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Comment by danielweber | Hacker News Reader

You don't have to figure out a 1400-ly trip to be here. You just ("just") need to be able to move from one star system to the next.

If they took 100 years to get to the next star system 5-ly away and then 500 years to populate that system enough to start a new colonization, that's just ("just") 168,000 years to be here. Given a 2 billion year head start, that's easy.

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Even if it only took them 100 years to get to a star system 5 ly away, I would be amazed and impressed by a society that would be okay with investing in and working on at minimum a 105 year mission. Perhaps they live much much longer than we do :)

>working on at minimum a 105 year mission

Cathedral building in the middle-ages was a multi-generational 80+ year affair and some of the Pyramids took even longer IIRC. So societies were/are definitely capable of working on ~100 year missions :)

Or the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona for a contemporary and in-progress example.

Maybe a generation ship needs to have some sort of 'cathedral-in-the-sky' religion connotation in order for us to commit to building it. Sounds like an interesting idea for a sci-fi plot!

If they lived much longer, comparisons on earth would lead one to expect they'd be much slower to get anything done. Small burrowing rodents that live a couple of years hit the ground running, build extensive dens, and reproduce before they're a year old. OTOH giant tortoises never actually do anything except walk around slowly.

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