Asteroids can be big grumpy things that decide that they are going to make life on Earth, just like the dinosaurs, extinct. They are flying around all over the place entering our solar system on their trajectories, and either crashing or being caught by another object in our system, or just peacefully cruising straight through and onwards out into the dark void. Asteroids are normally looked upon as nasty things that we need to be protected from, but there is another way of looking at them.
By their nature, they are full of rocks and minerals useful for mining for resources, and could even be a future bolthole for humanity. If we have an imminent problem on our lovely blue planet we could be kicking ourselves for not thinking further forward and having plans in place for another home. In my opinion the trouble with the human race in general Is that we only live 80 or 90 years maximum and therefore it is the only time we plan for. We need to look generations ahead.
For something as large as an asteroid colony that would turn into a spacecraft eventually a world commitment would need to be made. After the commitment is made certain things are absolutely essential to make this work.
Hopping onto an asteroid that is already moving is a good idea but it would be hard to get everything on it that is needed for a very long voyage. There is no problem landing and taking off on an asteroid as the gravity is minimal and therefore requires less fuel. Getting all the equipment into orbit around the Earth might be a bit of a problem. But perhaps we would have already mined some very close asteroids in preparation and leave the Earth out of the equation altogether.
For a trip to the stars and perhaps beyond the asteroid we are thinking of using may have to have an orbit around the Earth ready for us to exploit it. We can load the thousands of passengers and tons of equipment before it got out of range this way. We could spend years, setting it up but eventually it would need some form of propulsion. At the moment, the ion drive seems about the only constant propulsion system that would be of any use in my eyes.
Then the asteroid will have a large percentage of its interior excavated while leaving its outer shell mostly intact. The Earth has been excavated many times, producing large caverns so the only problem would be getting the equipment to the asteroid and using it in zero gravity. This interior excavation can take the form of interconnecting tunnels, concentric rings, a large central hollow sphere, or a large central hollow cylinder. The comet or asteroid is then spun up and rotated to produce artificial gravity along its inner hollowed surfaces, which are presurized and terraformed to make them more accomodating to human inhabitants.
A hollowed out asteroid is a good idea as it provides protection against radiation with the masses of rocks and minerals around the central core. If the asteroid was travelling forward, either a massive amount of asteroid would be needed to be left ahead of the central habitation or a large shield would be needed ahead of the asteroid to protect it from abrasion over the years. The cheapest way would probably be to inhabit the rear part of the asteroid and leave the forward part as a shield.
Radiator fins would need to be attached to control the temperature. The production of heat from thousands of humans and machinery would just be too much and would need to be released somehow. The temperature also needs to be controlled because of the Windows that would need to be built to allow sunlight into the dark interior.
Water would need to be carried and could be carried between the outside and the inside of the skin of the asteroid. Hopefully this could be acquired from the moon if LCROSS finds water in substantial amounts.
People would walk along the outside inner surface of the asteroid. As the asteroid would be spun up along. Its longest axis the gravity could be made to be very close to Earths. Food would be grown on the outer inner surface, rivers and lakes would form and buildings would be built. The plants and trees would reduce the CO2 and produce oxygen and a closed loop system would be carefully monitored. Water would have to be carefully monitored too and recycled. Hopefully the thickness of the asteroid’s skin would prevent water and oxygen from leaking into space. If not an inner skin may have to be built.
So what would life be like for the inhabitants of our ark ship? The inhabitants would probably be there for hundreds of years, perhaps even hundreds of generations. There would have to be a good data storage on board the ship so as to remember the important things such as operation of the ship, where they have come from, where they are going and what they are in. It is a big possibility that they could think that the universe is what they see (the inside of an asteroid), and not even realise that that they have arrived at their destination.
This generation or ark ship would take thousands of years to reach their destination, and it is very likely they would get overtaken by more advanced technology that we had built. Imagine going to all that effort, and then the 10th generation arriving at the star but finding that humans had already been there or are there already with a second-place prize.
Asteroids can be big grumpy things that decide that they are going to make life on Earth, just like the dinosaurs, extinct. They are flying around all over the place entering our solar system on their trajectories, and either crashing or being caught by another object in our system, or just peacefully cruising straight through and onwards out into the dark void. Asteroids are normally looked upon as nasty things that we need to be protected from, but there is another way of looking at them.
By their nature, they are full of rocks and minerals useful for mining for resources, and could even be a future bolthole for humanity. If we have an imminent problem on our lovely blue planet we could be kicking ourselves for not thinking further forward and having plans in place for another home. In my opinion the trouble with the human race in general Is that we only live 80 or 90 years maximum and therefore it is the only time we plan for. We need to look generations ahead.
Asteroid ship
For something as large as an asteroid colony that would turn into a spacecraft eventually a world commitment would need to be made. After the commitment is made certain things are absolutely essential to make this work.
Hopping onto an asteroid that is already moving is a good idea but it would be hard to get everything on it that is needed for a very long voyage. There is no problem landing and taking off on an asteroid as the gravity is minimal and therefore requires less fuel. Getting all the equipment into orbit around the Earth might be a bit of a problem. But perhaps we would have already mined some very close asteroids in preparation and leave the Earth out of the equation altogether.
For a trip to the stars and perhaps beyond the asteroid we are thinking of using may have to have an orbit around the Earth ready for us to exploit it. We can load the thousands of passengers and tons of equipment before it got out of range this way. We could spend years, setting it up but eventually it would need some form of propulsion. At the moment, the ion drive seems about the only constant propulsion system that would be of any use in my eyes.
Then the asteroid will have a large percentage of its interior excavated while leaving its outer shell mostly intact. The Earth has been excavated many times, producing large caverns so the only problem would be getting the equipment to the asteroid and using it in zero gravity. This interior excavation can take the form of interconnecting tunnels, concentric rings, a large central hollow sphere, or a large central hollow cylinder. The comet or asteroid is then spun up and rotated to produce artificial gravity along its inner hollowed surfaces, which are presurized and terraformed to make them more accommodating to human inhabitants.
Which star
A hollowed out asteroid is a good idea as it provides protection against radiation with the masses of rocks and minerals around the central core. If the asteroid was travelling forward, either a massive amount of asteroid would be needed to be left ahead of the central habitation or a large shield would be needed ahead of the asteroid to protect it from abrasion over the years. The cheapest way would probably be to inhabit the rear part of the asteroid and leave the forward part as a shield.
A reliable power source would be needed, something such as solar power when close to stars and a nuclear power source in between stars. This would be especially necessary if the inhabitants of the ark are cryogenically frozen.
Radiator fins would need to be attached to control the temperature. The production of heat from thousands of humans and machinery would just be too much and would need to be released somehow. The temperature also needs to be controlled because of the Windows that would need to be built to allow sunlight into the dark interior.
Water would need to be carried and could be stored between the outside and the inside of the skin of the asteroid. Hopefully this could be acquired from the moon if LCROSS finds water in substantial amounts.
People would walk along the inner surface of the asteroid. As the asteroid would be spun up along its longest axis the gravity could be made to be very close to Earths. Food would be grown on the inner surface, rivers and lakes would form and buildings would be built. The plants and trees would reduce the CO2 and produce oxygen and a closed loop system would be carefully monitored. Water would have to be carefully monitored too and recycled. Hopefully the thickness of the asteroid’s skin would prevent water and oxygen from leaking into space. If not an inner skin may have to be built.
So what would life be like for the inhabitants of our ark ship? The inhabitants would probably be there for hundreds of years, perhaps even hundreds of generations. There would have to be a good data storage on board the ship so as to remember the important things such as operation of the ship, where they have come from, how to make beer, where they are going and what they are in. It is a big possibility that they could think that the universe is what they see (the inside of an asteroid), and not even realise that that they have arrived at their destination.
This generation or ark ship would take thousands of years to reach their destination, and it is very likely they would get overtaken by more advanced technology that we had built. Imagine going to all that effort, and then the 10th generation arriving at the star with their Ark but finding that humans had already been there or are there already with a second-place prize ready and a small shiny starship or a wormhole.
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Lovely topic that crops up on Space.com forums so frequently. Begs the question if there should there be a debate about colonising alien planets stones throw from here (by warp drives) or branching out farther to the denser parts of the milky way. If you wanna aim this to the Proxima planets, theres this sci-fi book First Ark to Alpha centauri. My guess is why not branch out to the KBOs first then use a comet from there? Ha! Thatd be almost the same like in Niven and Pournelle’s Heart of the Comet. Mind you halley’s comet is getting smaller and tighter, losing tons of ices each circuit it makes to the solar systems ineer realms. Maybe better to hitch a ride in one of the sporadics that come here on parabolic tracks? Well nice topic anyhow
A well written entry, but there are a few things I’d like to point out:
1) Ion drive simply wouldn’t cut it. It would be like trying to push the moon with a hair dryer. Much better would be either a single (or possibly clustered) Orion nuclear pulse drive(s), or a sustained fusion reaction similar the the one proposed by the B.I.S. back in the 1970′s. Only that kind of energy being liberated could push something with the mass of Chicago out of the solar system. (Project Orion- by Dyson)
2) There would be no need for exterior windows to let light in, simply becuase once you get beyond the orbit of Saturn, the sun becomes just another star. The ship would need to be completely self-contained. More than likely a series of concentric decks, rather than the open enviroment depicted in your illustration. These decks could be lit through some kind of very long lived CFL. (Or the ship will need to be able to manufacture or repair them as the voyage goes on, along with all the other systems, for the next several hundred years.
3) The ablation sheild at the prow of such an ark would most likely be made up of cometary ice. Melted and sprayed in a sufficient thickness to be able to absorb both radiation and micrometeoriod impacts.
4) You mention people being in suspended animation… well, if you can do THAT… then you don’t really need to build a “world ship,” do you?
5) Hollowing out an asteroid is actually a pretty straight forward process: drill to the center of the rock, and set off a bomb… fill the cavity with ice, and seal it back up again. Then, set the asteroid in rotation, and lob it into a close orbit to the sun… the rock heats up, melts, and turns the ice into steam, which creates a “volcanic bubble” within the mass. Let it cool on an extended orbit intot he outer system, and when it gets back, viola! A titanic nickle-iron balloon, ready to be outfitted.
Just a secondary thought: your comment about “crew in cryogenic freeze” still kinda bothers me… but, I CAN think of a good use for such cryonics: keeping the gene pool highly diversified.
A generatinal ship like this would probably work best with a crew of several hundred people… which is barely enough to provide for a sustainable genetic base. By the time the ship got to it’s destination, the crew would be more inbred than Ozark hillbillys. So, to eliminate that fate, the ship would probably be equipped with freezers for sperm and eggs from several tens of thousands of people. Plus, the equipment for in vitro fertilization. Making the resulting colony much stronger in terms of diversity. Of course, in order to make the most use of these samples, it would be best if the population of the ark were predominantly female. (A similar situation to the one proposed in the film “Dr. Strangelove.”)
Cryogenic freezing is not such a bad idea really because in a way it freezes time. Therefore the infrastructure for maintaining a living crew is not needed. Cryogenic freezing fits a lot more people in as they don’t need places to live work or eat. This would leave more space for more people in cryogenic freezing.
In vitro fertilisation equipment is a good idea as even more life can be taken.
Well, it wouldn’t be such a bad idea, but so far, no one has been able to crack the problems of this sort of suspended animation. Any time you freeze tissue, you end up disrupting the inter-celluar bonds with ice crystals. So when you try to revive, the individual cells come back, but their ability to work as a unit has been destroyed. (Which, in the case of the brain, can ruin your whole day.)
It is a long way into the future for cryogenic freezing but then again it is a long way in the future for an arc ship.
The Xerophiles can survive being dried out and we need some water to revive. Admittedly they are just microbes but if it can be done in nature it can be done artificially as well I believe.
I do believe that spaceships aren’t really the way to go and that bending space is probably a better option. Perhaps when they find out what the Higgs Bosun is in the large hadron Collider this will solve the problem of mass and allow us to create spaceships that have no mass and therefore instant acceleration. This gives much better results as we can see them in our lifetime on the other hand if our lifetimes were expanded an arc ship may not be so bad.
Chris, you can freeze all sorts of animals in ice for transport. I myself had one of my first jobs at a Pet Store, and we would have goldfish and frogs shipped to us all the time in blocks of ice. Organisims don’t have to be extremophiles in order to be preserved like this. They only have to be aquatic in nature. Mammals, unfortunately, can’t do this trick. They may never be able to. There has been a few advances in hybernation through the use of hydrogen sulfides, but that’s not the same thing as stopping your life functions entirely, which is what you’d need for space flights of several hundred years at a time.
Even if you could freeze a human as easily as you could a goldfish, there would be an upper limit. Because the human body contains low level radioactive elements, you couldn’t stay frozen for much longer than 1200 years before your tissues began to be irreversibly damaged from it’s own background radiation. (not to mention the induced radiation coming from travelling through unprotected interstellar space.)
That’s interesting I never realised that a goldfish could be frozen. Perhaps I will experiment on my daughter’s goldfish.
Looking at Wikipedia even some types of frogs can be frozen and brought back to life. It’s only a matter of time until we can freeze the human body and bring it back to life. Medical science is still in the dark ages in my opinion but will flourish I expect when stem cells start to be used in all sorts of applications.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryobiology#Cryopreservation_in_nature
More likely, a human being would have to be frozen in a high pressure enviroment. Thus, ice crystals wouldn’t have the chance to form. So… your best chance at cryo sleep for a thousand years or so would be in a chamber that would look like a backyard propane tank crossed with a coffin. The revival process would be tricky at best… Ever put a Coke into the freezer, then when you pop it open, the whole thing suddenly freezes solid? Same principle.
But, this is getting off the subject of asteroid arks…
I was reading a paper just last weekend, which proposed that the same magnetic feild generator that would be required for radiation sheilding would also act as a kind of “mag-drive” pushing the ark ever so gently along, even as it protected those inside from cosmic rays. It would be far weaker than an ion drive, of course, but over time… say several thousand years….
Using magnetism in two ways (to shield and drive the spacecraft) is a great saving. That sounds like quite a nice engine.
In the overall scheme of things though ark ships, in my opinion, are dinosaurs that would become extinct pretty quick when the structure of the universe is discovered. Something like the Higgs bosun (sometimes called the God particle) may eventually give us a way of making the mass of objects zero. This would then allow spacecraft that could be built with no mass and that would overtake the ark and its poor people that are taking thousand years to get to their new world. I bet they would be pretty hacked off to arrive at their planet and to find an ancient civilisation that had come from Earth.
Possibly. That was the scenario the A.E. Van Vogt wrote about in his classic story, “Far Centaurus.” (1944) Where a group of astronauts in suspended animation take 1000 years to reach the nearest star, only to find they’ve been outpaced by the rest of humanity.
Unfortunately, that scenario isn’t very likely, when you start to examine the realities. For one thing, The Higgs Boson is still theoretical. Even if/when we finally move toward a “Theory of Everything” it doesn’t mean that we’re suddenly going to have anti-gravity, time-travel, or massless spacedrives dropped in our laps. In all liklihood, the best we’ll ever be able to attain is about .3 of c. I say this, because it seems to be the default speed that mass gets ejected from a star when it goes nova. If it takes an entire star exploding to push a hunk of molten rock to that speed… what does that say about our chances of matching it with relatively limited fission/fusion drives? Or even matter/antimater engines of some sort.
Nope, far from being dinosaurs, I think “world ships” or possibly “sleeper ships” or even “seed ships” might be the only viable starship designs for the next several thousand years, at least.
Even more likely… by the time we, human beings, reach the outer edges of our solar system, our A.I.s may have evolved to the point where they could make the trips far more easily than we humans could… They wouldn’t need food, water, atmosphere… time would be meanigless to them…and the difference between our natural minds, and those that we’ve built in a computer lab, would be pretty much non-existant.
The Higgs bosun is being looked for by the large hadron Collider and looking through papers it seems that the discovery could lead to other things such as massless travel. Obviously I don’t have hard proof as I would now be fantastically rich sending satellites into space for a small fraction of the original cost.
Once flight was thought to be impossible and that was about 100 years ago so who knows what will happen in the next 100 and who knows what will not happen in the next 100 years?
I have also had this idea that perhaps, space and time change dramatically around planets when compared to deep space. Perhaps the laws of physics are different the further you get from gravity’s affect. This may mean that space is more restrictive and then again it may mean that we rewrite the books.
Of course if the laws of physics change then the speed of light may change. There are quite a few things about the universe that we don’t understand such as dark matter. Let’s hope Einstein isn’t wrong but even he had to fudge a few things.
Try this-
http://www.weirdwarp.com/2009/05/not-faster-than-light-but-fast-light-is-it-possible/
Shris,
I appreciate your optimisim, but simply discovering the unifying particle doesn’t mean that we’ll automatically be able to start using for spacedrives. (We already have electronic components that allow a single electron to jump from one point to another inside it’s physical body, without traversing the intervening distance… but this hasn’t led us to building a warp drive.)
I’m here to discuss hard science and engineering solutions to a theoretical problem. Not to just wave a magic wand and say, “We’ll discover “X”, and suddenly we’ll be homesteading the galaxy!” That kind of pie in the sky stuff is great if you’re writing a novel, but it doesn’t really turn my crank at all.
I do tend to agree with you, though, on the sentiment that the solutions to interstellar travel may take us down roads we hadn’t really thought about before. I caught the season premire of “Sci Fi Science” last night, and watched as a whole new way of achieving it was presented. (Hint: cut out the ships entirely.) The episode is entitled “Colonizing the Galaxy” and is even more “blue sky” than some of the stuff you’re suggesting…. except that this means of interstellar travel doesn’t break any laws of the universe.
Check it out.