Ross Shulman sent in this great post by (one of my favorite) current science fiction writers Charles Stross about how you might design a generational starship to handle the vast distances and time involved in space travel. Excellent read. (excerpt below)
If you can crank yourself up to 1% of light-speed, alpha centauri is more than four and a half centuries away at cruising speed. To put it in perspective, that’s the same span of time that separates us from the Conquistadores and the Reformation; it’s twice the lifespan of the United States of America.
We humans are really bad at designing institutions that outlast the life expectancy of a single human being. The average democratically elected administration lasts 3-8 years; public corporations last 30 years; the Leninist project lasted 70 years (and went off the rails after a decade). The Catholic Church, the Japanese monarchy, and a few other institutions have lasted more than a millennium, but they’re all almost unrecognizably different. More here…
Below I also include an image to give some perspective to the distances we would have to cover. It comes from another good piece about escaping earth in a few billion years when the sun dies (via the National Superconducting Cyclotron Lab).
The distances we are talking about
Go to the feed source of this article
Go to publisher’s website
This article appeared on the website mentioned in the links above and the author and/or the publisher are to be credited explicitly for the content. Alphaverse.com is not affiliated in any professional way with the publisher of this article and uses its content purely for educational purposes.
