That's why we need to find a globular cluster with metal-rich planets, and take a generation ship over there.
Sure, a thousand generations will live and die along the way, but once we get over there, you've got stars every 0.1 ly or so, and with very plausible future tech, you could navigate between them in a few years. You could set up a proper starfaring, interplanetary civilization, with tradeships either going back and forth between two neighboring systems, or winding on long, never-repeating routes, visiting a dozen or so star systems in a human life.
(Most globular clusters appear to be old and metal-poor, and we haven't found a lot of planets there, and this only works if you find a globular cluster where ~every star can support a colony.)
> Sure, a thousand generations will live and die along the way, but once we get over there[...]
Unless you're planning on forcing those thousand generations to live in inhumane conditions (e.g. force a static culture), that should probably be "if we get over there". I'd be very surprised if, after 1000 generations, the chance for arrival is > 50%.
It takes only one generation to decide not to go along, be that by changing course, or by not reproducing enough, or internal warfare, ...
Sure there will always be some people who want to explore for exploration’s sake. But a generation ship leaving a garden of Eden we’re quite literally built for in order for our children’s grand^(1000)children to terraform a rock half a galaxy away in order to have a different mix of resources?
That’s a hard sell for the first generation, to say nothing of those who come after.
I would expect indoctrination something like what keeps alignment among devout religious practitioners would be forced to emerge. The alternative is extinction on a spaceship hurtling into the vastness of space.
I suspect education on that ship would look a lot different than it does on Earth.
That would mean we'd send them off with highly limited knowledge specifically designed to keep them docile, and an automated dictatorship that keeps the system rigid without leaving room for cultural development.
At best that's slavery, at worst it's reducing those 1000 generations to cattle.
I think it highly depends how big you make the thing &indeed what are the living conditions. If the people living on the thing can go one with their life withou much hardship they might not mind - even here on Earth most people just go on with their life and are happy.
Yeah, right we are 300 hundred years from the target but & 500 years on the way but so what ? You go for somo zero-g polo, do some cooking and pottery classes with firends, maybe learn machining so you can help with ship maintenance and so on.
It is the same on Earth - you go on with your life knowing you will propabably not live long enough to see some far future projects to be complete, like the final form of the Hagia Sophia Catthedral or Half Life 3 release. And thats mostly fine ?
Even with enough space and great living conditions, there will be greedy people who will try to gain power by gating resources. There will be factions forming, there will be conflict, and fighting. You need too many people for all to feel like one cohesive social unit for 1000 generations, humans just aren't built that way.
And that's just conflict. What if an early generation decides to target a planet that's less useful re/ metals etc., but that's much better suited for human life? How can you guarantee they won't decide to change course as a gift to their descendants, without draconian measures against such ideas?
> Also as for changing course - that is in many cases impossible, at least unless you want to make it 100% certain that you will die alone in the coldness of space. Just too much energy needed to signficantly change the trajectory & starts, at least in our part of the Galaxy, being too far apart.
Sure, the later generations wouldn't have that choice, but the first few definitely would. You need to bring a ton of fuel anyway to slow down, and 1000 generations is plenty of time to increase fuel efficiency a little. So a minor change e.g. at generation 5 seems very much doable, unless you have concrete examples that prove otherwise.
> It is the same on Earth - you go on with your life knowing you will propabably not live long enough to see some far future projects to be complete, like the final form of the Hagia Sophia Catthedral or Half Life 3 release. And thats mostly fine ?
I'm not forced to live my entire life working towards the Hagia Sophia or HL3, with the choice to do otherwise being taken away from myself AND from 1000 generations of my descendants.
If I was on that ship, I'd vote to blow it up, just so those responsible won't get away with it.
Yep, that ship would be a powder keg waiting for one missed ration to go off, see [1]. Hell, if the internet(?) goes down for a week that might be enough to cause a violent uprising. Actually, even if everything goes right and everyone is happy dying on the ship for no real reason, something will go wrong, it is just human nature.
The Hagia Sophia or the Sagrada Família took more then a lifetime to build but they were usable for their intended purpose, long before they were finished.
Re: changing course, as long as your generation ship accelerates for more than one human lifespan, your future generations of involuntary colonists aren't going to have a lot of options besides going along with it. The choice wouldn't so much be "keep going or veer off and colonize a closer star system" as it would be "keep going for another 800 generations or veer off and colonize a closer star system in another 80 generations". I mean, there's probably no way to stop them from making that choice, but it's hard to see anyone caring whether their nth-great-grandchildren die with one or ten millennia left on the trip.
If the ship accelerates for the first 100 generations, the 2nd generation likely still has every chance to target a different planet. I don't know which generation would be the last, but I'd need to see actual math to believe that it's strictly only the first generation.
One more consideration is targeting data. Do you even have another target or the sensors to find one ? The means of detection for a suitable planet or even just a good solar system, where you build a bunch of habitats might require huge telescope arrays or even something like a special telescope that uses the Sun as a gravity lens source.
Might be out of reach for even a massive generation ship.
Then you have a natural upper bound on the amount of amenities etc, because if you provide too much, 1000 generations can probably use it to try and find another target.
I'm sure you can keep making the situation more and more specific, but that's not going to increase your chances, or make the whole thing morally acceptable.
Also as for changing course - that is in many cases impossible, at least unless you want to make it 100% certain that you will die alone in the coldness of space. Just too much energy needed to signficantly change the trajectory & starts, at least in our part of the Galaxy, being too far apart.
Yeah, but why. It's not like you could redirect it enough that you'd land somewhere in your lifetime. It'd just be changing where the ship ended up in 10, or 100, or 1000 generations.
The point of sending them off to a carefully selected globular cluster would already be to give them a better life.
I'm not saying someone won't convince everyone on board that a silver future for their Nth-great-grandchildren worth derailing the golden future of their 10Nth-great-grandchildren (especially if it looks like the generation ship won't last 10N more generations), but from my POV sitting on a couch that isn't on a generation ship (well, not something traditionally defined as a generation ship), it doesn't feel like something you'd get everyone all fired up over.
You're proposing to enslave a thousand generations to ship them off to dead worlds rich in certain resources. I have no idea how you imagine their life to be once they arrive, but I can promise you that you're not giving the first 2-5k generations a better life, you're forcing them into a horrible future. It's deeply concerning that you don't seem to understand this.
You've got two huge filters on C++ codebase quality.
First, you have the "our core libraries/dependencies were written when it was 'C with Classes' and we're going to keep using that style for consistency/laziness/because it's well-tested", and then you have the "C++ is ugly/full of segfaults/hard, I'm going to use which solves all these problems".
You have to pass those two filters before you get to people who are interested in writing good, modern C++.
Indeed, while undoubtedly we need "C++ The Good Parts", since C++17, but C++20 would be better cut, we can perfectly write Python like code in C++, while getting the performance Python will never deliver.
My gut is that you could distill 98% of what's currently being done inside LLMs into a classical knowledge base/inference engine and only use the language models for natural language processing and an oracle for brainstorming and cut most of the computational cost and hallucinations out.
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