If you're in a middle generation, what's the alternative?

If you're in the middle of a long, slow interstellar journey, there's no chance of a survivable exit from the ship, so reversing course doesn't help you, although it may or may not help your successors. I expect most first wave journeys wouldn't have sufficient fuel to reverse course anyway, so trying to would probably be certain doom for your successors instead of meerly probable doom.

Anybody planning a mission on the timescale of interstellar journies is going to have to accept that they won't have much control of the result. You can pick the destination, and you can provide the initial conditions, and whatever happens, happens. The colony would have to be independent and self-sufficient by necessity, there can't be an expectation of sending spoils of colonization back home.

Even if we got up to 10% of the speed of light, transit time is too long for close coordination.

> Will people still care about “the mission” 5 generations and billions of kilometers from earth? Will the goal we set even be relevant or make sense at all?

That's an interesting point. I have noticed that often ideologically motivated parents don't always produce the same ideologically motivated offspring. They'll have to have very strict rules and some kind of brutal indoctrination to ensure the next generation follows the same path. But the more brutal and severe it is, the more likely it will cause rebellions.

I can already see a tragi-comedic scenario: the new generation overthrows the old guard, slams on the brakes, ship takes years to slow down from almost light speed. Decades later they are finally going back to earth at full speed. Now the next generation looks back at the mess their parents made, rebel, overthrow the old guard, slam on the brakes, decades later they are back flying to the original destination. But not until the next generation decides to bring back the fire of the revolution and turn things around... It all ends with them running out of fuel.

The pessimistic view is that we'll just have to let ChatGPT drive the ship and knock everyone out in cryosleep so they don't mess with the ship.

If "the mission" is survive, then yeah probably. I doubt the colonists would hold any loyalty to Earth, but they'ed definitely set up a colony for their own sake.

Also we do have plenty of institutions which have to some degree or another stuck to the mission many lifetimes after their founding. Religious institutions like the catholic church come to mind - obviously much has changed and plenty would argue about how well current behavior matches the founders' intent, but thousands of years later there is still an organization of people working towards a broadly similar goal. Less controversial examples include some construction projects which took centuries, like the Cologne Cathedral.

It should be noted that while none of the original crew would survive the journey, there would be an unbroken chain of people raising new crew members, educating them to the mission, and their adoption of the existing crew's values as their own, and propagating them forward, would be necessary for both their own well being and the group's. There would be little if any outside influence to cause the group to diverge from its mission, and no realistic alternative they would be able to pursue even if they wanted to. There might be ideological drift, but it would probably be a lot less than people who have been free to do whatever they want for the same period of time.

Kim Stanley Robinson's thesis in Aurora was: no. Subsequent generations would _not_ be happy with their ancestors' choices.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(novel)

I think with a lot of these missions, you had the commanders who were idealists, or those seeking fame and fortune, and then you have the all workers who just didn’t have better options.

We’d like to think of our military as volunteer service-people, but the reality is that it’s a pathway out of poverty for many. So how much “choice” to believe in the mission is there?

anti-aging / life-extension medicine might make a dent in the number of generations you need to get somewhere.

Plus, thinking you need to live near a star, on a planet, is merely a bias for "free" fusion power and gravity that you don't need to maintain.

I'm sure once we get artificial fusion working, the options for living in a community in a big, multi-story, 2 gigatonne, 500k population O'Neil cylinder tethered to a Kuiper belt iceball will look like "a big town with a nightlife, farmland, and a stable climate, with cheap trade and transit options for 'nearby' cylinders"

At which point you can colonize any frozen rock bigger than Rhode Island between here and Wolf 359 'easily' (slowly) whenever you want to move your O'Neill cylinder.

Would they know the mission?

I think the best way for these 100 or 10000 generation voyages is just to bake the motive into something boring like procreation or farming or religion or something.

I think there’s some sci-fi books where humans are doing one of these voyages and our dna is just aliens parking some bitcoin 4 billion years ago.

I wonder if the "generational problem" is a potential reason for the Fermi Paradox. If it is extremely difficult for a species to expend resources on multi-generational projects, then the species horizon is only that which can be spanned in some fraction of a lifetime of that species.

A good case study for these kinds of multi-generation missions are colonies and outposts. Especially the "put some settlers on an empty island to establish a claim" kind of colony. In that case the most obvious thing to do for each new generation is to continue living there, which aligns well with the goal of the mission. Even if they eventually demand independence the goal that the island doesn't fall into the hands of the French is still met, so that's at least partial success.

Alternative point of view: you already are on a mission, whether you realize or not. Somebody maybe put something in motion by doing some very imperative actions generations ago, and it still reverberates in your personal life. There are layers from other missions by other agencies as well. A king wanted to have his people live in some contested wilderness. So your ancestors went. There was a soldier who survived some battles in faraway lands who settled somewhere. The government wanted to industrialize the country and your ancestors moved to the city.

Of course, for most people most of the time, you are where you are and you just adjust and live.

>Would you still follow through on a mission Ferdinand II of Aragon sent your grand grand grand grand grand grandfather on in 1498? I probably wouldn’t. These goal would likely not even make much sense to me anymore, or be completely irrelevant in today’s world.

If you are on a ship in the middle of an endless ocean, or interstellar space, with many decades or centuries before reaching somewhere safe then truly what choice do you have?

Perhaps "the mission" is a set of resources and guidelines. To be successful, each generation will need to be able to make meaningful decisions about how to structure themselves, make decisions, manage resources, allocate work, collaborate, and direct the ship(s).

A single generation ship might leave for Alpha Centauri and arrive six thousand years later as a cloud of ships comprising a new nomadic civilization.

>> These goal would likely not even make much sense to me anymore, or be completely irrelevant in today’s world.

They won't have a choice in destination. The challenge will be maintaining an orderly society on the ship. If that life is all they have then they'll have to deal with it. If they have books, video, or VR of like on a planet they might have any number of reactions...

Well, if you are on an inter-generational spaceship it doesn't really matter if you care about 'the mission' or not, going back is likely not an option.

That said, there are multi-generational jobs and have been for a long time. So its not exactly uncommon for generations of people working in the same direction.

Kurzgesagt proposes moving the entire solar system, so the generations and kilometers question becomes moot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3y8AIEX_dU

Depends if you are the stone facer.

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson dealt with a generation ship and the implications of the mission on subsequent generations born on the ship who had no say in signing up for it. Great book!

We are on a generation ship traveling through space …

You might like "The Mountains of Sunset, The Mountains of Dawn?", a science fiction story about this kind of drift on a generation ship.

The hoverflies definitely have an advantage in that respect.

They're not consciously thinking about "the mission", just following their instincts.

Obviously you would set up a computer system to rule them all. Disobey and there goes your oxygen.

cooper and niven's "building harlequins' moon" explores some of these themes

> Will people still care about “the mission” 5 generations and billions of kilometers from earth?

Believing in the mission will be akin to people's belief in God/religion these days. You will have "atheists" who will say "You really think there was an Earth?"

Americans are still largely following the mission of their ancestors ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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My forefathers were expelled from our lands in the first century AD, and returned just about a century ago. Over 1800 years in exile. During all that time, every generation longed to return, and 1800 times we as a nation prayed for return.

We did it. It took almost two millennia, but we kept our goals and we kept our customs and we kept our values.

Perhaps a similar social structure will help humans inhabit other star systems on generational ships.

>Will people still care about “the mission” 5 generations and billions of kilometers from earth?

How could you not? At whatever point a crew member become disillusioned, it'll likely be too late to turnaround. There'll be a high incidences of interplanetary depression/psychosis as people struggle to deal with leaving the Blue Dot behind, esp. when they see footage from the earth, rainforests, etc. But, nothing counselling won't be able to take care of.

Right now, state propaganda is powerful enough to make young people line up to kill and be killed. So, a little interplanetary panic can be taken care of. In extreme cases, you can have protocols for any crew members who attempts to munity to euthanatized to guarantee the success of the mission.

My .02.

The Biosphere 2 project was an attempt to see what the smallest self-sustaining ecosystem (that would feed humans and recycle air/water) would be. For a crew of 8 people, the area of plants, crops & wetland covered 3.14 acres.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2

Nomadic humans travelled in a single generation. These flies need to be DTF in order to finish their journey.

Made me start wondering if supplies could be picked up in route. The oort cloud (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud) extends most of the way to the next star and presumably extends a similar distance away from the next star. Missions would need to be sent out in advance of the ship to start collecting and making fuel. It could then be accelerated up to catch the generation ship. It seams easily plausible in a science fiction sort of way.

Not necessarily what you really need is enough excess mass of critical elemental components to make up for any gaps in the recycling loop(s) between stars where you can resupply from asteroids.

If you want to steer the solar system in a new direction, you can use a Shkadov thruster. Why leave home behind when you can just carry it with you?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine

In Hyperion, people change themselves to fit the surroundings instead of the surroundings to fit them. This makes them Other, and they are the Boogeyman to standard humans.

This may be how it works out in the end. The “Belters” adapt and never set foot on anything with more gravity than a moon ever again.

So maybe we’d see sustainable colonies orbiting the earth first?

There are rumors that we should pass close to some other stars over the next couple million years. If we live that long that may be how this goes. Push the limits of stellar travel to visit the new neighbor, check out how habitable it is, start a diaspora. I don’t know how fast things like that will happen. Maybe you have months to decide which side you want to be on. Maybe you get months. Or a generation. But eventually they will get too far apart to visit again, except to share stories between us.

Moana 12.

Even if ansibles are real, the total communication payload between them will be limited by the mass of the ansibles. So real time communication won’t be a telephone or a conference call. You won’t be able to send robots and then control them in real time, decide if the colony is ready for humans, send them and then provide any missing expertise when they humans finally arrive. Or send embryos and raise them remotely.

It’ll be telegrams. For everything else it’ll be giant lasers and a 4-20 year wait for the data to arrive.

There's a movie too with the same name. It does not have good graphical effects, but besides that a very good movie.