Quote:
Originally Posted by eburacum45
Actually, I disagree. The concept of a generation ship requires a very large vessel , capable of supporting a breeding population of humans for thousands of years; all their food needs to be grown or manufactured on-board, and all their waste materials recycled. That implied a payload of millions of tonnes to be accelerated to interstellar speed.
At the other end of the scale the Starwisp is too small. It could barely carry a TV camera, let alone a human.
What is required is something in-between, a ship capable of delivering a sizable payload of manufacturing equipment to a system, which can then start making the requirements for a colony on arrival. No living people need be carried at all; they can be instead carried as zygotes, or gametes, or just as digitised DNA; human embryos could be raised to term in artificial wombs and raised by robots at the destination.
This might seem far fetched- but by the time we are able to manufacture starships, most or all of these other technologies will likely be available too. If they are, I would expect that no generation ships would ever be built.
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Maybe. In both cases all the infrastructure required to continue a self sufficient society must be sent to another solar system, and in both cases at the end of the journey there needs to be an environment humans can live in. The generation ship might well contain a great deal of dual use hardware that would go towards expanding infrastructure at the destination. The automation in the second option might well ending up massing more than would the generation ship option. Also, if automation is that good, is there a point in sending people?