How to leave the Solar system.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Not that some people can't get pretty fanatical about "for the children" but there does come a point when it gets ridiculous enough most people stop buying into it. "How can you condemn thousands of generations of your descendants to have you as ancestors, instead of the clearly better ones they could have had if you had just refrained from breeding". I can't see most societies as actually being reluctant to *permit* a generation ship. As long as you are wasting your money and future on it and not mine, go ahead.

As I think about it, I could imagine some of the infosocialist nation-states being OK with it, in the THS setting, maybe China too. I think the EU as portrayed in canon THS would likely try to prevent such a project, in the canon USA it would probably depend on the details.

[Phil Masters]

I can't help thinking that the whole point is pretty moot in TS, though. Any kind of viable generation ship is going to have to be huge -- whereas a ship with a crew in nanostasis, or just a lot of ghosts and SAIs and some good cybershells, or the fabrication facilities to build them on arrival or something, can be a lot smaller and hence both cheaper and easier to get up to higher speeds.

Insisting on an actual generation ship would be a gigantic boondoggle suggesting a pathological attachment to archaic SF stories, many of which actually treated the idea as morally ambiguous anyway.

[dcarson]

I can see some groups that are not willing to leave total control to AIs so you have a crew that rotates in and out of nanostasis but not any that would insist on generation ships.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

whereas a ship with a crew in nanostasis, or just a lot of ghosts and SAIs and some good cybershells, or the fabrication facilities to build them on arrival or something, can be a lot smaller and hence both cheaper and easier to get up to higher speeds.

Definitely. A very THS way to do interstellar exploration is Starswarm (Deep Beyond, p. 136). It's less obviously a weapon than the real-world Breakthrough Starshot idea.

[Flyndaran]

It is odd to insist on a 20th century human solution to a 22nd century transhuman goal and setting.
It requires obscenely rich, biochauvinist, zealots to have any chance at all of working. Would they really fit THS?

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

It is odd to insist on a 20th century human solution to a 22nd century transhuman goal and setting.
It requires obscenely rich, biochauvinist, zealots to have any chance at all of working. Would they really fit THS?

That might be why they're trying to get to another solar system. Note that this would apply to _them_ and not computer programs created in their images. Or even to new humans created in their images after they themselves had been turned into plastic and stacked in the cargo hold like oversized legos.

[Michael Thayne]

A good candidate for people to build a generation ship might be Duncanites. The combination of biochauvanism and pantropy is exactly the right memeplex to make people want to set out for other solar systems. And a generation ship is in many ways going to resemble a space habitat more than a "normal" ship. The only trouble is there probably aren't enough Duncanites—even a 100 person mission relying heavily on databanks of genetic information to get enough genetic diversity would represent 0.1% of the population of the asteroids. I don't know if you'd get that level of sign on for an unquestionably dangerous mission, even one with a strong ideological justification for it.

[Astromancer]

One thing to think about is how this society will educate the young. Given the starship, even a vast one like Earthship Ark or the Warden, or the Whorl will be a closed society during the flight. This means that all the new talent has to come from within the ship.

As you can't know which kids, even with THS biotechnology will be the talented ones, all the children will have to receive a broad education covering a wide field of of scientific and cultural subjects.

Given the cloning tanks in the setting, all children could be grown in the tanks and raised to age six in the tanks. They'd experience being loved and cared for, learn a randomly assigned language form a list as their native tongue and remember learning English. This would allow a wide group of languages to be known and maintained on board the ship while making sure everyone knows English too.

My logic for using the tanks is simple. Raising children from birth to six is the hardest part by far. The Tanks make society fairer, women don't shoulder all the burden (which they tend to do even in the more enlightened societies) and the wide variety of languages means that if the ship meets aliens, they'd have both professional and armature linguists to help figure out communication. Note: So that humanity didn't lose the skill of naturally raising babies, some babies would be born and raised naturally. But that would be a specialty job.

I assume their would be university level training on the starship (or ships, I assume that for safety the starships would go as a fleet). Everybody would need to double major in both a scientific and a nonscientific field. This would be simply because not everyone could be made into a quality scientist, engineer, doctor, or mathematician. But everyone can learn enough to be useful technicians. And those that star in nontechnical fields like the arts and humanities will also get their education. Also, wider skill pools will tend toward more flexible people to work on surprise problems that would always show up.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

As you can't know which kids, even with THS biotechnology will be the talented ones

Uh, THS is so technologically advanced that up to ten points worth of talent can be granted by way of genetic engineering - see Changing Times 48, right column, Metanoia-Series Upgrade. That heavily implies that the geneticists have already figured out which combinations of genes do that.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Uh, THS is so technologically advanced that up to ten points worth of talent can be granted by way of genetic engineering - see Changing Times 48, right column, Metanoia-Series Upgrade. That heavily implies that the geneticists have already figured out which combinations of genes do that.

It's much better evidence that TL10 genetic engineering can grant +2 IQ. Just because IQ is so much broader than a Talent.

On the other hand, because of the way GURPS works indivdual cp expenditure can swamp the genetic template. I wouldn't call IQ 12 truly "talented". It's high average by the usual standards. The 2 levels of a 5pt Talent you could give that Metanoia would be no more than that.