Life on an Interstellar Ark Ship

The vast gulfs between stars may take  decades or even centuries to travel, requiring enormous generation ships carrying  families and whole ecosystems with them. What will life be like on board such arks? When Jessica was 3 years old her family boarded the Francis Baily, a massive  colony ship bound for Lacaille 8760, an M0 orange-red dwarf 13 light years from  Earth. She barely remembers waving goodbye to Earth in 2263 A.D., and knows Earth  mostly through videos and VR of the world, not her f

amily’s small apartment in Tennessee  or their dog, who couldn’t come along for the journey and remained with her grandmother Emily. Jessica never really thought of herself as part of the original crew for the ship, she never  got any training for space before the flight, unless you count the zero-gravity bounce house  at the daycare she went to for the last few weeks before they departed when they were living  at the space dock. By the time she was 20, the number of people born on the trip was 

nearly as numerous as those who signed up, and those who were kids when the voyage began were  the smallest of the three groups and occupied a strange spot in the ship’s emerging culture. As a ship carrying settlers for a new planet, even though most of the colonists were making  the journey in cryo-stasis, many were making the journey awake and many of the crew were also  believers in big families. Jessica herself was married at 19, a mother at 20, and widow at 22.  Her husband Frank was kille

d when working on the outer hull when a damaged section erupted and blew  him free and severed his tether. To make it worse, the automated drone that was dispatched  to retrieve him misfired after hook up and burned all its fuel in the wrong vector,  pushing him away from the ship faster than any of their remaining drones or maintenance  shuttles could have reached and returned from. Frank was the senior member of her  maintenance section, had helped train her, and always been the poster child f

or safety  and caution her father pointed to as role model. Her father was the deputy director of  the de-pressurized and EVA Maintenance Wing. Like a lot of the younger crew, she’d ended up  training for the same job one of her parents had. The investigation that followed showed that  a minor software update from Earth had failed to properly take into account the relativistic  time dilation of the ship, and it invalidated the clock and position system used by the drone  as its navigation backup

as its main antenna had been damaged in that same explosion. Just a freak  accident and series of minor mistakes that might be taken for granted so early into the Starseed  Initiative and its interstellar ark project. Due to light lag Jessica was 24 when she  got the first condolence letter from Earth, from a man named Duncan who was apparently a good  friend of her late husband’s own grandfather. He is on the board of directors at the Starseed  Initiative and apparently helped Frank get his sp

ot on the ship. The letter said he was going to  make sure the matter got properly investigated, and it seemed sincere if a bit distant and  awkward and asked her to keep in touch. She suspects he basically wants her to be a  spy or informant. Still, Jessica’s parents aren’t on good terms with either of their  own families back on Earth, which seems to be the case for a lot of the settlers and  crew, but she always wanted a pen pal and figures having a big wig as a friend can’t hurt. A lot of th

e awake settlers think it was a murder, not a glitch, especially after instruction from  Earth seemed to imply that. The ship’s XO says it was just standard operating procedure for that  to be investigated but Jessica thinks she gets sideways glances from a lot of people onboard  the ship wondering if maybe it was her. Others think it might be one of the ship’s AI. Ships have few secrets and lots of gossip, and that the Francis Baily is several kilometers  long doesn’t seem to make it feel any l

ess crowded when it comes to cliques and rumor mills.  There’s only ten thousand people awake and most spend their time in the habitation drum,  a multi-level cylinder habitat. Technically the settlers aren’t allowed outside that habitation  drum and a handful of other parts of the ship, and that captain’s own authority is limited  inside the drum. But these days the lines between crew and passengers are getting thinner. Alternatively, the lines between the original crew and settlers, and those

born en route, is getting  much thicker. They’re not going to die off either, the super-majority of the settlers and virtually  all of the crew make use of nanotechnology to slow their aging to an effective standstill. The  birth rate isn’t super-high on the ship, but it is still resulting in more people alive on the ship  who didn’t sign up for the mission than who did, and the ratio is growing all the time. The habitat  is designed to house hundreds of thousands, more than enough to support th

e sleeping crew  and those born on the journey, along with quite the zoo and botanical garden from Earth, with  far more samples frozen for the journey too, embryonic and fully grown critters in some cases. Jessica never remarried and her own son went into maintenance like she did, though by that point it  was a fast-growing occupation on the ship as more and more glitches kept occurring. It broke her  heart when he also died after another accident, and she ended up mostly raising her  granddaug

hter, Emily Poole. Jessica herself was almost ostracized by her shipmates  and more than happy to return the cold shoulder, and put her focus into making her granddaughter  the best ship’s maintenance officer she could be. By this time it was getting clear that there  were a lot of maintenance bugs on the ship and any message they sent home to Earth to report  a problem and get advice was taking most of a decade to get there, get acted on, and get sent  back to them. Many of those software packa

ges, even minor ones, often had thousands of software  engineers involved in making and improving them, and some orders of magnitude more engineers,  so what they could do on the ship was limited. And a lot of the updates from home were getting  increasingly buggy as they tried to make fixes to ever more divergent and patchwork systems. Not that many people viewed Earth as home anymore. Though some wanted to turn around  and go home and there were debates on if the ship should just refuel once a

rriving at  Lacaille 8760 and take back anyone who didn’t volunteer for the trip or had changed their  mind. After all, it had been several decades and even many of the most enthusiastic crew  and settlers who had signed up for the trip and remained awake were having second thoughts.  As for those not yet born when the ship left, they never signed up for the mission. They didn’t  volunteer to suffer and die on some dead planet under a red sun 76 trillion miles from home. Life on the ship is gett

ing no easier. Eventually even their internal medical nanobots started  getting untrustworthy and more of the folks decided to go on ice, since that was deemed  a lot safer and would help stretch resources. Jessica is glad that new cryo-tanks are easy  to build and agrees with the XO’s sentiment, that they should stuff the whiners and all  the settlers who aren’t useful to the ship into cryo-stasis for the rest of the trip. Jessica herself was regularly EVA from the ship in her duties and often

got heavy radiation  exposure, an irrelevance in an era where cancer was quickly fixed by nanobots, but in the end  she went on the ice too, reluctantly, on New Year’s Day of 2323, halfway to a new world she’s  spent almost every year of her life journeying to. I think it’s very easy for those of us who dream  of a future in space and out among the stars to forget how long those journeys will likely be  and how much they’ll influence the settlers. In classic sci-fi everyone jumps on a ship and t

en  days later they’re at some new planet living the pioneer life. Even when the story obeys physics  and limits the journey to sub-light speeds, folks are usually frozen for the duration or we  hear about the journey only in passing. Not many authors have tried to set their tales on those  generation ships, with some notable exceptions like Gene Wolfe’s “Book of the Long Sun”, or  Robert Heinlein’s “Orphans of the Sky'', both of which feature inhabitants that have forgotten they  were on a gene

rational ark ship, and it is perhaps best known from the Star Trek episode “For the  World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky”, where we encounter inhabitants who don’t know they’re  on a ship, which the Orville also looked at. It's a fun premise to explore, this idea that  a ship might travel so far and so long that its crew has forgotten its purpose, and  I could see that happening very easily, but it lacked an element of realism to me,  or the genre-savviness any interstellar ark designers

would have by the time we made one,  since they will have read those books too. I would not expect any critical technology to  be lost on any journey, digital data is just way too easily stored and duplicated. You might get  exceptions where some tyrant in control of a ship started clamping down on who had access to data  and limited backups and that led to data loss some centuries later, especially if they maintained  power by threatening to destroy critical archives if attacked, but otherwise

I couldn’t see it. Particularly because I think civilization will only send interstellar colony missions out in  three scenarios. First, that prototype effort to Alpha Centauri to prove it can be done and for the  sake of prestige, and maybe a few other ventures by those great nations or groups seeking to share  that glory. After all, unlike the Moon missions, you have decades of travel time to wait to see  if that first mission succeeded in which others might decide to send one too, and to a di

fferent  system. But that might get us a few colonies around nearby stars, it won’t be the norm that  colonizes a galaxy of a few hundred billion stars. Second is that a post-scarcity civilization heavy  with technology and resources will send out such ships, and I find this case most likely to be the  norm. I think that after any early prototypes and prestige missions folks would wait till an era  where interstellar colonization was much easier. The exception being the third case, that after  s

uch a wait of a few centuries they realize it isn’t getting any easier and start sending on  missions anyway. And that’s the scenario we discussed more in episodes like Crawlonizing the  Galaxy and The Last Planet. It’s also more the case in examples like “Book of the Long Sun”. And  we could also imagine a case where we had to throw together a crash ark ship mission as the first of  its kind to save humanity, but as we’ve discussed in other episodes, I don’t think that’s a very  plausible scena

rio, even if it also is popular in fiction, and we could treat that as a fourth case. But in that second case, a post-scarcity and high-tech case, it’s probably one where vast  effort has been put into expanding the human lifespan and augmenting people to be more robust  in many ways. They aren’t having the technical issues that Jessica and her granddaughter  faced on the Francis Baily, because there’s already been a few generations of generation  ships made to get real world experience and that

came after centuries of science fiction and  serious speculation by scientists and engineers, and also likely after many decades of  interplanetary settlement including deep space habitats out in the Kuiper Belt  and beyond, even into the Oort Cloud. I do not doubt that there will be unexpected  problems that require tenacity and grace by their crews on any such journey, especially the  first handful of expeditions, but I think we have to acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of  colonial

missions, especially once they’re light centuries from Earth, are being conducted by those  who have entire libraries of experience to draw on when it comes to living and traveling in space. Nonetheless, this is my first argument for what life on an Interstellar ark will be like,  and that is long and numerous. Trillions of miles from home, on board an artificial  world, you must have backups for everything, including your officers and experts,  and the knowledge and ability to fix and replace e

verything. And your ship is not magically  immune to damage just because it's crew is frozen, albeit you can expect less wear and tear and  less acts of negligence, vandalism, or sabotage. There are likely to be actuarial odds on a  generation ship having some sort of human-induced catastrophe such as vandalism or a tyrannical  captain erasing their history, and that might be hard to avoid on intergalactic missions or  someone trying to sail a hundred thousand light years to the other side of th

e galaxy, but outside  of scenarios like that I think we can assume most systems get colonized by multiple ships and those  sent on journeys from stars not that far away. In which case we are only talking about a handful  of generations and likely often with many of the original settlers still alive from life extension  or freezing or both. And where the world that sent them and its many neighbors can and would  send help or rescue if something happened. Additionally, while they might originate 

from a star system a hundred light years from where they settled, it is likely that this  would be because colony ships weren’t sent from the fringe of settled space, but from several  systems back where the origin planet had time to grow. If we imagined space outward from Earth as  spherical shells, each 10 light years further out, or thick, then Earth might send the majority of  colony ships out to those first 10 layers inside a light century, but it might be folks from the  first and second

spheres who settled the eleventh and twelfth spheres, and a ship en route to  them is likely to be able to call on other pioneer worlds along their way for help. A star  system settled only a century ago and maybe with a million people isn’t likely to have any interest  in colonizing another star yet, but they might have interstellar ships and certainly have radios. Nonetheless, I’m not really seeing why most people would choose to make the journey on ice. Some  certainly, and many more if it tu

rned out that life extension wasn’t viable, but realistically  speaking if you can repair all the cellular damage someone has taken from being frozen,  and bring them back to life, you could more easily have repaired their cellular wear and tear.  Maintenance is easier than repair, and regardless it is basically the same technology, even ignoring  options like post-human cyborgs or digital minds. Or genetically modified people or even uplifted  animals. For those who remember Emily Poole from th

e Francis Baily from one of the vignettes in  last year’s episode Life in 2323 A.D., she had an uplifted dog who was her best friend, and today’s  opening tale is the prologue for that story. Long voyages through radiation-soaked space don’t  make mutation too hard to believe either, and its popular in sci-fi tales – Orphans of the Sky has  a two-headed mutant as a major character – but I think that would be more likely to occur  from an intentional act, or sequence of them, genetic engineering

and cybernetics, rather  than genetic mutation. Cultural mutation can certainly happen and that is the concern behind  concepts like the Aurora Effect, the idea that a generation ship arriving at some hostile world  might find it harder to handle than they expected, or themselves less up for the task, and turn  around. Which is much easier to believe if everyone on that ship was born during the journey. But I don’t buy it personally. It might happen occasionally or for ships that sought to push

the  envelope on distance rather than just seeking the next decent and available system to settle, but  it’s not like any of us picked where we would be born or raised at. I was literally named for  two physicists and a sci fi author – Isaac Albert Arthur is not my pen name, my parents were  geeks who met in their physics class – and while I can summon minor irritation for  basically having my life role cast for me while drawing my first breath, I love what I do  and love the communities in whic

h I was raised. I’m hardly an anomaly, some village farmer  or blacksmith a few centuries back was likely following in their father’s footsteps and probably  most loved what they did too, nor were any of them repeating that parent’s life story verbatim,  it’s a sequel or soft reboot, not a rerun. And regardless, they still did it in most cases, being  irritated at the hand you’ve been dealt is a long step short of deciding to abandon your family or  tribe or scuttle the ship you’re all sailing o

n. It will probably happen and after a  few hundred times we’ll probably have a decent formula in place for mitigating  that and knowing how far we can sail the sea of stars before the probability reaches  50% of that ship going awry in some fashion, the half-life of an ark ship, so to speak. This episode is about life on such a ship, not how long that ship might live, but that ship  has a lifespan and is essentially a culture and civilization epoch that is going to be distinct  from the place t

hey left or that they found. And a very influential one too, think of the hundred  folks on board the Mayflower back in 1620 arriving at Plymouth. I happen to live in a town called  Plymouth, and it isn’t that Plymouth of course, it’s a tiny town of mere 2000 few know of that  is still 20 times bigger than that settlement that everyone in the US has heard of and I  don’t doubt there’s going to be an entire planet called that at some point and sooner than  later. And in a galaxy of trillions of p

lanets, more than a hundred for every person now living  and many more than every human who has ever lived, you may well have a civilization that names  you as a founder, inspiration, or namesake. Now we might question the ethical validity of  wanting to found a new planet for the prestige and early access, but it is bound to be a big motive  and even if not the reason someone boarded a ship, it is likely to be on the Top 5 list of reasons  everyone on that ship points toward when folks start ta

lking about the value of their quest or  its hardships. When someone stands up in the town council or parliament of that ark ship and starts  questioning their purpose, they are going to get a well-polished sermon on their bold quest  not being for lesser men of frail convictions who fear to tread on strange new worlds and  carve their names into the bedrock of mighty civilization they shall forge for their children. People might gripe about getting born in a ship that’s basically it’s own isola

ted island of a  few thousands but people already gripe about being born in some tiny Podunk town, but those towns  keep going, indeed there are actually several towns called Podunk, and while folks get up and  leave such places regularly enough, they rarely gain a big following for a mass exodus and I can’t  see anyone rising to power on a ship by talking about how pointless their existence and purpose  is. Alternatively, I can absolutely see people on the ship griping about that, and I can abs

olutely  see people rising to power by talking about how transcendent and important their purpose is. And a lot of times, promising folks a land of milk and honey is not necessary, you can sit around  loudly proclaiming what a desolate rock you’re going to and how hard the work of forging it into  a civilization is going to be and still get lots of volunteers. We often worry that high-tech  post-scarcity civilizations will hesitate at interstellar colonization on the grounds that  they have very

easy and luxurious lives and won’t want to abandon those for toil, but let’s  be honest, that’s exactly the sort of civilization that would have a wall of bodies pressing at the  airlock asking to come on board. Not everyone, not even likely a large fraction, but there’s  always going to be folks looking for a purpose and a new place to make something of themselves. Or to get away from their old life, and it is decently likely a colony ship would either contain  a chunk of civilization that was

n’t fond of their home world, a group devoted to some specific  religious or ideological belief is entirely plausible as a source of colonists, or people who  just want to be gone and possibly because they’re not very welcome anywhere else. If even one in  a thousand folks on Earth felt like that, we’d have a constant string of millions of volunteers. Historically, we usually see a mix, and a direct mix too, your ship of a hundred settlers might  have 80 believers and 20 hired experts who were r

ather indifferent to your cause, and half of  those true believers might be a kid or spouse of someone who was much more devoted to the cause  than they were. Families are rarely monolithic in belief and not much settling gets done without  them. So we can imagine a lot of folks who are less than thrilled about the venture. That’s  part of the reasoning I usually have about ark ships actually being fleets and of  what we dub the “Gardener Ship” variety, where the arrive at a destination, let off

some of  the people on board along with tons of equipment, resupply on raw materials for a couple years while  getting them settled in, then head off to the next system with anyone who doesn’t want to stay. They manufacture more equipment and breed up more people on their decade long voyage to each  stop. Every so often they even build whole new ships and divide their fleet, and odds are they  can spare one ship each time to take back the folks who want to make the journey toward the  inner sph

ere of settled systems. That ship can stop at the first settled world they backtrack to  and let them off and run more visitors, migrants, and trade back to the place they came from. Now some would settle a system with the smallest ship and fewest people needed, but I’d argue you  tend to go big. As we saw in Exporting Earth, it is a lot easier to build an ecosystem  by transplanting one and size helps in that regard. It’s also a lot more attractive  to people to live in a community of a dozen s

hips with a few thousand people on each of  them than one with just a couple hundred. And such ships might carry hundreds of  thousands, not hundreds or thousands. Why settle a system with less when that  just invites more settlers to appear in the big gulf of time while you’re growing? No  one is going to feel obliged to ask permission to settle on the same continent as a colony of a  few thousand, let alone a multiplanetary system, and if your population doubles every century  then you are loo

king at a thousand years to go from a thousand people to a million and a  thousand more to get to a billion. I wouldn’t give good odds on a couple thousand years passing  without others looking at the system and heading over. And you might have had to buy that planet in  some fashion, which is easier to pay for with the pocketbooks of a million settlers, not a hundred. Which brings up the matter of stakes and turfs. If you haven’t already allocated that planet to  various settlers before you eve

n commissioned your ark ship, you certainly would have  by the time you’ve spent a century flying through the empty void. In all likelihood part  of your payment or reward system on board your ship is in the coin of that system you’re  traveling to claim. If you imagine a ship of ten thousand people arriving at Earth, with  its nearly 60 million square miles or 150 million square kilometers of land, that’s 6000 square  miles or 15,000 square kilometers per person. That’s Connecticut or Puerto Ri

co or the  Bahamas, Jamaica, or Kuwait. And to be fair, that’s all a good deal more desolate than even  Kuwait if it’s a dead rock you’re settling. Depending on circumstances it may have been so  easy to find colonists that they paid heavily to fund the expedition and get their stake, or  you might have been having to promise land and free travel to get there. And this is assuming  something akin to a modern economic system, which may or may not exist here at that time,  and indeed might be the

reason they are leaving. It’s just easier to speak in modern terms. That means realistically that even if you gave everyone of those 10,000 folks several square  miles all their own to dome over as they see fit, you wouldn’t have even used 1% of that  planet’s space, let alone that solar system, and no legitimate argument could be made that  anyone wasn’t being given ample land to tend. You might be paying folks with additional land  or mineral rights or claims to asteroids – again it is a whole

star system and one that begins  with space travel, it doesn’t necessarily mean the destination for everyone is on whatever  rock there most closely resembles Earth. Because of redundancy though, I don’t think it  would ever be colonies that small and I don’t think it would be just one ship or even just one  habitation drum or ring on one either. Indeed, I think they would occupy a lot of their flight  time building and improving habitation sections of their ship. Or ships. Generally those are

going  to be their homes when they first arrive too, not some dome down on the planet, and  being able to detach half a dozen modest sized space habitats into orbit or near  valuable rocks or ice balls elsewhere in the system is a nice way to start your effort. People have been living on those for a long time so they are comfortable with it, and many  might choose to remain there. That’s half the notion of a gardener fleet, many on the voyage  might prefer to keep voyaging. It’s their life, and

everyone who wants off can go, and those  who don’t can also go, onto the next star, or whichever promising system looks at about the  right distance for them to have bred up enough new people to settle it by the time they arrive And this is a key notion as it represents another escape valve. In many ways life on an  interstellar ark is no different than life now, or a hundred or thousand years ago, the  ecosystem and civilization is smaller but more than big enough to allow people a lot  of cho

ices in life. Including migration, you go to a different ship in the fleet  or different town in that ark ship, moving from Engine-berg to Ice-town, where a few  hundred folks take care of the cryo-crypts of the hundred thousand folks who felt like making the  voyage on ice. Or decided to part way through, or who like to wake up every decade  for a few years, then go back to sleep. Or got told to get in the ice-bin or get  out the airlock, because the captain’s a heavy handed authoritarian and b

elieves  democracy is for colonies, not passengers, and has a short temper for complaints. Or  outright mutiny or mundane criminals, in a civilization with cryo or stasis you just handle  your bigger problems on voyages by sticking them in the freezer. Same for heading home. You need a  lot of infrastructure and equipment to found a new colony, you really don’t need much complexity to  a ship shooting frozen people back to the nearest settled world or all the way to Earth itself. And you can pro

bably do about one cubic meter per person on ice, so a kilometers long ship  could easily keep a billion people onboard that way. I should also note that if you’ve got  self-replicating tech and nanomachines that could let you found a whole planet with just a  few small cargo bays full of equipment and data, but then you could just as easily have  told that planet-changing tech to make you a giant spaceship. So there’s never  much reason to go small and compact. So when you arrive at the colony,

your dozens  of different factions all have tons of paths available to them. Those wanting to be on their  own to go found their personal domed habitat on their land parcel that is there for as far around  as their eye can see. Which if you’re standing on a building 25 feet tall on a roughly earth sized  planet would be six miles around, or 72,000 acres, or 29,000 Hectares. Some folks travel on to other  stars, some go to one of the founding cities, some settle in those orbital habitats and sta

tions,  some claim their own comet or asteroid to mine. Some take a ship and travel to neighboring systems  to begin some trade routes, or carry some migrants back and forth who want a change of scenery.  Some go on the long journey back to Earth. As to on the ships, what’s day to day life  like? Well things get manufactured, maintained, and recycled but I doubt this would take the  bulk of their time and effort. Food gets grown and probably most hydroponically. Even most of the  animals on boar

d for the journey probably have a zoo like environment where we mimic their habitat  but supplement their food from what we make. Nobody is steering that ship very often either.  The ship’s navigator is probably a small committee that meets once a month to review data to make  sure everything is going according to plan, and the ship’s crew isn’t some warship or exploration  vessel with a bridge full of tactical and science officers. It’s basically main engineering  and logistics, plus emergency

damage control. You probably pay taxes in some fashion, and  you might be working for the ship’s tax agency or as an accountant, or as a police officer or  firefighter, or elementary school teacher or a thousand other jobs we don’t normally think of in  space but will doubtless outnumber all the shuttle pilots and maintenance crews. So much depends  on technology, and I would imagine they will generally be a lot more automated than we are now. And however they left Earth, as we’ve discussed else

where there are ways for a fleet to gather  resources while traveling without stopping that fleet, sending off splinters and vanguards,  automated or otherwise, and settling a star system is a long process so being offered the  task of being on a ship that breaks with the fleet to land on some rogue dwarf planet in the void  to plant some automated mining gear and launch devices so you can arrive two years late but with  an extra share is a gig many might volunteer for. Novelty is valuable on a

journey like that  so I doubt volunteers would be hard to find and then you’ve got new raw materials to build  with during the trip and can start preparing your orbital ring or space elevator to deploy  on arrival or pre-fabricating domes or adding more habitation rings to your ship, or adding  another ship, and so on. I don’t think living quarters would ever be terribly tight on these  ships though, space is not at a premium in large vessels following the cube-square law, so you  likely have a

decent set of quarters rather than a submarine-style packed room full of bunk beds. They also have endless libraries of entertainment and knowledge at their fingertips, more than we  have now and let’s be honest, if you got told you were effectively ageless and would be stuck on  a ship for a century with only all of Wikipedia, Youtube, Netflix, and every book ever written  for company, you are never running out of new and interesting watches and reads. Or a million  virtual worlds to play in or

AI generated entertainment. But you still have tens of  thousands of people to get to know and you would still have new data beaming in from back at Earth. Indeed, you might even have new arrivals catching up to your ship. Again a small cryo-crpyt tombship  carrying a few hundred people and moving a little faster than your own ship might not be much  bigger than a freight truck and rendezvoused with even if moving a bit faster than you so it  could catch up. It wouldn’t need any more slow down

fuel than needed to slow to match speeds  with your ship since its people and cargo would be so tiny compared to that colony fleet. And  you are probably equipped to handle this sort of resupply option of cargo pods being shot your  way. Those might be those folks you dropped off a few decades earlier to set up a small station  in the void catching up with you, or folks from the previous colony who changed their mind and  decided to join the fleet, or pirates planning to burst inside and seize t

he ship. Let’s be honest,  a ship bigger than most metropolises is a tempting target to seize, and you might have conflicts  going on between other ships in the same fleet. One way or another, even though it’s a voyage  of lifetimes through empty nothingness, there’s likely to be lots of interesting times  for those living on an interstellar ark ship. We talk about transplanting life and civilizations  from Earth to strange new worlds, and we saw today how those ark ships are essentially worlds

in  motion themselves, but in many ways the process of transplanting life is really about starting  biological, and even cultural evolution all over again on an alien world unlike our own, on  some barren planet, something we’ll also be examining more this Thursday in our look at  Primordial Planets. That episode was largely inspired by Cell to Singularity, a free-to-play  science-based game that sponsors our show and which I was playing right before drafting that  episode and editing this one.

Amusingly this show also helped inspire that game, as many of its  designers are longtime fans of the show, and its shows in the game. Cell to Singularity starts you  off on a primordial planet, a barren Early Earth era of the most basic lifeforms, and takes you on  a journey through dinosaurs and other epochs all the way to modern times, then goes beyond our  world to forge a future out among the stars. Tap into the Extraordinary tale of  Evolution in this cosmic clicker game, where you start a

s a single celled organism,  then upgrade your biology, intellect, and technology until you engulf an entire planet  with a civilization on the brink of technological singularity. Explore from Early Earth out to  among the stars, in a game that fits easily into your busy day and again is free to play, whether  you're on your PC or phone, just search Cell to Singularity on Steam, Google Play, or iOS, and  start evolving your new civilization today! So the month of March is coming up  and we have

8 episodes to look at, beginning with our look at Crystal Aliens  tomorrow, March first, as our March 2024 Nebula Exclusive. Then we will head to the beginning  of time for a look at Primordial Planets, when those could first have formed, and what very  young planets are like, including Earth 4 billion years ago. Then we’ll continue our discussion  of terraforming from earlier this week when we looked at terraforming our own Moon by asking  if and when terraforming in general is ethical, and wha

t sorts of challenges future  civilizations will face on deciding whether or not a planet should be terraformed  and to what degree. After that we’ll travel toward Mars to look not at the Red Planet, but  instead at its two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, and ask why and how we could settle them. Then  it will be time for our sci-fi sunday episode, Automated Justice, for a 50-minute deep dive on  the role of AI in our courts and justice system. Next month is an informal shout-out  to megastructur

es on the heels of this month’s Nebula Exclusive on the Topopolis,  where we’ll be having some extra shorts on some lesser known megastructures, and I wanted to  give a quick shout out to my friend Neil Blevins, the author and artist for the book Megastructures:  The Visual Encyclopedia, who has been getting a lot of requests for reprint of that book  after it sold out. If you’d like to help bring that project to life, he has a kickstarter  going and I’ll link that in the description, and I’m lo

oking forward to your feedback today  and next month on what megastructures you think need their own dedicated full-length episode. If you’d like to get alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to hit the  like, subscribe, and notification buttons. You can also help support the show on Patreon, and  if you’d like to donate or help in other ways, you can see those options by visiting  our website, IsaacArthur.net. You can also catch all of SFIA’s episodes early and  ad free on our

streaming service, Nebula, along with hours of bonus content like Topopolis:  The Eternal River, at go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur. As always, thanks for watching,  and have a Great Week!