The 100 Year Starship

[EA]

What if Country X starts building a starship in, say, 40 years and it works and off they go.

Then Country Y invests in new technology and starts building their new ship in, say, 100 years.

It's possible and likely that Country Y's starship is more capable and faster than Country X's ship as they would have waited for and capitalized on scientific breakthroughs that make interstellar travel better.

[rootbear]

This is the same idea as waiting to buy a computer until they're faster, on the assumption that the faster computer will give you the answer sooner. About twenty years ago, this idea was quantified and published in the paper "The Effects of Moore's Law and Slacking on Large Computations", which you can read here:

https://archive.org/details/arxiv-astro-ph9912202

[imgabe]

Country X will have 40 years of experience of actually being in space and might learn much more valuable knowledge than the theoretical advances made by country Y.

[stanferder]

You're assuming the 60 years after Country X's starship is launched is going to be a period of progress.

If it's a period of collapse, perhaps complete collapse, humanity will have lost an opportunity by delaying the launch.

[boutad]

> It has been argued that an interstellar mission that cannot be completed within 50 years should not be started at all. Instead, assuming that a civilization is still on an increasing curve of propulsion system velocity and not yet having reached the limit, the resources should be invested in designing a better propulsion system. This is because a slow spacecraft would probably be passed by another mission sent later with more advanced propulsion (the incessant obsolescence postulate).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_calcu...

[JNRowe]

There is a fair amount of thought that has gone in to that, often referred to as the Wait Calculation.

An interesting example was "Interstellar Travel - The Wait Calculation and the Incentive Trap of Progress"¹, which somehow isn't on libgen [yet?].

1. http://www.jbis.org.uk/paper.php?p=2006.59.239 - The incentive trap of linking to a £5 download for fifteen year old paper is another paper entirely.

[fapjacks]

Are you asking for a value judgment? Or what exactly is your question? This can happen for example in some games like Master of Orion. You send a ship to the border, and before it gets there, you've already researched, built, and deployed a faster version. Sometimes it changes things, sometimes it doesn't. If your sole purpose is simply to arrive then it hasn't changed a thing. If you are planning to fight aliens when you get there, however...

[m4rtink]

This is a plot point in various SF works.

For example, in the Honor Harrington books by David Weber, the Manticore system colonists traveled to their target a couple hundred years in hibernation. But as it was likely propulsion technology will advance before they reach their destination, they also left part of their money in a trust fund back on Earth, to make sure the Manticore system won't get squatted in the meantime.

This proved to be a sound idea, as practical FTL drives have been invented after the colony ship has departed and they have been greeted by the Manticore Trust navy upon arrival, that has secured the system a couple years earlier, arriving by the newfangled hyper drive. :)

[growlist]

This idea is in the game Elite Dangerous, and you can go and look at them: https://elite-dangerous.fandom.com/wiki/Generation_Ship

The lore is quite amusing and poignant. Many of them met a sad end in one way or another, reminiscent of Fallout.

[allochthon]

Interesting. 100 years is a long time. Would this be a generation ship [0]? If so, I'm curious about their discussion of the moral and ethical considerations of committing children to such a journey.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_ship

[cptaj]

The project aims to study how we can develop interstellar travel technologies in 100 years.

Not to develop a ship that can travel for 100 years. (Even though that might be the case)

[scrumper]

Is this program dead? I had a look through the website and couldn't see much to suggest otherwise other than their writing prize in July last year. The list of partners too was a bit weird, all branding consultants and design agencies.

[close04]

> the endeavor was meant to excite several generations to commit to the research and development of breakthrough technologies to advance the eventual goal of interstellar space travel

It doesn't seem that the purpose is to come up with a working concept but rather a concept that's interesting enough to push the topic forward and tickle the imagination of scientist, engineers, etc. for generations until the practical implementation is achievable. So I expect right now branding and design are more useful in popularizing this.

[viach]

I hope the future of interstellar travel is not these gigantic starships. It's like starting a project of building a gigantic Zeppelin in 1900 in order to get able to get to moon in 100 years. Teleportation seems more convinient to me and much less financially and socially devastating.

[naravara]

>Teleportation seems more convinient to me and much less financially and socially devastating.

Sure, but there is that pesky problem where the solutions need to be theoretically possible.

[dfilppi]

There should only be one Manhattan style project now: figure out how to download consciousness into a machine. Besides conferring immorality, this would also make interstellar travel time scales irrelevant.

[icandoit]

If we could do this wouldn't we spin up minds-in-machines to do all sorts of cognitive tasks on demand and shut them off when the task is done (or they abandon their task) like a virtual machine.

Imagine making a copy of someone like Fabrice Bellard [1] and spinning up 100 of them to write your flappy bird clone for you and then shutting them off.

Would this be a terrible crime, or a paradise? This is an idea known as Hansons "ems" [2].

- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard

- https://ideas.ted.com/are-you-ready-for-the-impending-age-of...

[naravara]

>this would also make interstellar travel time scales irrelevant.

Not really. You're assuming this "machine storage" mechanism can preserve state forever. Even if you manage to upload consciousness losslessly and maintain all the ineffable qualities of "life" or "soul" or whatever (that we don't even really have solid philosophical definitions for), you'd still need to contend with data corruption and bit rot over cosmic time-scales.

[adamisom]

Although I think "immorality" was a typo and you meant "immortality", it's a funny typo, because ethics are definitely relevant.

[zentiggr]

Frank Herbert's take on this had humans enslaved for a few centuries before the Butlerian Jihad got humans back in control of themselves and instituted a ten thousand year taboo on 'thinking machines'.

Sci-fi is great for postulating dystopian outcomes so we can at least anticipate bad choices and guard against them.

[lallysingh]

I can probably train a simple AI to be "close enough" to lots of people. Does that count?

More seriously, if we can send software, why care about this muddy consciousness stuff?

[stanferder]

I fear that the rush to integrate humans with machines will miss something essential and end up replacing true consciousnesses with philosophical zombies.

[krapp]

Conferring immortality?

Are you under the impression that hardware never breaks down, or that media never rots, or that software never fails?

[kaybe]

We definitely need to get our environmental problems and ressource consumption under control first.

[sxu]

What about reproduction?

[PaulHoule]

"Did jesus die for Klingons?" can be answered the way that Mormons answer the question for Americans.

That is, Quetzalcoatl came to the middle east to offer the good word.

(I always tell Mormon missionaries about Quetzalcoatl and they haven't heard of him, but the Quetzalcoatl cult did start around the same time as when Jesus came +/- 100 years or so.)