Friday, January 14, 2000

The real apocalypse

About five to six billion years from now, the Sun will die. We might imagine a final sunset, but in reality the Sun will expand into a red-giant star, swelling to many times its current size. Along the way, it will vaporize our oceans and extinguish all remaining life. Let’s say that long before this happens, all of the inhabitants of earth decide it will be safer to move to another galaxy to resettle new worlds. Where do we go? How do we prepare for that? Present your vision of this ultimate migration.

An ideal terrestrial planet would be 2 Earth masses with a 25 day orbital period around a Class M like Proxima Centari or Yellow star such as Gliese 581 which is still early in main sequence. Proxima Centari has a lifespan of 16 trillion years light years (Sun only has 10 billion year lifespan) and suppose there happens to be a extrasolar planet in that star system less than 3 AUs. It is 25 trillion miles from Earth. If the sleeper ship had nuclear pulse propulsion or laser beam and solar sail surfacing than it would take 85 years to reach Proxima Centari. And ideal location would be a planet between 1 AU and 3 AUs from a star with nitrogen, oxygen and Argon and Earth's temp, a dense atmosphere.

The humans would have these ships called sleeper ships. The crew would be in hibernation and suspended animation full of 2000 capsules. cryopreservation at 145 Kelvin. A combination of cryoprotectants and ice blockers won't lead to ice formation and the blood cells won't be dehydrated (which results in them to explode). If there was a crew of 200 astronauts than the computer can activate the 'pod's if something goes wrong . An alternative way is to have two astronauts awake for 4 months at a time for routine maintenance or emergencies. You would want to put any kind of animal you would want to eat in suspended animation. You would need to bring a communication satellite with you for video transmissions, weather gathering and GPS. A remote control weapon system with pulse rifles and would be great defense for base camp and also to kill predators that eat Earth livestock.
You would need blueprints for everything human made up until then. One thing I learned is you can do anything without a computer. So you would need basically a factory on board the ship that covers a room. You would need a machine to forge steel. The sleeper ship must be the base camp. There must be all the ingredients to make any type of medicine invented on Earth. You can't leave Earth without a hologram for an Autopilot and state-of-the-art medical bay. You would need dune buggies on board, some appliances. You would need 30,000 hours worth of TiVo recordings so astronauts would never get overly board (100 Petabytes of data). For entertainment, you emulate every console known to man and emulate DVD images or ROMs. You would need a couple terabytes of compressed audio. An encyclopedia would be great. A computer automated diploma and degree program done thru wireless connections on the future planet would be helpful so people could get trained without actual professors. It would keep civilization from regressing. Every student gets a computer manufactured by the ship to complete this degree. There would be 100,000 degrees loaded in software. The UNIX operating system of this time would be self-supporting.

The economic system would be based off capitalist/mixed economy of US in two party democracy form and upper house and lower house legislature. The planet would be a federal republic form of government. The planet would be covered with state governments. It would be center-right and center-left and wouldn't have far left parties at all. The left wing party would practice liberal-libertarian and populism and the right wing party would practice liberal economics and neo-conservatism. Independent politicians would be everything else. the whole planet would have the US Constitution . This new planet we're on wouldn't be a marxist "United Earth" as seen in Star Trek.

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