Population Demographics and Other Issues for the Massive Ra World Ship Model – Part 1

Abstract

A world ship is a massive spacecraft carrying a human crew on a trip to the stars over many generations that may take millennia to complete the crossing. It is completely independent of any resource supply chains from back home and is the initial foundations upon which an interstellar settlement may grow into a fully-matured civilisation. Strategies for sending humans around other stars depend on the ability to construct large World Ships which are of order 1011 tons in mass, 100 km in length and host large populations of millions of people over many generations of lifetime. A mission architecture is constructed for a 1 million population carrying capacity growing to 10 million, based on an original 1984 published model which achieves a cruise speed of 1,500 km/s or 0.5% the speed of light (c) for a 1,000 year trip time. This is for a concept called Ra, named after a god who drove his sun chariot across the sky. We discuss how the world ship population is divided into categories. We also discuss the critical issue of population demographic and economics. Power supply and habitat spin rate are also discussed. It is concluded that the design of a society within a world ship presents challenges for social-cultural philosophers and the adoption of a free market economy. This paper is the first part to a follow up which will describe a world ship driven by an inertial confinement fusion engine. Keywords: World Ships, Interstellar Studies