Report: Make deep space travel a family affair

Leaving 'yucky, dirty Earth' behind

The family that travels through space together, says University of Florida anthropologist John Moore, might have a good chance of staying together.

(CNN) -- Forget Captain Kirk and the Enterprise crew. The right stuff to search for distant planetary systems will be people linked not by political ties but familial ones, according to a Florida scientist.

Close blood relatives have the ideal organization and motivation to overcome the kinds of stresses likely to challenge deep-space missions extending two centuries or more, says University of Florida anthropologist John Moore.

"We are much less likely to go crazy in space and much more likely to accomplish our interstellar missions if we send crews into space that are organized along family lines," he says.

Families possess well-defined pecking orders between parents and children, older and younger siblings. They function along clear divisions of labor, which promote the accomplishment of various levels of work, Moore reasons.

Experience on Earth already provides plenty of precedent, he says.

"Whenever colonization is done on Earth, it's always by people looking for a life. All of the colonization that I know about as an anthropologist has been done by families, especially young couples," he says.

Pre-inter-planetary Polynesians

Investigating the most effective method to dispatch humans to Alpha Centauri, a star system very close to ours, Moore says he drew from the stirring example of ancient Polynesian seafarers.

Young couples would often set out on prolonged voyages across the Pacific in search of new places to live, with little more than paddles and prayers in their canoe flotillas.

"They didn't know where they going, but with the trade winds blowing them in one direction, they were pretty sure they weren't coming back," he says.

Similarly, he deduces, groups of young married couples would work best to cross the unknown voids of space, preferable without children at the onset so they could adapt to their new environment.

What would be a good number to start with? An expedition of between 150 and 180 people could sustain itself at the same rate over many generations, Moore calculates.

Plotting such trips might not be as outlandish as it seems. Some space scientists predict that one could embark before the end of this century, Moore said.

As for those who might find such a perilous voyage off-putting, Moore offers:

"We change jobs. We move to Chicago. We emigrate to a foreign country. The decision made by parents to join a space crew is not different in kind from decisions made by parents on Earth, only different in degree.

"If educated properly, I think kids in space might one day say, 'Gosh, I'm sure glad I'm on this spaceship and not back on old yucky, dirty Earth."