. Other topics, such as the importance of having short-term achievable goals, identifying a destination for a 100-Year Starship, bringing together a core group of experts/enthusiasts, interest groups and private funding, and the continued importance of science and technical education for the youth of the world were also discussed at length.
The workshop concluded with unanimous acknowledgement that there exist many unanswered questions and a great deal of work ahead. Planning is underway for follow on activities, with the study scheduled for completion by the end of 2011.
Think of this confab as being a new riff on the old reliable ethics class saw, the "Lifeboat Dilemma," a riff writ much larger. It raises a host of interesting questions. One question has an implied answer, built into the very bones of the project. That question: what entity is best suited to lead the effort, build the ship and man it? Seems that the model NASA and DARPA believes has the best potential is one based in the private sector. The idea seems to be something like the 16th Century European colonial model. Let the future East India companies of the world handle it, or at least head it up, perhaps with some government involvement.
An immediate issue with this is that there would seem to be no near term payoff for the investment. Unlike the European colonial powers, we can presume that there would be no analogs of tobacco rum or cotton wending it's way back home, making the enterprise a healthy money-making venture. So, how do you sell the private sector on the idea of a one way trip with no goodies coming back the other way?
Some other questions:
Who should go on the one way trip? What would be the criteria for inclusion? You would want people with technical proficiency for the immediate term. They would need to be able to maintain the ship, and improvise in response to unforeseen developments. We would hope they were able to pass on the know how, as well as their own history, and the history and culture of Earth. Would we want a representative crew? Or, assuming that would introduce possibly fatal friction, would we opt for a population that shared a uniformity of values and cultural attitudes? Would we insist on a particular form of governance? Should we expect that any form we insist upon will be carried on for the duration of the trip? These questions at least partially hinge on the physics of the case.
Assuming that the technology available in 100 years is more or less like today's, the trip will be very long, taking generations. [Note that the planetary system mentioned in the PopSci article is 20 light years away. So, making the optimistic assumption that there is an Earth like planet there, that would entail that we would, at the very best, take a bit over 20 years to get there.
But, that's the rub. 20+ years is a possibility, and looks to be precisely only that, a mere possibility. The overwhelming probability is that we would have to rely on propulsion systems that move at what is essentially a snail's pace when compared to the speed of light.
Now, I'm not a math cypherin' kind of guy, but a quick calculation of how long it would take (found in an online discussion I cannot re-find, so I cannot link to it) to make that 20 LY trek has it a little something like this:
20 light years, translated into Car and Driver units we can understand lands us in a trip that is around 117,569,996,000,000 miles long. That's 117 trillion miles. Them's national debt scale numbers'. Holy Toledo.
Our fastest spacecraft is Voyager 1. It is now booking it outside the solar system at approximately 38,000 mph. So, assuming that is as fast as our starship could go, it would take about 353,000 years to cover the distance. Assuming 100 year lifespans, that's 3530 generations of folks that would be living on the starship. Assuming there is some way to up the speed by an order of 10, the trip would still take 35,000 years or so. That's an awfully long time. These numbers are stunning and I dare say prohibitive. No East India corporation would be interested in payoffs so far down the road. Nor would they seem eager to fund a one way trip into the dim recesses of the future, without some sort of return on the investment. These immense numbers lead to some other obvious follow-on questions:
What would have to be done to supply essentials for the inhabitants? Assuming we need to provide animal and vegetable life forms for food, how do you go about providing sustainable crops, how do you go about using waste, or disposing of it? How do you deal with the water supply, not to mention oxygen, and carbon dioxide?
The all purpose answer that comes to mind is that the starship will need to be freaking huge enough to sustain a complex ecosystem, not unlike the one we find on good old Earth. This raises yet further questions:
How do you engineer and construct something that massive? How are the flora and fauna going to live without the energy provided by Sol? Anything that large will presumably need to make use of gravitational forces to hold the bio-system together, literally. How do you generate sufficient gravitation or other inertial force, (centrifugal) within a ship? Can you? Assuming we use centrifugal force, setting up a rate of rotation, and can get that all going, what do we do about protecting the inhabitants from interstellar cosmic ray radiation? The faster you go, the worse that shielding problem.
Some other questions: Do we want the folks on the Mega-Mayflower to stay in communications with Earth?
Presumably we would want to keep abreast of their progress. So, we would need to fashion a communications system.
Now, it seems the best way to go about this would be to somehow push our entire solar system, propel it as a whole, toward the ultimate destination. Good luck with that.
Another option; make use of naturally occurring objects, like the moon. Turn it into Starship Mayflower. Problem is, if we do this, it might wreak havoc with Earth, rendering it less habitable. Monster winters, and hotter summers Some bad craziness, among other things, as Earth tilts more radically in relation to the plane of it's orbit. Also, 'moonless' animals on the Mayflower could apparently have some issues.
Darn. So that one is out. Forget the moon as Mayflower.
3530 generations or 353, one would expect that connections with Earth would become tenuous at best, even with communications. One would also suspect that it is more, rather than less likely com-links would fail. Suppose that happens, and repair is not possible. Hundreds to thousands of generations pass. Knowledge of Earth dims if the pilgrims do not carry with them a substantial volume of information about the home planet. What is more, it may occur that they forget how to read the history. What happens then? Well, consult Star Trek's episode "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky" for one possibility:
A mythology in fact, a whole cosmology builds, and very few if any people know the truth. What is more, bad fashion design runs rampant, and security personnel are compelled to wear black leather feedbags as largely useless headgear.
The horror.
And, what is more, they may forget what they were sent out to do. If the mayflower is truly self sustaining, they may end up as analogs of isolated Amazonian tribes, with a peculiar cosmology that has strayed far from the truth, and a complete lack of perspective on their origins.
Then again, one might say, even if we could somehow nudge our solar system that way, and make the trip without ever leaving home, these things could happen anyway. At some point in the distant future, after some great cataclysm, our primitive descendants may dimly remember our time, as unimaginably long ago, and as a sort of Atlantis.
Oh god....that's a Donavan song. Time to quit:
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