Aurora - a critique by Stephen Baxter and others

[Rynn]

a) I would suggest that rather than trying to fit a full planetary ecosystem into a ship, a better approach might be to create a smaller, custom designed, and possibly engineered, ecosystem instead.

I can't imagine the size of the ship necessary to take an entire planet's full of ecosystem. That's millions of species of just animals alone, let alone any other kingdom. You'd have to take a breeding population of all of them at least and even more of species that support others by providing food, shelter, pollination etc.

In terms of transplanting an ecosystem it would definitely have to hover above a minimal ecosystem. Minimal as in "this is the bare minimum to keep everything alive and sustainable" but with a bit extra to add a buffer in case of accident. Then on the other side you breed numbers up and use your exowomb technology to introduce new species.

Genetic engineering and bots could shrink that number down as we've suggested if you can design things like robotic pollinators, soil species that fill multiple niches etc.

One element of such a shipsystem might be that it 'tops out' with its largest organisms and/or apex predators actually being rather small and harmless by our standards. Cats or weasels instead of wolves or lions (or tigers or bears, oh my). Another might be lifeforms engineered to work better in the closed environment of the ship. Perhaps a rabbit gengineered to have a slower breeding rate, for example.

I assume here your idea is that humans don't draw resources from this ecosystem? If the apex creatures are cats then they likely couldn't, humans requiring a lot more resources. But I suppose that if the journey was short enough you may be able to get away with stores of food, recycling technology and life support all to keep the humans alive until they can arrive and expand the ecosystem.

For a generation ship or anything like that I suspect you wouldn't be able to do this. You'll need to use the ecosystem for everything from recycling of waste into food to providing breathable air to microbiomics.

b) I would also suggest that for a fairly short range/short duration ship such as Aurora (I've seen discussions of ships taking centuries to thousands of years to get around and SF back in the 70s and 80s had many stories about such), that a better approach would be to go for less of an ecosystem and more of a system designed to support humans reliably over a fairly long time scale. So perhaps something more like farmland, living areas, some amount of plants and animals, but not trying to cram whole self-sustaining ecosystems into such a small space. A certain amount of machinery doing some jobs as well might be in order

Later in the setting technology could do the job of an ecosystem. An artificial ecosystem could replace the air, recycle waste and advanced medical technology might be able to provide all the symbiotic organisms humans need to properly survive. That's a deceptively monumental challenge though replacing the biological environment humans have spent their entire lineage evolving to fit within. Vecs would definitely have an advantage in colonisation.

Which sets up a second strategy quite nicely: building an ecosystem from scratch. As difficult as it would be to transplant an ecosystem this is orders of magnitude more. You have to not only synthesise millions of organisms representing thousands of species but somehow apply them to an environment in the right order (likely artificially preparing that environment first) so that they thrive rather than die out in a huge wave. A lot of scope for failure there. Hmm....ideas for an entry about an early colonisation effort are percolating

Along those lines do we have any examples in the setting of robotic interstellar ships, lead by an AI, that build an ecosystem and raise human children in it? I'm feeling some good scope for OA level weirdness there.

A few early missions used the Parental Vec system.
Uoagranyu was mostly a success;
Pandya nearly failed because of inadequate immunology;
Diwali here the environment was deemed too dangerous for biological humans so it became a purely vec colony;
On Caph the system worked too well, and a population explosion occurred.

Ah thanks for that I have the outline of an idea along these lines. An early mission that consisted of a few AI with exowomb technology that were intended to build an ecosystem and raise humans in it. Only their eco-engineering theories were flawed and the ecosystems keep dying out. Over time this drives the AI mad (because they were designed to cherish life) and they get stuck in a cycle. Several centuries later a probe arrives to find a system littered with dead habs and a mad AI that keeps building new ones, raising human children in them and watching them die of habitat loss over and over.

[Bear]

I would expect breeding populations of most species to travel as data. I mean, straight up: Here are fifty thousand genome sequences for humans, along with gestational parameters so you can get the uterine replicator set right. Here are fifty thousand genome sequences for elephants, here are fifty thousand genome sequences for tobacco plants, here are fifty thousand for dermestid beetles, etc....

With, of course, lots of data compression because there's a lot of repeated material between and within species. And this fundamental source document, which along with sufficient infrastructure to operate a uterine replicator, is all you need to set up a whole planetary ecology, is known as the Book Of Life.

Probably a highly extended and annotated version of it will be a holy book in the Zoetropic Biopolity. Probably volumes II and III cover a multitude of tweaks, provolves, and splices and probably volumes IV and V are about Muuh and Soft-One ecologies.

[Rynn]

I would expect breeding populations of most species to travel as data. I mean, straight up: Here are fifty thousand genome sequences for humans, along with gestational parameters so you can get the uterine replicator set right.

If you can do this and also be able to prepare the abiotic environment, introduce species in significant numbers and the right order, raise the organisms that require parental care and ensure proper socialisation of creatures that need it...then sure! But each one of those is a huge task, miles more difficult than building an interstellar rocket. That's why in the early setting it's likely that only vec missions are going to succeed. The first biont missions, well they might not be sophisticated enough to tick everyone of these boxes so instead they bring a small ecosystem along to transplant.

[stevebowers]

But each one of those is a huge task, miles more difficult than building an interstellar rocket.

Building a interstellar rocket large enough to carry a complete biome is hard, because you soon come up against some very restrictive physical limits. However biological technology will continue to advance in the meantime, and by the time the first interstellar missions are ready there will have been some remarkable advances in biotech. Much of this tech would be honed in the space habitats that will already exist in the Solar System.

I think the first colony ships would probably carry very small, simplified biomes designed for the purpose, or species which have been designed to be easily gestated on arrival, or both. Wolves and bears might not make it (unless provolved wolves and bears take them along as pets, perhaps).

[Bear]

Starting from an abiotic environment is hard. But, seriously, the Book of Life is a source document. It's useful on literally every planet where you want to introduce life, and it doesn't need a complete rewrite for every new endeavor. It's information infrastructure. And if you later want to change your biosphere or introduce a known species, there it is and you can just do it.

It doesn't imply the expertise to get parental care taken care of or get things in the right order, but none of that stuff is even relevant or possible if you don't have the information. And, well, information as data is just easier to manage, transmit, and store than information as DNA molecules in cryogenically stored gametes.

[Drashner1]

I can't imagine the size of the ship necessary to take an entire planet's full of ecosystem. That's millions of species of just animals alone, let alone any other kingdom. You'd have to take a breeding population of all of them at least and even more of species that support others by providing food, shelter, pollination etc.

Legend has it that it runs about 300 cubits IIRC

Genetic engineering and bots could shrink that number down as we've suggested if you can design things like robotic pollinators, soil species that fill multiple niches etc.

Agreed. And I suspect that if you can build a starship in the first place, your gengineering and automation skills are well beyond anything we can do today.

I assume here your idea is that humans don't draw resources from this ecosystem? If the apex creatures are cats then they likely couldn't, humans requiring a lot more resources. But I suppose that if the journey was short enough you may be able to get away with stores of food, recycling technology and life support all to keep the humans alive until they can arrive and expand the ecosystem.

Depends on what you mean by 'drawing resources'. The crew would be engaging in some form of farming, which might include raising smaller animals for meat, milk, etc. Trees and plants could be onboard for both aesthetics and to process the atmosphere in whole or in part. In some cases, you might get protein from insects, algae, or some kind of cloning or gengineered organisms or plants. The farming in question would probably look more like some form of intensive indoor farming than km of fields like we use now.

You certainly wouldn't have people just going out and picking fruit off random trees or hunting random animals (unless the ship was really large). But this wouldn't be so different from what we see in cities even now. You aren't going to find a lot of cows or wolves in a modern city. But you can find lots of plants and a range of smaller animals that live and die without big animals as part of the ecosystem.

A couple of centuries isn't all that long as interstellar trips go and from a tree's perspective may not be much at all. If we were looking at 500+ years to thousands of years of voyage time, I think you'd need a much bigger ship.

Later in the setting technology could do the job of an ecosystem. An artificial ecosystem could replace the air, recycle waste and advanced medical technology might be able to provide all the symbiotic organisms humans need to properly survive. That's a deceptively monumental challenge though replacing the biological environment humans have spent their entire lineage evolving to fit within. Vecs would definitely have an advantage in colonisation.

Later in the setting you have thousands of years of experience at this kind of thing and tech that is more or less alive in its own right. Agree that vecs would have an advantage (but then machines are generally superior to biology (or have that potential) IMO).

Which sets up a second strategy quite nicely: building an ecosystem from scratch. As difficult as it would be to transplant an ecosystem this is orders of magnitude more. You have to not only synthesise millions of organisms representing thousands of species but somehow apply them to an environment in the right order (likely artificially preparing that environment first) so that they thrive rather than die out in a huge wave. A lot of scope for failure there. Hmm....ideas for an entry about an early colonisation effort are percolating

I'm sure there would be failures and near-failures and wild successes all taking place in the 'mid-early' timeline when terraforming and hab creation were really hitting their stride. By Y11k though, you just bring in the big industiral grade bioforges, load the desired template (I'd like a 32B ecosystem please) and get out of the way while the whole thing is forged up and deployed in the appropriate order. Although, I suspect a lot of hobbyists like to noodle around with making things from scratch and writing their own templates.

Todd

[stevebowers]

In the later timeline some interesting failures might occur when two or more artificial biomes are brought into contact in an environment, and interact in new and unexpected ways.

If a colonisation effort acquires ecotechnology from several different widely separated sources there may be unexpected results and unintended consequences, something which can make for interesting historical events. There almost certainly would be institutes dedicated to studying the interactions between disparate artificial biomes, and ecotechnicians who specialise in solving this sort of problem.

[Rynn]

Starting from an abiotic environment is hard. But, seriously, the Book of Life is a source document. It's useful on literally every planet where you want to introduce life, and it doesn't need a complete rewrite for every new endeavor. It's information infrastructure. And if you later want to change your biosphere or introduce a known species, there it is and you can just do it.

It doesn't imply the expertise to get parental care taken care of or get things in the right order, but none of that stuff is even relevant or possible if you don't have the information. And, well, information as data is just easier to manage, transmit, and store than information as DNA molecules in cryogenically stored gametes.

Why don't you write this up as an EG entry? Perhaps there could be another article called "The Program of Living" (or any better name you can think of lol) which is the protocol for how to go from an abiotic environment to a thriving ecology of your choice drawing from the Book of Life.