New Eden Project

So to solve this issue, you can manually orientate each seed so they grow in the right direction, which sounds incredibly labour intensive. Or you could just germinate all the seeds under gravity.

So when nuclear power first started being developed and nuclear waste became an evident problem. The US government decided that any waste site should have a warning to any future inhabitants not to disturb the nuclear waste. This is called Nuclear Semiotics And that this warning should be understandable into the far future. The number they arbitrarily set was 10,000 years. For context on just how long 10,000 years is, the earliest known written language is only 5000 years old. And the languages have changed many times since then.

Proposed solutions ranged from extreme hostile architecture like giant spikes, religion around genetically engineered glow cats, to simply burying it deep and hiding all trace relying on isolation and obscurity to protect it.

What they ended up going with was pretty much a multi layered signage system warning of the hazard, and burying it deep in a remote location.

Now back to the thought experiment.

In essence, it’s the nuclear semiotics problem, but turned up to hard mode.

Imagine you are an advanced civilization, you have a danger. A danger you are able to contain, but you can not destroy. It is long lasting but you know that there is a risk of its containment site being found by intelligent species who might try to disturb it. You can not assume this intelligent species will have any cultural, biological, or technological similarities to you. Let’s assume you can build structures and technology that is resilient enough to last eons of environmental damage. But they can be destroyed if someone is determined enough.

How do you communicate to all potential species that this site is dangerous and should not be disturbed?

My answer under the cut. So comment with your own ideas before reading mine.

I’d want it to ultimately be a well thought out and well made mission designed to succeed. No fallout vault-tec social experiments. And I don’t want an idiot plot where the so called competent characters act stupid to add drama. This is a well planned mission with competent people. The interest is in how they solve the problems. Not how they fail to solve them.

you may not have any common biology, culture, or technology with these future people.

Let’s assume you have mastered making structures that can withstand natural weathering for very long times. So risk of accidental leakage is minimal. But you can’t guarantee its integrity against intentional attack.

This is essentially the nuclear waste warning problem but turned up to the extreme.

So this is a great reference for making spaceships.

Made a new model of the NEP Eden.

Changed the design to a 3 way rotational symmetry. Also reduced the number of habitation modules from 6 to 3 bigger modules. They also will no longer rotate independently from the rest of the ship and the entire ship will spin to induce a simulated gravity in the habitation modules suspended 500m away from the spine with cables. Made the fuel tanks over twice as big, now measuring 100m diameter x 150m long, rather than the 60m x 100m tanks of the previous model.

It’s inhabitants would travel between the main ship and habitation modules with elevator like shuttles. The majority of food and support systems would be housed along the spine of the ship with 3 wings of modular cells running the length of the ship housing the farms, material processing, storage, and cargo in atmospheric entry cells for the eventual colonization.

So I’m thinking that the NEP takes place 300-400 years in the future, where humanity has established colonies throughout the solar system. A few hundred million on the moon, and about half that on mars with any other bodies with small outposts and stations more than actual colonies.

To travel among the various colonies and outposts, cycler ships (look it up) would be used. These are space vehicles that have been put into orbits that will do close flybys of two planets on a periodic cycle and as such requires very little propellant to travel between the two planets using the cycler. The benefit is you can put your mass expensive things needed for space travel, so life support, habitation, powerful engines, etc. on a cycler ship, only needing the fuel to send a smaller shuttle to the cycler.

Finished the plans for the recreation and dining deck. 

More plans for the New Eden Project habitation modules. now have plans for the Garden Deck, the Dormitory Deck, the Cafeteria & recreation deck (WIP), and the cabin deck. 

Still need to finish plans for the Infirmary, Laboratory, and school deck, the Admin and office deck, and the Mechanical & Workshop decks.

I have once again done a total redesign of the ship. Making it bigger. Now each habitation module is 22m x 60m by 25m tall. So an 8 story building. I think they are big enough now. But here is the new Garden deck floor plan. At least a mostly finished version of it (Some labeling still required). The top and bottom walls would be taken up with sliding “stack” style hydroponic shelving. This would mostly be for starting saplings and plants off in a gravity environment before moving them to the big farms along the ships spines which would be under much less gravity do to their proximity to the axis of rotation.

But some plants and crops would be grown to maturity in the garden, including specially bred/engineered fruit trees that can grow in the confines space of a spaceship.

I have started drawing the cross sections of the NEP ships. This is just half (it wouldn’t fit on one page) of a section looking along the ships nadir.

The central circle is the ships parkway and the primary means of transit along the nearly kilometer long ship. At its center is suspended the ships primary propulsion; Three acceleration pipes that accelerate the waste helium from the fusion reactors to near the speed of light providing thrust. Attached to these pipes are tracks which carts will ride on for faster transit along the ship. One track reserved for up, one for down. And two smaller tracks reserved for automated box transport share the third side. The parkway’s wall is lined with modular hydroponic panels growing plants, most edible and all usable.

The parkway is surrounded by a triangular second hull structure. This outer hull is segmented into thirds radially around the parkway and then further segmented into 16m or 8m high rooms along the length of the ship. Colour coding is used to easily differentiate what third you are in. Within these rooms, the majority of the ships material/ food processing and mechanical systems takes place.

Coming off each third is a wing composed of stacked modular containers. These containers measure 8m outside diameter by 20m long and would be a standard container in this world akin to modern shipping containers. Each third has hatches and docking for 6 of these containers, many of which would be double wide taking up 2 ports. Three of these containers are stacked end to end to provide more volume. These containers would be used for farms, which utilize a movable stack design for more compact space use, raw material storage, and payload modules that are atmospheric entry capable for starting a habitable settlement on the surface of a new world.

A section sketch of a bolo city.

When the colonists of the N.E.P. get to the planet Juliet, they discover it will take longer to adjust the climate than hoped and take steps to expand their space based population by constructing bolo cities in high orbit.

Designed around a bolo concept, where you have two masses tethered together and swinging around a common center point. To reduce the Coriolis, the tether would be quite long, at least 10km. This with a fairly gentle rotation of 0.328 RPM should enable a decent balance between a comfortable gravity at 0.6g (~70% julian gravity) and a barely noticeable Coriolis. You can also see some other gravity configurations in the table I calculated.

The bolo cities would begin as the refurbished fuel tanks from the N.E.P. ships Adam, and Eve. Each bolo consists of two cities, one at each end of the tether with elevators going connecting the two cities. The cities would start out as nine refurbished fuel each for a total of eighteen for the entire bolo, meaning that if you cannibalizes both N.E.P. ships, you can build two bolo stations. However the utility of having an interstellar capable ship would likely prevent both ships from being canabalized.

As new segments are added, the city grows generally downward from the original modules. The bottom of each city would host a docks where vehicles can match the linear velocity of the bolo city and approach on a tangent.

I have found many numbers for minimum viable population sizes ranging from 15 based on the Tristan de Cunha to 10 000 but generally accepted number for a minimum viable population for humans is 4169 based on computer models and better researchers than me. 

So The New Eden Project is based on a two ship structure, the first ship, N.E.P. Adam, having a population of around 400-600 people and the second ship N.E.P. Eve having a larger population of around 1000 people that follows around 10 years after the Adam. Assuming a trip lasting 80-100 years, both populations are genetically diverse enough to sustain a population independently for the trips duration which would only be 3-4 generations without genetic disease or genetic intervention, but might not be enough for growing colony.

the smaller the population, the higher the risk of catastrophe due to disease or disaster is however, This can be countered with medical treatment making sure everyone is healthy. You can counter the risk caused from disaster and contagions by separating you population into smaller yet groups. In the case on the New Eden Project, the populations is separated into 12 habitation modules, each capable of semiautonomy. and each habitation module can further be separated into areas as to reduce the effected area of a disaster such as loss of atmosphere or chemical leak to as small an area as possible.