| > Only the richest, elites. Would they actually want to go? If we are talking about a 1000 year voyage, and not assuming a major breakthrough in cryogenics or longevity, signing up for that trip means you are going to spend the rest of your life on that ship, mostly outside but near our solar system. I don't see that being particularly enticing to rich elites. I don't remember were I read this so cannot properly give credit, but I saw an interesting variation on the generation ship. The conventional approach is to send a large crew, whose job is to operate the ship, reproduce, and raise their kids to take their place, generation after generation until the ship arrives and they become colonists. The variation would be to start with a much smaller crew and large collection of frozen embryos. You make use of the embryos when you arrive to build up the population to full colony size. The advantage of this approach is that since there are fewer people during the trip, you have more capacity for supplies. You can better equip the ship to deal with unforeseen problems. For instance, suppose taking the embryo approach, you can get it down to a crew of 6. You'll have 12 when the crew is overlapping with their kids. Call it 18 if the crew's parents have not yet died when the crew has their kids. Suppose each crew member needs 3000 calories per day. Then on a 1000 year voyage, you need 18 people x 3000 calories/person/day x 365.2422 days/year x 1000 years = 19.7 billion calories. I have a protein bar by my desk at the moment. It is 190 calories, and is about 125 mm x 30m x 20mm = 75000 mm^3. So, 19.7 billion calories x 1 bar/190 calories x 75000 mm^3/bar gives a volume of 7.8 x 10^12 mm^3. Stored in a cubic storage container, this would require a container with an interior length, width, and height of 19.8 m. The "small active crew, everyone else a frozen embryo" generation ship could start out with enough food on board to last the entire voyage, and so would not need to raise food onboard. That alone should greatly simplify things, and greatly improve the chances of making it. Of course they probably would still grow food, but now it would be for added variety and flavor, not a necessity. (I'm not going to do the calculation to see if they could start with enough water for the whole trip. Water is very bulky and we use a lot of it, so my totally uneducated guess is that it would take too much space. However, I believe that efficient water recycling in a closed environment is something we know how to do very well, and so water should not be a problem). |
I would suspect you would want to have at least 10-20 people in each 5 year age bracket. Then people will have a fighting chance at developing their own social lives and maybe even their own culture.