Imagine being the 599th generation and passing away right before you landed on the planet.

When I was a kid, the fastest spacecraft would take 42000 years to reach Proxima. Now it only takes 19000 years. We've already cut it more than in half.

Scientist: wanna be locked in a space ship for the rest of your life? me: *Does it have wifi?*

And when we arrive there, we find no suitable planets... So then we turn around and come back to find humanity no longer exists on Earth.

If I were on the 3018 ship, I would give the 2018 ship a tow 👍🏼

"When is the optimal time for humanity to send colonists out to another star?" Definitely not when it takes 19'000 years and 600 generations!!!

A really big problem is that thousands of years means you're quite apt to forget what you were doing entirely.

The 5000 year ship probably honked passing the other ship 😂

I don't know why KZfaq keeps insisting on notifying you guys with the file name I uploaded instead of the actual title that I gave the video on the site. Just so ya'll are aware, the actual title that should be showing up is "The Big Problem With Interstellar Travel" and not Landlocked Navies 2 lol.

Imagine the ship's toilets after 600 generations.

Imagine traveling for 19000 years only to discover ProximaB is uninhabitable 😀

The wait calculation is something I apply to almost every decision

We haven't even stepped into our backyard, kinda hard to expect us to go cross-country.

CASE: “It’s not possible!” Cooper: “No.. It’s Necessary” Interstellar, 2014

Me in June 2020: Just take me, I don't care what the gamble is.

The take on this problem that I liked best is that, after so many generations, the crew of the generation ship would know no other life. So what if, after 19,000 years of travel, then they arrived no one wanted to leave the ship?

I mean.. wouldn’t the newer, faster ships just give the original colonists a courtesy tow or something?

Too late to explore Earth, too early to explore the universe, smh

No one ever mentions the interstellar medium collisions that may happen at relativistic speeds that would destroy the ship.

The solution to the wait calculation is to keep track of everyone you have launched already, so that a faster ship travelling in the same direction can rendevous with the older, slower ship, transfer everyone aboard, and continue at the faster speed.

Sometimes reading comments makes me feel like I have friends

I think it's safe to assume that after 600 generations spent in a closed environment subject to radiation and mutations what comes out at destiny location would be an entirely new species.

If you send an expedition to another star using a generation ship, by the time it gets back, the crew will no longer be human. Even with massive shielding, cosmic ray changes to the genome will have created a new species.

As soon as you get to about 1/2 the speed of light relative to the interstellar medium the nose cone of your vehicle will be about the same temperature as your exhaust. The 'bugs on a windscreen' problem is often ignored.

Well everyone, I guess metaphorically the entire planet earth is landlocked and our space agencies are our navies

Sounds like a good movie plot

If we ever do this, we need a contingency plan for the exact scenario. Maybe make the ship so that it can easily be found, retrofitted, and pushed up to speed while enroute. I think for the foreseeable future, that generation ship would be too valuable of a resource, both human and material, to pass up.

"I'll turn this thing around if you all keep acting up!" Takes on a whole new meaning. Lol

So why are we completely ignoring the possibility that a faster ship could just dock onto the slow one and the passengers could move over?

I’d be pissed if I was a on stuck on a ship because of my ancestors wanting future gens to go somewhere else. Especially seeing pics and hearing stories of earth. So would a lot of other people. So much so that different factions would arise and fight. Knowing human history...Radicals would eventually blow the ship during its 19,000 year journey.

This is my idea: 1. Go to mercury first 2. Get recources 3. Use recources for making dyson swarm 4. Dyson swarm will probably give us almost unlimited energy 5. All of those recources and energy should give us the ability to go speed

So any time now, a spaceship’s going to arrive at Earth and the humans are going to get out and say “WTF? - they told us it was uninhabited”

Dude, that poor group of people lmao

Earth is a giant generation ship. I'm not on Earth by choice, but I choose to make this sacrifice every day by not committing suicide.

This is how I feel everytime I try to future proof my pc.

Thank you so much for uploading this video. It is helping me get through the pandemic!

What if in midst of the 19,000 year journey, someone decides to go insane on the ship and mass murder the group?

That was one of the smoothest leighways into a sponsor ive ever seen😂

I had to come back to this video to describe a situation that happened to me. Due to COVID, Amazon shipping times were around 10-14 days. I ordered something back in May 26 and the delivery date is June 7. Today (June 1), I ordered something else and it was back to two day shipping and the expected delivery date is June 3. The Wait/Walk Dilemma is real!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Also another real-life situation is waiting for a bus or walking to your destination. Very interesting concept...especially if you've been a victim of it.

When you are in space; can you harvest static electricity and turn that into power for deep space exploration? Since light will be harder to collect at a far. Also has anyone looked into using magnetic fields from our sun and planets as a means of travel; meaning creating a space shuttle that can be negatively charged to get pushed by the suns mostly positive field? you can build a giant solar magnetic "net" that you can extend for travel purpose then collapse in means of slowing down or for maneuvering. dont be afraid to message me, ive been thinking about means of travel through space for awhile

The Helios probe is a terrible measurement for how fast we can make modern spacecraft fly between stars; it only moves that fast because it picked up a lot of kinetic energy falling towards the Sun. But it's an even worse measurement of how fast we could _ever_ make spacecraft go, because there are many known options that work under known science and just require more space infrastructure. The simplest is the so-called "laser highway," which uses a large number of space stations with lasers to push craft up to a significant percentage of the speed of light. Isaac Arthur has a lot of great videos about that and other interstellar colonization tools on his KZfaq channel.

landlocked navies 2 KZfaq is exposing you lol

We just aren't meant to see what out there, we are meant to be here and figure out what we need to do here.

"Since you're watching this on a computer - Computer Science". LOL

After 600 generations of living in space there would be no way the people on that ship would ever be able to even stand on a planet. Who knows what living in space for your entire life would do to your body, I mean look at what it does to astronauts after just a few months.

This isn't about landlocked navies

So when an Alien spaceship arrives at Earth and the inhabitants look just like us, should we assume that we are the descendants of the fast ship, and they are our slower great-great-great...grandparents?

I feel like the right time to send the ship to Proxima Centauri is when it takes 10 years to reach there

An operation like this would be so delicate and even human on board born each generation would have to be inhumanely monitored. Imagine someone, just one person a few generations in, deciding they think it’s unfair their ancestors decided their lives for them and stole their lives and went on a murder rampage? Or tried to sabotage the whole mission out of spite or some sort of disease broke out in the tiny space? So much could go ohh sooo wrong and it would all be in vain. The only real solution would be doing it in two generations or less.

This would make a great film with a spectacular twist that there are already humans there.

Imagine traveling 18999 years & your ship explodes just 1 year before reaching.

YOU may be depressed by how far away even the nearest stars are, but why would I even want to go there, when all the cats I want are here?

I just have to hope immortality is invented before I die. Then I can become an immortal space pirate!

We already are on a generation ship, it's called Earth.

How would the ship even have the resources to support that many humans without the sun's energy input

I remember as a kid, I used to think stars were just little specs of light that you could touch in outer-space lol I remember the day in school that I found out that those specs were actually distant sun’s just like our sun but super far away & you could never touch them! I was mind blown 🤯 Even today when I explain to other people that don’t know about space that those specs of light you see in the sky are actually distant sun’s just like our sun! it’s always fun to see them be mind blown just as I was all those years ago ☀️💫🚀🌎

We could pull an interstellar Australia and send a bunch of prisoners

The problem with interstellar travel? EVERYTHING!

Damn, I didn't want this video to end. The Wait Calculation is so intriguing to me! 🤔🤓👨🏽‍🚀

Arent we locked in a space object hurtling through space at enormous speeds already?

The speed of light is the universes refresh rate

Note that the "Wait Calculation" problem never prevented ancient man from migrating to six of the seven continents on Earth. This is because another continent was never the destination, building a new village over the next hill was. The secret to slower than light migration to nearby stars will be not having those stars as the destinations but of building large space habitats such as O'Neill Cylinders where ever we find the resources to do so. These self sustaining habitats would be the destinations not nearby stars.

I think best solution is light speed travel. If we ever see hope for digitizing human mind and artificially growing or costructing humans, that would be the best way. You would still have to wait till some autonomous craft sets up in target system though. But even if you had to wait long time for craft to arrive, actual transfer of people would be just 4 years at light speed. And you could possibly have the autonomus craft already surveying, constructing and gathering materials in advance.

Imagine there was an awesome Netflix series about the experiences of a generation ship!!!

But hyper space.....

The problem lays with humanity, people couldnt live in peace on a planet. This is going to be way worse on a ship... for 20.000 years its just not possible.

To all of you thinking you'll give the previous ship a tow,That's not how these things work,you'll have to slow down, attach both ships then find a way to accelerate to your initial speed in interstellar space without any gravity assists so not an option,also it's not a tared road where you're likely to overtake them at some point,Space is massive and everything is relatively in motion,so the position of the earth,our sun,our solar system,other stars,our galaxy,etc will be thousands of light-years from where they where thousands of years ago thus the path taken by both space crafts although both originating from earth and having the same destination will most likely be light-years apart.

A Generation ship is the silliest interstellar travel idea. That long in space would destroy the human body and make colonizing the planet almost impossible, living in a tiny ship would drive everyone crazy, etc. Why don’t people talk about suspended animation, or freezing embryos, more? Until we figure out warp drives of course 🙂

Huh, navies in space?

wow, didn't know navies could go to space :v

The best way is to build a ship that can accelerate at 1g constantly, it is outlined in my video "Best method for interstellar travel" you could get to alpha centauri in 3.6 years and have gravity the whole way

Incase anyone is curious, which you probably are if you follow this channel, in 2016 Proxima Centauri b was discovered. This is a planet in the habitable zone of the star Proxima Centauri, the nearest known star to our solar system. The actual habitability on this planet is unknown. So far, we do not know if the planet rotates or has a magnetic field to allow for an atmosphere to exist. Without a significant atmosphere, habitability would be impossible due to the intense stellar wind pressure from the planet's star being 20,000 times what the Earth receives from the Sun. Proxima Centauri b is approximately 4.2 light years away. Many have speculated on sending unmanned spacecraft or probes to this system for exploration within the next decade. It has been theorized that it could be possible to perform a slingshot maneuver around our Sun towards Proxima Centauri b. This has never been attempted, but could result in a spacecraft achieving 20-25% of the speed of light. That is over 10 times faster than humans have ever propelled a spacecraft. At these speeds, a spacecraft could reach Proxima Centauri b in about 20 years. One of the largest obstacles to overcome would be that even if we are able to send data from Proxima Centauri b back to earth, the fastest we could send the signal would be at the speed of light. So we would not even know if the spacecraft successfully reached its destination until at least 4.2 years later. Of course, any kind of data transfer has never been attempted at these distances and that leaves enormous room for error. I thought I would share this as to give us 'exploration' types some hope that maybe within our lifetime, we could see close-up images of a potentially habitable planet outside our solar system. While this all seems unlikely, some might even say impossible, don't forget that the most improbable thing to ever happen is simply the existence of human life as we know it.

I once took the movie Interstellar on a road trip. Interstellar travel was easy.

I'd get on board the ship no matter how slow it is, if for nothing else just to get away from the bozos in charge on this rock today.

The wait calculation should be a movie. Put a couple on each end of it cryogenically frozen, you got a blockbuster.

The speed is not the only problem. You have to slow down when you get there ans it will take the same amount of energy that you used getting there.

How rude! The advanced technology ship didn't even give them a heads up? "Hey, just an FYI, we'll be getting there about 5,000 years ahead of you guys. Have a nice life."

Bro this concept needs to be a book or a tv show or something. Not just the idea of a generation ship but getting there and discovering that humanity sent something faster already

I've basically won games of Civilization like this. Your enemy launches their colony ship, but you launch a much better one just a couple turns later, and you end up winning.

I do believe we need to worry about colonizing/ exploring other planets in our solar system before we even think about a whole different star system.

But how long would it take to get there using a rocket powered Toyota carolla?

3:20 Cool that they have a term for this concept as I had thought about it before w/o a term. If future space companies and government agencies send nanobots to nearby stars, the wait calculation will be a massive factor in the 'Interstellar space race'.

Kudos for not simply detailing the difficulty of traveling at or near (or exceeding) the speed of light.

There is also a possibility that in 5000 years a 3rd ship could be sent

Why not create a constant ping of the ships location? Send out a ship now, but it constantly tells us its location - so when we do develop faster modes of transport we will be able to meet those colonists and use the station as a mobile space station/rest stop of sorts. Just build the entire ship to operate as a giant space station so that when technology does catch up, it can be actually useful and the people living on there can be moved to other places faster. We won't have this problem because you could use each generation of colony ships as just more and more rest stops along the way.

consider that if you are on that ship you could all play video games for your whole life without wifi because everyone could just use the same massive computer and different monitors and mouses

I mean, why can't they just have docking ports? Faster ship rendezvous with slower ship, picks the people up and gets them there faster. Hell we could get technology going so fast that we'll be there yesterday!

This video makes the classic assumptions that science continues to progress in a positive direction, that civilization does not have a backslide of technology, and that humanity gets the chance to exist long enough for science to progress.

The speed that we find safe. The faster we get, the more fatal would a single small particle in front of our space craft be. Unless we develop something for that...

In the beginning you say " Fastest man made objects speed is 240,000 Kmh" but it's actually 99.9% the speed of light in the Large Hadron Collider.

"Are we there yet?"

"Science fiction has taught us" cracked me up

The generation ship audio logs in Elite Dangerous are awesome, they really worth a listen

Light speed is too slow. We'll only master interstellar travel when we develop a space vessel that has ludicrous speed

I am curious how the paper addresses interstellar communications. The generation ship would be in contact with Earth. signals would eventually take years, but that would be gradual. I am certain “passing” ships would stop by and rescue those aboard the generational ship.

I can’t imagine people spending their entire lives on a ship, it’s kinda sad. Edit: I underestimated the size of these theoretical ships, my bad.

A mutiny would happen long before they got there.

There was a short story written about this a few decades ago. The crew of the 2018 ship ended up getting a 3018 ship and going on to the next uninhabited star.

That would make a great movie plot. People on a 'generation ship', after thousands of generations in space, arrive at their destination only to find that humans who departed Earth later than your ancestors, arrived way earlier than you.

Seriously tho, WHY IS THE LIGHT SO SLOW?!?