How do we build a gigantic colony space ship?

[neutrino78x]

Perhaps true, but even if it worked, you would have to resurrect Project Orion to have any chance to get it up there. :lol:

Project Orion (nuclear propulsion)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)

lol, well, I would break the boat up into modules (however sacrilegious that would be) and launch it with commercial rockets, then assemble it in space.

Or, I would build a Truly Massive Railgun, and launch it all in one shot. You would have to build up power in the railgun over a period of years I guess lol.

--Brian

 

[CAllenDoudna]

It will be a couple hundred years before we go intersteller (merely my guess). By then we will have built up a considerable infrastructure in space so that an intersteller vessle will be no more expenssive or challenging for that era than a transoceanic vessle was a few centuries ago.

We will begin by having factory workers on Earth strap themselves into virtual reality harnesses to guide robots in space that will mine, process, and build with materials from the Moon astroids, and comets. Later we will use Mercury (rich in rock and metals) and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn (rich in water [for oxygen as well as water], methane [for carbon], and amonia [for nitrogen].

I would suggest a sphere about 25 kilometers (15 miles) in diameter (which seems to be about the limit of our engineering with ordinary materials at this time).

Even when we can build an engine that will get us up to near the speed of light we're not apt to go more than about 1% of the speed of light for the simple reason that a collision with a small boulder will release as much energy as a nuclear explosion. Along the equater there would be an "ocean" maybe a couple of kilometers wide and 10 kilometers of land either side of that for about 1,500 square kilometers (566 square miles)--about the size of an average county. From the mid-lattitudes to the poles would be windows. rivers would begin in these low-gravity mid-lattitudes and flow to the higher gravity at the ocean. We would need a caravan of at least a hundred of these and probably start out with a hundred people on each one.