The Long Game.

Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

We made a visit to the downtown Art Knapp gardening store on Saturday in order to upgrade our selection of apartment greenery, and I was gratified (and a little amused) to see that NASA is cited as an authority on plants - or at least air cleaning plants.

This actually makes perfect sense when you think about it.  Having a plant or two cleaning up the air around your office is one thing, but using plants to maintain the atmosphere in a space station or space craft is a much more serious affair. As such, NASA has a vested interest in knowing what plants are best suited for the role.

In addition to NASA's botanical research here on Earth, astronauts have conducted 20 plant growth experiments on the International Space Station since 2002, with some unexpected results in terms of optimum watering and fertilization strategies.*

These aren't casual experiments - they're the basic building blocks of interstellar exploration.  Pending some unexpected breakthrough in non-Einsteinian FTL** physics, the exploration of space beyond our solar system will be a time-consuming process, to say the least.  Even at the speed of light, a trip to Alpha Centauri, our nearest stellar neighbour, would take 4.3 years, and to explore further requires lengthier and lengthier travel times that would grow into decades or even centuries.

The only practical way to explore the universe under these circumstances is to play the long game:  build space ships with complete functional self-sustaining ecosystems.  The hydroponics system in these green ships would provide both oxygen and food, as well as providing a link to the distant forests and fields of Earth. 

Taking this concept to its extreme conclusion, we end up with the multi-generational starship:  a vessel whose crew will not live long enough to see the end of their mission.  Instead, their children or their children's children will guide the craft to its eventual destination.

The concept of the multi-generation starship is first suggested by Russian scientist and theoretician Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in his 1928 paper The Future of Earth and Mankind.  Born in 1857, Tsiolkovsky lays the foundations for modern astronautics with his work on rocket dynamics, multistage rockets, and spacecraft engineering. Tsiolkovsky saw the multi-generational ship as a logical step in Mankind's inevitable voyage into space, comparing them to Noah's Ark.

Not surprisingly, these ships are a well-known science fiction theme.***  Unfortunately, multi-generational space travel is to science fiction what a trip to an isolated cabin by teenagers is to slasher films - it's almost guaranteed to end badly.  The crews of these ships lapse into barbarism, become mutant monsters, forget that they're in space, or, D) all of the above.

Ultimately, these missions might fail for a completely different reason:  the crew refuses to leave the ship when they reach their destination. Imagine a ship's crew that has lived its entire life in the gulf between the stars.  What possible reason would they have to abandon their familiar home in favour of the uncertainties of static planetary life?

However, this decision would not necessarily be a bad one.  Whereas it's easy to see these crews as interstellar equivalents to the Flying Dutchman, doomed to never drop anchor, they might well end up being the ties that bind interstellar civilization into a unit, performing an eternal circuit from one colony to the next.

The real question, though, is the selection of that first crew.  I wonder what percentage of the population would willingly spend the rest of their lives on a starship that they would never ever leave?  Perhaps more people than you'd think - let's not forget that 3% of survey respondents who would only go to Mars if it was a one-way trip.

idea in "The Future of Earth and Mankind", which was published in a Russian anthology of scien - See more at: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/generation_starships#sthash.QAQrwOPI.dpuf

idea in "The Future of Earth and Mankind", which was published in a Russian anthology of scien - See more at: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/generation_starships#sthash.QAQrwOPI.dpuf

idea in "The Future of Earth and Mankind", which was published in a Russian anthology of scien - See more at: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/generation_starships#sthash.QAQrwOPI.dpuf

idea in "The Future of Earth and Mankind", which was published in a Russian anthology of scien - See more at: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/generation_starships#sthash.QAQrwOPI.dpuf

- Sid

* Just for the record, these results have involved things like unexpected growth patterns or unusual root distribution. Neither triffids nor Audrey III have been an offshoot (no pun intended) of the experimental process.

** Faster Than Light, for the uninitiated in the audience. SF author Ursula K. LeGuin helpfully gives us the useful acronym NAFAL (Not As Fast As Light) to describe all the other Einstein-compliant methods of interstellar exploration.  Slower Than Light is probably a more logical term, though.

*** Recommended reading would be Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky and Methuselah's Children (sort of), Aldiss' Non-Stop (published as Starship in North America), Russo's Ship of Fools, or Blish's And All the Stars a Stage.  VERY dedicated fans can sit down with the unfortunate 1973 Canadian TV series The Starlost, one of the great genre examples of horribly wasted potential.