Re: Generation Ships
 

"Proportionate to its size" means that the larger it is, the more stable it is.


But even a large generation ship is a tiny ecosystem.

A generation ship IS a large machine. It has all the large machine problems plus the difficulty of keeping the atmospheric ratio in balance.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Well, really if those gluttonous citizens of sector 7:G would take shallower breaths, we would all be better off.

Plants make O2; animals make CO2. Too much of one, cull the producers. The problem is that people don't like culling the human herd at all. Controlling human breeding has never been shown to be possible. And that's the most difficult part of generation ships, in my opinion.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Genships have the same privilege, there are generations of people to maintain them. Their machineries can be stopped, started, repaired, and replaced.

The sustenance of human life can't; there has to be a recoverable population of people alive somewhere at all times. Shifting them from one compartment to another helps, but mingling populations means mingling biospheres, and risking that the destablizing element is carried with them.

Of course, if you want to say you purge the farmers along with the farm, that will work biologically, but sociologically it falls between Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and THE KILLING FIELDS.

Re: Generation Ships
 

It's seldom been shown to be even desirable until very recently and then only in some parts of the world. I think you're rather short of conclusive proof sinply due to lack of examples.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Unless you expect the yearly death rate to even come close to those of the rough and tumble earth bound ones, then you will have overpopulation. Isolated islands have always suffered such events. Look at Easter Island.

Re: Generation Ships
 

If your really paranoid people can be quarantined and air locks between the farms would help as well. We do have protocols for preventing contamination even with highly contagious diseases. We can use those to prevent cross contamination.
Or we can do this at TL9 and simply cull the farmers. Or their bodies at least, the AI's can be uploaded into new mainframes. Plus it also keeps subversive elements from poisoning the farm.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Our protocols are considered effective given the resources of the current planet Earth, which a genship won't have. The arrangement of probabilities that allows for a clumsy researcher to occasionally contract fatal smallpox can bean infinitesimal risk for the human race and still be intolerably risky for a 100K genship crew.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Well yeah there isn't going to be a lot of wilderness. Wilderness is inefficient for pure food production. There will probably be parks though and possibly wilderness themed parks.

Food production will be as efficient and resistant to problems as it can at the tech level of the ship. It won't resemble conventional farming.

I think the issue leading to this disagreement is fundamentally one of scale. I suspect I am imagining a significantly larger ship than you are. There is more than enough space to have a natural ecosystem. The only reason it isn't going to be natural is because it can be improved upon for the context of providing food for a generation ship.

Ecosystems include things like forests and other similarly sized areas.

Yes, compartmentalization is important.

And if Hoover's Dam can last for 76 years with maintenance then an ecosystem with similarly skilled maintainers and budgets can gain a similar multiplicative effect from when it would break down.

"Proportionate to it's size" can mean that. It wasn't clear that it did.

Ecosystems include quite tiny areas and generation ships include quite large areas.

Of course a generation ship is a machine. You could call the generation ship's ecosystem(s) a machine too. So what? I said many machines don't have self repair abilities and most ecosystems do.

Controlling human breeding has been difficult but at least some societies that needed to keep their population steady have managed it.

Which is why stored food supplies and greater than necessary food production is helpful.

Mingling populations doesn't mean mingling biospheres if proper care is taken. Especially if the mingling isn't happening commonly.

Isolated islands are pretty rare and isolation makes problems harder to deal with instead of being a problem in itself. While not as isolated as Easter Island I suggest you look at Tikopia.

They have all the resources an airlock requires. Even if something is spread between two areas then that doesn't spell doom for the whole ship.

Re: Generation Ships
 

You mean an airlock? And some seal suits, and someway to kill any microbes on the outside of the suit? What kind of mini-gen ship doesn't have that? Two you don't have smallpox breaking out every other decade let alone every other year. As long as you have a decent degree of redundancy you'll be fine.

I think the main problem at TL 8 will be building a large enough ship, the resources are just too much to stick up in space. At TL 9 its far more doable. Fabricators and HDEM rockets are nice when it comes to a space industry.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Hmmm..., as it turns out, isolated communities aren't likely to become overpopulated on Earth. Look at the entire Austalasia area. If something is sufficently isolated, it's more likely to suffer depopulation and technological degration.

On the other hand, if we're considering high-TL societies, any analogy from a primitive society pretty much drops out as irrelevant. For a TL7+ society, overpopulation seems not to be much of a problem, given the availability of reliable and mostly problem-free contraceptives. Most such societies here seem to be maintaining replacement rates and probably would have little problem adapting to any rate of breeding that seemed desirable, particularly if there was some mechanism for affecting their behaviour, like laws or something.