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by jcranmer
2064 days ago
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> a sphere with a radius of 24.4 meters A more human-sized comparison is "100 average single-family homes in the US, all filled to the brim with rice". Or 60 ISSes, all filled completely with rice. Per person. And this is volume, not taking into account the weight of rice. Minimum sustainable population size seems to be about 100 people, so consider how large a ship you'd need just to fit all that rice storage. |
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On the other hand, it is under two Mount Palomar observatory domes full.
I'm assuming anyone building a generation ship is going to build it in space, not build it on a planet's surface and then try to launch it, so size is not really going to be an issue.
The big engineering issue will be propulsion. We don't have anything now that could drive such a ship. My guess is that this is either something we'll have within the next couple hundred years or we'll never have it.
I'm assuming that by the time you want to build this kind of ship, you've gotten raising people from frozen embryos or frozen eggs and sperm perfected, and that is where most replacement crew would come from. That should greatly reduce the crew size needed.
I think we'll be able to handle the biological side of this within a hundred years, with a good chance of it being quite a bit sooner than that.