How long does it take a ship to travel to its destination?

• How long is the trip? (We can figure the distance later.) I think anything more that a few hunderd years will be hard to justify. I can't imagine trying to engineer something that is expected to last many thousands of years. Would you commit your children to something that you have no idea if it is going to survive? I vote for 250 years ship time. The issues I have with anything longer are reliability and finding a crew for such long flights. Shorter than that and we don't have enough time to evolve the crew. I am assuming genetic engineering to accelerate the evolution. I think the trip should take a few hundred years at most. I don't believe that anyone would expect a trip much longer than that to survive. -- DaveK - 22 Jul 2004 03:50:07

• I think that only a hundred year trip does not recognize the kernel of CM's original idea: TIME. Also, as writers, it is up to us to suspend disbelief and come up with viable reasons why people would agree to a multigenerational voyage. Limiting our mission to a hundred years would put the idea itself along side a large clump of cliche' stories. What makes this original is the SCALE. No scale, no originality. Besides, what motivated humans to cross Asia, move over the Bearing Straits, and colonize the Americas all on foot, all over a span of millions of years? I'm sure as writers and thinkers we can find some sort of justification. We need to stop limiting oursellves to the here and now, and think about the SCALE. -- EmptyKube - 23 Jul 2004

• I feel that the story takes thousands to millions of years. The fact that earlier voyagers meet up with later generations is, in itself another aspect of the story which some writers might want to explore. For example, if colonists from different eras meet up in space or on a planet, do they even recognize each other as having the same evolutionary ancestry? Does biggotry take place? -- AnnelieseFox - 24 Jul 2004 15:32:17

• It's our job as writers to get the reader to supend their disbelief. I think the original part is the changing of the crew to match the target planet. I can think of a few stories that took thousands of years but none where the crew purposely evolved. As to not following CM's original idea, most of my stories don't follow my original idea. -- DaveK - 25 Jul 2004 02:09:18

• Nothing wrong with not following original ideas, but what is interesting about this idea isn;t the idea of a generation ship as such. These kinds of stories have been done A LOT. What fascinates me is the timescale. The correlation between distances traveled and human evolution harkens to our own pre-history, and stikes a chord with my sense of SF wonder. Humans embarking on journeys that they know will take a lifetime for reasons that later generations can only fathom are the essense of why we are all were we are today. I thnik of the Iceman found in the Alps, of the arrow in his back, of other injuries he seems to have suffered, and I wonder what was his life about? Who was he running from? Why did they shoot him in the back? (Might have been a spear instead of an arrow, can't remeber) Understanding history is about undersatnding people, and if we are going to do a future history, the idea of having a stage to play with that spans millenia is intoxicating. -- EmptyKube - 31 Jul 2004 15:30:32

• Haha! I have returned! I think time IS the most important aspect of the entire venture. (This is why after these past few months away, I'm posting here first--well, second after the muse challenge.) I have always argued for a tens of thousands-millions of year timeframe, and I still stick with that arguement. With the posts so far in this section, I have two thoughts: 1) Based on 3 votes to 1, the main GenE story thread should take thousands-millions of years. There a decision! (unless Dave suddenly wants to suffocate me.) 2) We can also start a 2nd GenE working/collaborative project dedicated to Dave's interest in a GenE ship that would take only a few hundred years (someone just have to start another World page. Dave?). The GenE idea is so big, it really can go anywhere, and I don't want to restrict any creativity, but as Anneliese and I discussed (sometime in the past--scratching head as to when), at somepoint we have to make decisions and start writing stories. I fully envision this project taking time, but human-cellphone time-years, not the astronmical aeons of time called for by the GenE universe! -- CmAmidon - 24 Sep 2004 03:48:30 ---

• How long is the trip? (We can figure the distance later.) I think anything more that a few hunderd years will be hard to justify. I can't imagine trying to engineer something that is expected to last many thousands of years. Would you commit your children to something that you have no idea if it is going to survive? I vote for 250 years ship time. The issues I have with anything longer are reliability and finding a crew for such long flights. Shorter than that and we don't have enough time to evolve the crew. I am assuming genetic engineering to accelerate the evolution.

I'm not sure we need a real planet/star. It can be star 12345 of the 2152 Galactic Star Catalog. Next --- -- DaveK - 25 Jun 2004

• I'm in the opposite camp. I'm very much against anything under tens of thousands of years. I fall into the timeframe of 50,000 to 1,000,000 years. The two aspects of this idea that interest me are 1) the extended timeframe, and 2) the "natural" evolution; sure genetic engineering would be part of the mission, but it would be mostly tinker with the ship's environment and let the inhabitants respond. Evolution can not occur in only a few hundred years. I'm against using genetic engineering to speed up evolution. That defeats the purpose of extrapolating ancient evolutional timeframes into the future. I think we need to use time as our ally, and not force things faster natural processes. Dave says: "Would you commit your children to something that you have no idea if it is going to survive?" I would bet that if we took a census of people today, a few hundred thousand, if not a few million would volunteer. Anything to escape the mundane existence that befuddles so many people. The issue of reliability though, is a big one. How does the ship sustain itself? CmAmidon - 25 Jun 2004