Interstellar ark
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An interstellar ark is a conceptual space vehicle that some have speculated could be used to traverse the distances between stars. The concept was first developed by Dr. Gregory Matloff, who argues that such a vehicle may be the most economically feasible method of traveling such distances.
An interstellar ark might be a generation ship or a sleeper ship.
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Considerations for Generation-Ship Proposals
It would have to be large, and the only adequate technology likely to be available (even assuming the most favorable economic and political factors) soon enough to make plans around is the Orion concept of propulsion by nuclear impulses. The largest spacecraft design analyzed in the Orion project had a 400-meter-square footprint and weighed approximately 8 million tons. It could be large enough to host a city of a hundred thousand or more people.
The purely engineering issues above concern building, in space, a physically self-sufficient craft. In light of the multiple generations that it could take to reach even our nearest neighboring star systems such as Alpha Centauri, further issues of the viability of such interstellar arks include:
- the possibility of humans drastically evolving in directions unacceptable to the sponsors
- the minimum population required to maintain in isolation a culture acceptable to the sponsors; this could include such aspects as
- ability to maintain and operate the ship
- ability to accomplish the purpose (planetary colonization, research, building new interstellar arks) contemplated
- sharing the values of the sponsors (which are not likely to be empirically demonstrated to be viable beyond the home planet).
Considerations for Sleeper-Ship Proposals
A sleeper type crewed starship would probably be propelled by a Daedalus type fusion microexplosion type nuclear pulse drive propulsion system, that may allow it to obtain an interstellar cruising velocity of from 5% to 10% of the velocity of light .
At the present time, cryopreservation and other forms of "cold sleep" lasting decades or longer are, for mammals, and for humans as of 2003 real theoretical possibilities. These possibilities are suggested by the short-term hibernation of certain mammalian species, hypothermia, and hibernation can greatly reduce the amount of food, water, and oxygen that is required to keep a living animal, or human alive while in stasis (suspended animation/induced hibernation.)
Developing the medical technology that is required to achieve a "sleeper" type starship is probably an achievable goal for later in the 21st century provided that the necessary monetary funding is provided, and the necessary laboratory experiments are conducted in the future.
These conceptual methods' appeal rests on hopes of:
- reducing ship mass by eliminating the equipment needed by an active ship-city (without cold-sleep-maintaining and -reversing equipment of comparable mass), and/or
- avoiding the need for an acceptable ark-adapted culture.
Both Orion type thermonuclear pulse drive starships, and Daedalus type thermonuclear pulse drive starships could be built and sent to nearby stars within a 10 light-year radius of the solar system later in the 21st century, if there was sufficient monetary funding and political will to do this.
Trivia
- The concept of an interstellar ark was used humorously in the cult sci-fi classic The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in the form of the B-Ark of the Golgafrincham Ark Fleet, filled to capacity with cryosleeping advertising executives, management consultants, independent filmmakers, and other "undesirables" whom the Golgafrinchams wanted to get rid of. Hitchhiker's Guide author Douglas Adams had first proposed these plot elements for a TV special that was to have featured Ringo Starr, but the show was never produced.