Generation ship design project

[stevebowers]

We should write this up:
- a 'slow wave' strategy, where deep space habitats migrate slowly through adjacent Oort clouds and expand almost imperceptibly across space. A slow wave could start almost anywhere - there might be thousands or millions of locations in the Terragen Sphere which support a population of slowly expanding deep spacers, a wave that will continue to expand long after the Terragen Civilisation has vanished or transcended.

Unless some agency chooses to prevent this expansion from occurring, and dedicates resources to hunting them down.

[Bear]

I think the only other person I've seen talking about this (or something similar to it) is Isaac Arthur, who referred to it as "Crawl-onizing."

But I think he was still talking about a group of vessels launched with the goal and purpose of reaching another star. I'm talking more about a culture of people who plot their courses without necessarily having the goal of another star in mind; they're just balancing the interests of staying near enough the markets they serve, staying near enough the other habs that supply things they need, and plotting courses to intercept and harvest materials useful to their own industries.

Some of them are hab builders and sell new habs to other groups when population demands it. Some of them mine metals and some fab chips and some harvest volatiles, and each of these specialties establishes constraints on what they need to stay near and how near they need to stay.

They don't want to crowd too close together in cases that create competition for the same resources - if they specialize in the same kind of industry that means they compete for both resources and markets. But they need each other, because you can't have the same massive ship effectively intercepting all the different kinds of resources that they use - instead, let the specialists each concentrate on interceptions that, once made, benefit hundreds of their neighbors, by moving individual habitats of much lower mass than the supposed 'generalist' alternative that tries to get everything.

So you get a 'flock' - a more-or-less leaderless group, all navigating independently, that wants to maintain preferred distances from each other while traversing a volume containing useful materials.

And this is what they do, year in and year out. If the flock gets big enough that all the specialists are duplicated, it may split into several flocks, just by happenstance, gradually with dozens or hundreds of independent decisions about navigation made over a century or more. If they happen to overrun a volume containing a star, then the resource density in-system will sustain a slow buildup of population (and number of habitats) as they approach it.

But I don't see their goal as colonization as such; they're just going where the available resources are, one year after another, forever. They wouldn't think of themselves as colonizing, or "Crawl-onizing." They'd think of what they do as just living where they are.

[Drashner1]

I have a paper that dates back to the 80s that talks this general strategy. IIRC it divides interstellar colonization into two basic types: Fastships and Nomads.

The Fastship approach is some variant of the 'traditional ' interstellar colonization approach with the goal being to reach another star system since those are traditionally the only sources of matter and energy available to support a civilization. So the space in between stars is seen as just a vast empty void that must be gotten through to get to somewhere where it is possible to set up a new home.

The Nomad approach involves setting up small colonies on/around comets (and probably Kuiper objects as well - but those weren't really known about when the paper was written). These would use the resources of a given comet to support a population of perhaps a few dozen to a few hundred people. Huge mirrors might be built to gather starlight (not sunlight, starlight) or fusion might be used if it's available. Comets might be gradually moved together to form clusters and support larger populations. However, any given comet or other body would only have finite resources and so might eventually be abandoned as the population moved on to greener pastures. Over time populations might cross interstellar distances if there are sufficient comets and other bodies in interstellar space to support them or they are able to stretch a comet/comet cluster to make the journey - or both.

Note that average distances between comets in the Oort cloud may be larger than those in the Solar System so issue of markets or staying 'close' or specialization around different tasks may not work or may not work exactly as you describe. Or not - I'm seeing a pretty wide variation in distances listed when I try googling this. It might vary and something similar to what you describe may happen within a given cluster of comets when those eventually start to develop. Note that comet based civs would have much more limited resources and energy than those operating in a solar system so travel times might be much longer along with how big a decision it might be to actually go somewhere.

On a different note - OA actually has multiple examples of civilizations that operate in Oort Clouds and/or interstellar space. The Backgrounders, Deeper Covenant, Haloists, and Bok Swarm civs all do this in their own ways. The OA timeline isn't long enough for most of those groups to have really spread far just via migration from comet to comet or the like (they use other means for long trips) but that kind of thing is possible in principle.

It's true that so far relatively few authors have chosen to write about such civs compared to the number that write about star systems - but that is a matter of personal choice not because OA hasn't thought of the basic idea or has mandated that it not be explored.

If you (or anyone) want to write up an article(s) about these kinds of civs, whether describing new ones or expanding on what is already in the EG, go right ahead.

Todd

[Bear]

See, I don't think this signifies much in the OA setting because the OA established history simply bypassed this era of history.

I think we're going to use up the WHOLE ten-thousand year OA timeline just getting to the nearest 100-or-so stars on "flock" migrations like this, before there's really an impetus to start making driven star-to-star "fastship" migrations.

That's the point when people start looking around and realizing there's no place they can get to that still has available resources, unless they take one of those 'fastships' and then start over at the far end. That's the point when the future of a "Flock" inside the established sphere becomes constrained or limited by prior claims on resources in every direction they might go.

So I foresee something like 10K years of very slow "nomadic" expansion, FOLLOWED by the kind of deliberate, star-focused rapid expansion that OA seems to be built around from the very beginning of its timeline.

On the other hand, even at that point the 'fastships' may never be necessary or desirable. The flocks are 'mobilis in mobili' and subject to separation by galactic orbit dynamics the same way as stars, so the forces continuing to pull them further apart from each other, once they get that 10K year start, may be sufficient that nobody ever needs a 'fastship' at all to remain in contact with fresh resources, even as they keep moving along with all their markets and suppliers.

[Drashner1]

*shrug* If you say so. Have fun with that then.

[Bear]

I might, I suppose, have a little fun with it if I write a book or two set on habitats in such a "flock."

But on the whole, no. As I said, this doesn't signify much in OA, because OA is what happens when you're "having fun with" an idea of the future. Flock migrations are less fun, but they're what I think is actually the most likely way of us actually getting between stars.

And the pessimist in me points out rational reasons why the future may be ess fun than that....

[stevebowers]

A few days ago, Tom Mazanec asked the question; 'how much of the Oort Cloud has been exploited so far in OA?

There are billions of objects in the Solsys Oort Cloud larger than a kilometre; however the OA canon suggests that only ten thousand of those have been colonised. This means there are literally billions of unused or underused objects in our system alone. This could allow a Nomad/Crawlonise strategy to spread throughout our Oort Cloud and transfer to other, nearby examples without infringing on any significant territorial claims.

The Nomad strategy could be exported to any number of stars in the Terragen Sphere, most of which are not fully exploited either. These Nomads could be allied with the Deeper Covenant, or work in opposition to them; they could be Hiders or Backgrounders, or something entirely separate from all of these. And as I suggested above, the Nomads might persist long after the rest of Terragen civilisation has collapsed or transcended.