starship-design: Report: Make deep space travel a family affair

["L. Parker" <lparker@cacaphony.net>]

Report: Make deep space travel a family affair

Leaving 'yucky, dirty Earth' behind

March 9, 2002 Posted: 8:11 AM EST (1311 GMT)

By Richard Stenger
CNN


(CNN) -- Forget Captain Kirk and the Enterprise crew. The right stuff to
search for distant planetary systems will be people linked not by political
ties but familial ones, according to a Florida scientist.

Close blood relatives have the ideal organization and motivation to overcome
the kinds of stresses likely to challenge deep-space missions extending two
centuries or more, says University of Florida anthropologist John Moore.

"We are much less likely to go crazy in space and much more likely to
accomplish our interstellar missions if we send crews into space that are
organized along family lines," he says.

Families possess well-defined pecking orders between parents and children,
older and younger siblings. They function along clear divisions of labor,
which promote the accomplishment of various levels of work, Moore reasons.

Experience on Earth already provides plenty of precedent, he says.

"Whenever colonization is done on Earth, it's always by people looking for a
life. All of the colonization that I know about as an anthropologist has
been done by families, especially young couples," he says.

Pre-inter-planetary Polynesians

Investigating the most effective method to dispatch humans to Alpha
Centauri, a star system very close to ours, Moore says he drew from the
stirring example of ancient Polynesian seafarers.

Young couples would often set out on prolonged voyages across the Pacific in
search of new places to live, with little more than paddles and prayers in
their canoe flotillas.

"They didn't know where they going, but with the trade winds blowing them in
one direction, they were pretty sure they weren't coming back," he says.

Similarly, he deduces, groups of young married couples would work best to
cross the unknown voids of space, preferable without children at the onset
so they could adapt to their new environment.

What would be a good number to start with? An expedition of between 150 and
180 people could sustain itself at the same rate over many generations,
Moore calculates.

Plotting such trips might not be as outlandish as it seems. Some space
scientists predict that one could embark before the end of this century,
Moore said.

As for those who might find such a perilous voyage off-putting, Moore
offers:

"We change jobs. We move to Chicago. We emigrate to a foreign country. The
decision made by parents to join a space crew is not different in kind from
decisions made by parents on Earth, only different in degree.

"If educated properly, I think kids in space might one day say, 'Gosh, I'm
sure glad I'm on this spaceship and not back on old yucky, dirty Earth."
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