Humans will fly to the stars

This is the conclusion of scientists appearing at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference this weekend in Boston; However, the language of those who leave will change and maybe they will even become a separate species

Scientists have recently introduced new ideas in the field of future propulsion systems to explore planets orbiting distant suns. Unlike the small spaceships of today, the space crew of tomorrow will be able to live in buildings the size of small cities and which will be assembled in orbit around the Earth. The researchers shared their suggestions for how we might explore other star systems at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston in February.

According to them, about 200 volunteers who will go on the mission will receive a one-way ticket and will almost certainly never get to reach the final destination of their ship. Only in the last six-seven years has the existence of planets around other glasses been confirmed and scientists are making various speculations about the way these worlds could be visited.
Dr. Geoffrey Landis, a researcher at NASA says that the Earth's lifespan is limited - the sun will burn up all of its energy reserves eventually and if humans want to continue living they will have to move to a new home. Apparently, to transport large numbers of people throughout the galaxy would require huge aircraft with formidable sails that traverse deep space using the momentum they get from giant lasers.

"We will have to make a sail with a diameter of several kilometers" said Landis. "He will be huge but very light. The colony that gets pushed towards the stars by the sail will look like a small insect next to the giant sail. It will constantly float in space and it will be necessary to correct its course from time to time when it encounters dust particles in its path.
The researchers also try to predict the social problems that may be caused by such a task. Linguist Prof. Sarah Thompson from the University of Michigan believes that the colony may suffer from communication problems with Earth. "What language will the passengers speak during the flight? For operational reasons, it must be one language common to all. "It was said that we will start with one language, for example English. After 500 years, English will change so much on Earth and separately also in the spaceship, so that the descendants of the passengers will not be able to converse with each other.

If the delegation includes representatives from all over the world, they will have to speak an international language. Esperanto for example. Obviously there will be a majority for English speakers, but not exactly the same English. There will be representatives from countries like Ghana and India, as well as Europeans, Americans, American-born and immigrants from wide parts of the world."
But even if they speak the same language, for example American English, it will quickly become a separate dialect from those on Earth. Word changes will occur because the space environment in the long run will be different from that at home. New words will be created, old words will disappear.
The basic words such as father, mother, run, walk and sit will remain, but other words such as plane, skyscraper, car and train, may not be useful for space travelers." says Thompson, who studies a variety of areas such as the development of the Native American language in Indiana to 11th century Arabic. The main distancing from the original language will occur naturally in the education process of the next generation - of children who will be born in the space colony itself and will never know another life. Radio contact with Earth may slightly preserve the connection between the spoken language here and in the spacecraft, however, as the spacecraft moves further away, this connection will be extremely difficult, and any such transmission will take decades. said the researcher at a conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And maybe they won't want to keep in touch with Earth at all? adds the researcher.

Prof. Yuval Naman explains in a series of articles on evolution that the development of languages ​​is an excellent example of one of the features of evolution - the component of small isolated groups that become the ancestors of a large group. In the case of evolution, a family or tribe of animals falls into an area where they are isolated from the rest of the species, their accidental traits that depend on a single gene or a small number of genes, for example a certain eye color or height, will become dominant in their offspring.

Prof. Naaman mentions that the Hebrew language was absorbed in Israel as the spoken language, precisely because the Jewish settlement at the beginning of the 20th century was limited and therefore the movement to bring back Hebrew did not encounter much opposition. There were already five million English speakers in Ireland, and all plans to return the use of the Irish language met with resistance, and in fact to this day Irish is a second language in its homeland. A similar problem is common today in countries that were part of the Commonwealth of Nations and whose inhabitants spoke only Russian for several generations. Countries like Moldova, Ukraine and Belarus are trying to return to the original languages, and the residents are having a hard time with it.

An interstellar ship would actually also be a kind of Noah's ark, as it would carry everything the colonists would need, including greenhouses for growing food and sophisticated production systems. The anthropologists believe that the spacecraft should be based on residents from many countries to increase the gene pool. And it is also possible that in light of the fact that these people will live in isolation from the rest of the human race for such an extended period of time that they will become a species in itself.