The human species has always been fascinated by the unknown. And while in the last thousands of years, many discoveries were made and few things remained undiscovered, we were able to explore only a tiny fraction of the place that stirs our desires: the Universe.
But while the majority of us can only dream about traveling among the stars and living on different planets, others set to work and generated a simulation which displayed the ways humans could settle in the Milky Way. The simulation was created by the Advanced Concepts Team (ACT) of the European Space Agency (ESA) as part of the Global Trajectory Optimization Competition (GOTC) which has reached the 10th edition.
This year’s theme was ‘Settlers of the Galaxy’ and asked the teams to conceive the most energy-efficient method to colonize as many solar systems as possible given that we would already have the technology to travel from one end to the other of the Milky Way and survive and settle in space. The contestants had to come up with ways to inhabit 100,000 star systems. But to populate that many star systems would mean that the ships have to travel through space for thousands of generations.
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Therefore, the human species would leave the Solar System behind and would go to other systems. The minute they are settled, they move on to the next star system, and the process goes on and on.
The ACT designed generation starships, which are a general category of interstellar ark ships that can travel between solar systems. They even outlined the internal mechanisms, the kind of energy they will use to travel, and self-healing materials. In the presentation video, they showed these generation ships drifting away from our Solar System and beginning their journey across the Milky Way.
They also presented the routes the ships would follow together with the new routes of new ships after a system had been colonized. By the time the simulation comes to an end, most of the Milky Way is colonized by future generations of humans, and the galaxy resembles a firework display.
Andre Blair s is the lead editor for . He holds a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Toronto, and a Master of Science in Public Health (M.S.P.H.) from the School of Public Health, Department of Health Administration, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Andre specializes in environmental health, but writes on a variety of issues.