Evacuate Earth

I hope you meant meets. Seriously, the way you get everyone to work is to hold a lottery and not announce the winners until the ship is ready to go.  WTC uses this this method to get people (including me) to train and sign up for more events to validate Kona lottery slots if you are one of the chosen few.

So your fee just to enter the lottery would pay for the ship, right? And then you pay if you get accepted. Just like WTC!

You couldn't do a straight-up lottery.  You'd have to have full genetic testing first to make sure you don't have any pre-disposition for crazies or genetic ailments  (diabetes for instance).  

So you have to qualify to be in the lottery in the first place. 

I actually think WTC could play a role.  If you finish IM Kona in 12 hours or less, you're automatically on the ship because you have shown yourself to be physically fit and able to endure the long journey...

^^Snerk

They didn't discuss multiple ships which I thought was a bad idea.  Put all your eggs (or humans) in one basket?  

So would you keep working?  Would you be willing to pick up the slack for the people who said "Forget about this work stuff.  I'm staying here and having fun!"

They have a 75 year timeline which means most of us will be dead by the time the ship launched anyway so it would have no real bearing on the first generation's lives.  And if you're born in year 35, you already knew it was coming. 

Maybe they should have a WTC legacy program type rule.  If you do a lot of work, you buy one of your descendants spots on the ship.  That way the current generation is securing a spot for their ungrateful grandchildren...

They'd definitely need a huge ship to give you gravity somewhat like Earth's gravity.  Then you could have scout ships that go ahead and then come-back. 

Naturally, you'd have to take the Dr. Strangelove principle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iesXUFOlWC0  (skip to 1:30)

The actual construction of the ship is small potatoes.  The US has 1,010,000 tonnes of ocean going ships in the form of just 10 aircraft carriers.  A 1 million ton (2 billion lbs) space ship could be pretty big.  Today, assuming you could get it off the planet, you could do it in a couple years easy, with only mobilizing ship builders - not even getting into other manufacturing labour.    Make it a generational ship, and you don't need new propulsion technology - getting air, heat, and fuel would be bigger issues.

So, then you'd have to sell to people that in 75 years, your grandkids will get on a ship that they'll die on.  Maybe their grandkids will get to some place to land...

Did you mean at 3:47?  That's the real important part of the plan...

But the video does bring-up another point.  What if some countries decided to launch their own life-boat? China and Russia can probably build just as good a space ship as we could.  

Ever seen Episode II?

as someone who works in aerospace... no, no they could not.  we would need all their resources and manufacturing though, so they would have to be on board.

I didn't say they'd be able to survive on the ship very long.  Just that they could build their own ship...

Fun question!  I would definitely NOT get chosen since I had cancer and would probably be deemed "genetically undesirable".  Issues I could think of many off the top of my head...  mass of a single ship (or multiple smaller ships), water, air, etc., etc.  But I'm going to focus on just ONE:

Everyone would be LONG dead before they got there.  In fact, their children and children's children would all be dead.  It would take about 60 generations to make the distance...

Take the BEST case scenario - the closest possible Earth-like planet is in fact Earth-like and habitable.  That would be Gliese581c orbiting the star Gliese 581 in the constellation Libra.  It's about 20.3 light-years away (How many years it would take to get there at the speed of light).  That's about 119 TRILLION miles.

You don't power a spacecraft continuously (not enough fuel, no matter what the type, even ion-drive).  You get it up to speed and let it drift at that speed towards the target.  It takes about 7 months for a small rover craft to travel approximate 142 million miles to Mars.  No humans on that rocket, so they don't need to worry about g-forces affecting people and can just slam the throttle down.  That's flying at around 30,000 miles per hour.

Let's say we invented some super-space-drive (forget Warp-drive, faster-than-light, it's not possible).  And that could move our Earth Evac Ship 225 times faster, at 6,750,000 miles per hour.  That's FAST!  Almost 7 MILLION miles per hour!!!  Now we're at 1% the speed of light.  We're really blasting our way through space towards our salvation and new planet...

At that speed, it will take just over TWO THOUSAND YEARS to get there!

You might say that in that time we could continually upgrade and invent ways to move the ship faster...  But the ship would most likely have long-since been destroyed from the internal war(s) for power that took place.

Science facts are a b!tch, ain't they? 

And you are missing the private enterprise ships (Sir Branson VI will surely be involved on that). You pay and if not selected on the main lottery at least have a way off the pending doom. The private developer will surely occupy many spots on the ship, but they will need the money, resources, and connections of their paying customers.

And if you plan ahead, you could follow the main ship (like a remora on a shark or flies on a horse). I could even see interplanetary commerce among the many private ships.

The difficult part will be keeping all the politicians in here...

If you could go light speed, you should be able to go 20.3 light years in 20.3 years... 

They discussed on the show the project orion propulsion where you drop small clusters of nukes out the back of the ship and as they fire, they push a plate that accelerates the ship to ludicrous speed.  Or about 7% of light speed.  At that rate, they figure it'll take between 80 and 100 years to get to a nearby habitable planet.  

There's definitely no steering though and figure you'd have to save nukes for the stop on the other end...

So basically, you'd have about 4 generations who knew nothing but life aboard a ship.  Very strange to think indeed.  

And BTW...

I do believe in extraterrestrial life out there in the Universe.  I don't think it's statistcally possible for there NOT to be.  But for the reasons I wrote above - That's why we haven't had contact and most likely won't for a long long time.  The vastness of space and what it takes in terms of speed and time to get across it is ridiculously big.

We've only been sending radio signals (speed of light) for 70 years now.  So anything sent, received, acknowledged, and replied - at the earliest - would take 140 years.  IF they were 140 light-years away or closer (which they're not).  We wouldn't hear from anyone out there until at least 2082 at the earliest.

Sorry.

Doesn't this all presume this alien life is constrained by our technology?  Maybe they got all Romulan and actually have a large battleship sitting on the far side of the moon.