Not saying the situation Davies is concerned about isn't almost infinitely more complex than a few plants in a bottle, but it does argue that we may not have to fully understand every little interaction between every two or three bacteria on the spaceship in order to get it right for our astronauts.
Beef jerky.
Millennial will not go if there isn’t any WiFi.
If it’s anything like Europe, make sure you pack some washcloths.
A towel!
And Don’t Panic!
Guardians of the Galaxy Awesome Mix Volume 1 & 2, of course.
Justice Kavanaugh and Beer
My choice will be cases of crème of wheat, peanut butter, bread, vitamin C, distilled water, TV, an intergalactic Amazon Firestick, and a Ruger Mini14...
Fascinating.
Might be wanting a bit of rope.
With ourncurrent technology none of this will happen.
Physical things on this complicated of a ship will fail, and there may be some things that fail that have redundancy, but you can only pack so much replacement materials and redundancy systems. Ultimately things will fail and not be able to be repaired or replaced, and when its a critical system or enough important systems, you’re done.
You say look at the voyager ships. Nowhere as complicated or as many systems, plus they have both failed during mission time and unexpectedly come back. They have no life support, no water systems, no food systems, not a lot of plastics and tubing, not nearly as many computers that will be running multiple systems, not nearly as much physical volume, or air handling/recycling systems with co2 scrubbers, waste removal and reconstituting systems
plus the fact bodies will probably not last as long as we think in 0/reduced gravity situations long term, given how fast things change negatively for astronauts just a few months on the iss despite the regimented daily physical working uot they do to offset it.
nope. not with our current technology. moon, yep, right now. mars, maybe once engines can get us there in a few months, and that’s going to happen. ut not interstellar missions. we need a time/space warp type engine to do that. when we can fold space and pinch a point 4 light years away to where we are, then unpinch it and then we’re there, that’s what is going to make interstellar missions viable.
Told my wife about Davies' article and she says this part of it is most likely wrong because viruses and bacteria adapt so quickly; they may not be able to infect us initially, but would catch on in no time (not counting cases where there is a different "handedness" between organic molecules there and here).
Imagine taking a five year old on the journey
Are we there yet, are we there yet, are we there yet.....
Undies...at least 3 pair.
I imaging it depends of the ship used - its size and speed.
If it is a 300 foot long Project Orion type ship traveling at 10% light speed, then it could carry thousands of crew and lots of personal possessions;
if it was a 200 kilometer long oviid Culture General Service Vehicle (like “God Fishes Forever”) traveling at 150 kilo lights, then it could carry tens of millions of humanoids and others, who could take anything they wanted including dozens of Orion ships, as well as buy what they needed from the shopping malls, visit entertainment centers, bars, whore houses etc.
Size matters.
Mrs Deplorable would take about 5 pieces of clothing, but she'd make sure there was a laundromat.
“Two overarching questions confront would-be human spacefarers: where to go and how to get there.”
I can think of two others. Why do you want to go? How soon do you want to get there? If we’re not in a hurry, but we’re determined to do this, we could create a highway of habitats making a beeline to Alpha Centauri, say. The problems that Davies struggles with could be worked out by trial and error along the way. If they discovered they forgot something in one of them, it wouldn’t be impractical to fetch it from the one before it.
Book PACKING FOR MARS Mary Roach
Fun read
Very interesting read! Thanks!