Starship(s) for a doomed Earth - which nations would band together for the funding?

Scenario

On Earth in the latter half of the 21st century:

• the increasing ravages of climate change (e.g. droughts and a rising sea level) are creating more conflict between nations over the battle for resources and the need to deal with climate-change refugees
• our new powerful telescopes have identified a relatively nearby star system with several planets that appear to be good candidates for colonization
• technological advances have made plausible the building of sleeper ships

Question

Given the likely enormous cost of building such sleeper ships, which is more plausible:

• the major nations all agree to fund a joint effort to build one or more shared ships, or
• coalitions of major nations each fund separate and competing efforts to build one or more ships

In the book "Starship Century," Peter Schwartz envisions a scenario - like the one I've provided - where competing coalitions each try to build their own starships. Some examples of his: the English-speaking nations, the Europeans, the Chinese.

But I'm wondering if the costs would be so great that the major nations would have to all cooperate on a single shared project, despite their rivalries and geopolitical tensions.

So is it more likely that the costs involved make it necessarily an all-together-or-not-at-all situation, despite the geopolitics? Or would the geopolitics be too much to overcome, so it would be a race between coalitions?

And if you think the latter is more likely, what do you think those coalitions might be?

posted almost 8 years ago

Arbutus‭

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