Keen to flee catastrophe? Icarus Interstellar may be able to help – but you'll live in a mud pie in the sky and never return to Earth

Designs from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The academics admit humans might not turn out to be the best lifeforms to save when the end is nigh. Photograph: Jan Bauer/AP

The good news is you will fly into space on a mission to save humanity. The less good news is you will abandon the rest of Earth to certain doom and live in a mud burrow with only nerds for neighbours.

Such are the quandaries that passengers will face if plans work out for an interstellar spaceship designed to serve as a lifeboat for Earth should the planet face disaster in the next century.

Architects, designers and scientists have joined forces to explore the technologies needed to build a spacecraft that could be launched within the next 100 years and sustain human life for generations.

Early designs for the ship envisage a giant 15km-wide ball filled with soil that will support complex ecosystems of microbes, plants and animal life. Rather than building homes on top of the soil, humans will live within, carving out rooms in a network of connected burrows.

"We need to think how we might live in space long term," said Rachel Armstrong, lead researcher on Project Persephone at of Greenwich University. "So far, our approach to space has been very top-down. We take a vessel, put an environment in it, and off we go. For generational starships we need a different approach."

Armstrong, a doctor-turned-architect, hopes to develop synthetic soils that are optimised to support life and recycle waste. Electronic circuits sowed throughout the soil could monitor biochemical activity and use organic signals to communicate with plants and microbes to reshape the ecosystem as it evolves. The goal is to make the spaceship self-sufficient, life-supporting and self-fuelling, perhaps by mining asteroids or scavenging materials from space junk.

"By asking these questions the project is challenging the industrial view of sustainability. It's all very fine to conserve energy and be considerate about polluting the environment, but is that actually sustainable? We want to build sustainable environments that promote life," Armstrong said....Continue Reading

> via The Guardian