GeekOut, episode 1!

What would it take to keep a small town’s population alive, healthy, and sane for a 40 year trip through space?

This was the foundational question that informed the design of the Requiem de la Lune, the ship that my book Of Oracles and Sirens is set on. Everything from the structure and layout of the ship to entertainment and options to enable human creativity with limited resources stemmed from this.

As a space exploration geek, I have long been familiar with the challenging question of how to keep humans sane and healthy on long duration space flights. Studies and real world experiences have shown just how dangerous being cooped up with the same few people for months at a time can be for human psychology. Onboard the Skylab space station in the 70s, there was a point in time where the astronauts literally started refusing to do their work, complaining their schedule left no room for downtime and leisure. Other studies have closely follow people in Antarctica, a great analogy for space travel as it is completely dark for large portions of the year, the extreme cold make it difficult at best to go outside, and workers are stuck dealing with the same group of people for long stretches of time.

The Requiem was designed by some of the best minds on Earth as they hurried to complete this last life boat before the planet fell to disaster. Thus, from the ground up it was built to cater to the psychological health of its passengers and crew.

The population required to avoid some… awkward questions around inbreeding primarily took care of the concerns around too small of a crew. With over 5,000 people on board, the ship has the feel of a small town. Each of the three habitation rings is divided into five sections called ‘Arcs’, and these serve as neighborhoods. People that need a break from their neighbors can go visit another Arc or even another ring all together.

The rings help solve another big problem right away: sensory familiarity, mainly that of gravity. And since we have gravity and a nice large space to build our habitation system in, we of course want to add some greenery: nothing drives humans crazy faster than being stuck inside for too long a period. The central part of each habitation ring is a continuous park-like environment known as the Commons, with copious trees and plants that not only lend some mental relief to people but also help scrub the air. The last crucial piece is a day-night cycle. This is one of the biggest challenges for modern day space travel; if you’re stuck in the same environment where the lights never change, how does your brain get the clue to start getting ready to sleep? On Requiem we see the ceiling in the Commons covered in screens that simulate Earth skies, dimming as night approaches and showing beautiful star fields and other motifs to help keep circadian rhythms in check.

So we have our small town with proper gravity, nice parks, and beautiful simulated sunsets. The next big psychological threat: boredom! Smelling the roses is only a novel experience so many times. Requiem is packed with every last book, movie, TV series, and games from Earth that they could cram into its massive storage banks. But outside of that, its important to enable people to create things of their own as well. Creativity, afterall, is a core part of who we are as a species. Workshops throughout the ship can be used to carve simulated wood, build small remote control racing machines, or customize a new sign for someone’s habitation unit. This not only provides a creative outlet, but keeps the spark of human ingenuity alive and well, something that will be crucial in restarting civilization on a new planet.

Entertainment options, creative spaces, and providing spaces for people to come together as a community are all important. But just as important is the opportunity for people to opt out and have some alone time. There are no shared rooms on Requiem, everyone has somewhere to call their own. Food can be delivered to someone’s habitation unit instead of picking it up from the local galley, and the entire ship’s entertainment catalog can be accessed from anywhere.

As I mentioned, all of these elements drove a large part of the Requiem de la Lune’s design. Retrofitting in elements to help with psychological health just isn’t realistic once the ship is underway, so they went above and beyond to create a place where people would be happy to live. If that all sounds too good to be true, keep in mind… this was humanity’s last big play to save our species. The nations of the world came together to build this vessel in the hopes that those lucky few would live on to carry our spark out into the universe.