Are habitable planets common? Like Earth? Do destination planetes have to be like Earth?

• If they are common than they are not valuble but if they are rare then they are harder to find, the subject of contention even war. I'd say common, but the closer to Earth, the more valuable, as the travel time is signifcantly shorter. CmAmidon - 27 Sep 2004

• If evolution proceeds over a million years, the changes could be extreme--could Humans somehow colonize sulfur enviroments, gas giants, Hi-G? --Camidon 5/10/06

How are the planets discovered? Probes? Earth based sensors? How much do we know about it?

• Perhaps one thing that could be done, is the continuous sending of probes, and the resulting feedback is more or less, a steady stream of data. In this manner, the ship could constantly update its evolutionary parameters. As a ship came closer and closer to its destination, the spectrum of possibility would steadily diminish, and the evolution parameters (slow alteration of the ship environment) would be more and more permanent.

• So, when a probe is sent out/initial astronomical projections are set, the crew begins slowly evolving as the ship's environment changes based on the first info received. However, if a new probe is sent out every year, then once the first probe reaches the planet, there would be constant feedback from every subsequent probe. As each probe learned new information, a ship would respond by tweaking its evolution to account for the new info.

Why change people and not terraform the planet? Humans have modified environments before why change now?

• This way, as people cross the comsos, they change to fit into their new world. They won't have to wait to terraform the planet. The long voyage to the planet puts them ready to settle it. The waiting is the travel time. Why terraform a planet, if its intended inhabitants already conform to the conditions necessary for survival? -- CmAmidon - 24 Jun 2004

• A very reasonable question. To me the answer should lie in what level of technology we start with. If our mission is cobbled together with currently available technology, and launched in as a lwo tech a means as possible, then terraforming isn't an option.

Why does the ship's crew settle a planet and not stay in space?

• This is a good question. I don't have an answer... yet. Perhaps this could be a story: An entire ship (or a small group from a ship) DOES decide to stay on the ship and keep roaming the cosmos. -- CmAmidon - 24 Jun 2004

Why does a colony ship traveling for centuries or millenia choose this particular planet?

• What if we introduce the discovery of an alien wreck somewhere in the currently reachable solar system (Earth, moon, nearby asteriods, Mars, et) with immense data storage regarding the species own colonial or survey efforts. Such a discover might just spark enough interest to inspire putting together missions to some of the worlds, and detailed planning to attempt to adjust the crew's biology to fit the destination environs. --DaveK

• I would argue against the aliens for this particular universe (although I like that idea).

What type of planets are the ships travelling to? Size, rings, satellites, gravity, atmosphere, hydrosphere, radiation, continents?

• What worries me is that the time involved is hundreds to thousands of years. If the premise is that the ships are used to guide evolution toward being able to adapt on a given planet, you need to know the conditions. Being able to spot an earthlike wolrd from lightyears away and map it isn't the same as knowing what conditions there are. We might be able to do spectral analasys of the atmosphere, and make guesses about temperature given the world's proximity to its sun, but thta's not the same as knowing what the dirt feels like, what the plants do, what's rain like, et. To change a species biology to suit a world you need some very detailed info. Since FTL is out, sending probes to do flybys will take an amazingly long time. If say we find a suitable wolrd around say Deneb, deneb is like 2000 light years away. at the speeds we can muster now any probe would take millenia to get there, teh to transmit the information gatrhered back would take another two thousand years! -- EmptyKube - 19 Jun 2004

What type of star systems are ships traveling to? Share your ideas about your destination star system.

Why not wait 100 years and halve the travel time?

• I agree that there needs to be some sort of driving factor...whether a geological/environmental crisis on Earth, the discovery of alien artifacts, or a political/religious movement that the planet won't tolerate, there needs to be a darned good reason for people to agree to a thousand- or more-generation space voyage. --DaveK

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

How large or small of a crew will your ship have? Share thoughts here.

• This depends on if we allow genetic engineering. If so, the crew could be quite small and genetic engineering is used to supply the diversity. --DaveK

• This is now a nonissue. Authors came determine the amount of crew they desire for the size ship they create. Discussion is still ueful though. --Camidon 5/3/06

• (taken from [How is the Ship Built?] I envision a population of a decent sized city 50K-200k with all the necessary infrastructure to support such a large crew, food growing and processing, waste recycling, habitats like an earth city with parks and commercial realestate, control room, science labs, power stations, observation areas, perhaps mining areas to extract useful resources from the ship itslef.