Re: Generation Ships
 

Again? Really?

I see no reason to assume careful parenting and carefree sexual pastimes would require unusually large amounts of support. From my point of view while the particular attitudes to parenting and sex don't have a direct historical basis the general history of such things leads me to conclude that it would work. Like others I think it might well be a better choice than others for a generation ship.

When two people's interactions are having a more adverse effect on the ship than the loss of either of them then duelling or some other way of removing or separating them makes sense.

A genship would have a very hard time surviving a traditional civil war but it could possibly survive the duelling equivalent of a civil war.

Depending on how the life support works a prison could be as simple as locking the imprisoned with enough to support him and letting him support himself if he wants to live. The ship wouldn't really lose anything unless something else is wrong.

Yes the ship will react harshly to anyone endangering it's hydraulics.

It's worth noting that the reason I specified TL 8 at the beginning of thread in the context of technological progression is that generation ships might be built with many TLs and many variations on TLs but almost all will be built with access to TL 8. Thus I hoped to get everything that would be useful for a generation ship to research. If a generation ship is of a higher TL than it can ignore the things it already knows but if I assumed a TL 9 ship than things might be missed that would be useful for a generally TL 8 but advanced in some areas ship to research. It is still useful to presume the lowest TL of at least TL 8 that is possible for a given technology when discussing matters other than research for the same reason but I never intending the discussion to be wholly limited to TL 8.


Anything that damages anything endangers the mission. It might be less endangering to let it be damaged than prevent it in some circumstances but there is no reason to introduce additional damaging elements into the ship unless the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.

Unless you have an unusually circumscribed definition of "sport" all sports are not violent.

If you can build a ship that can reach it's destination in an automated fashion successfully more often than with a human crew than there won't be generation ships unless there is some ideological necessity for a crew and thus there will be very little research.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Only if AIs can do everything that humans could do as well or better for the time it takes a whole generation to grow up, which includes raising a generation of people.

While I don't feel competent to rule out the possibility of AIs, I do feel that AIs that essentially are digital humans without any need for special equipment or a looming possibility of psychological failure states during an extensive learning period for the engineers are not realistic at TL9 and probably not at TL10. Even if it's possible to make self-aware free willed intelligent beings without biological compenents*, why should we expect them to be similar to humans in any way?

It's entirely possible that AIs would turn out to require hardware that made them much more expensive than hiring a human (but did make them practical for some applications, whether because they did not have rights or because their tolerance for boredom, risk or other negatives was different than humans). Or that they would be at as much or even more risk than humans from psychological damage when without the society of others. Or that they were utterly unable to truly master certain skills, at least without prohibitive amounts of brute-force computing.

Or any of a number of other reasons why it was not a good idea or practical to have a whole generation of colonists be raised by AIs without human input.

*Which I think will always be possible at some point. I just don't know if it will ever be a practical method of doing it and gaining something useful.

Re: Generation Ships
 

You can't get experts to agree on how to raise children. How would programmers design A.I.s to do it without even more argument?

Re: Generation Ships
 

The standard GURPS assumptions seem to imply it. They have no disadvantages or traits that would limit their ability to do so, other than possibly not looking like a human. That said, you also might consider changing those assumptions to make some things more interesting to your setting. For example if you don't want an AI to stop an evil mayor like I posted earlier...

Re: Generation Ships
 

A.I.s are different in every setting as there is as yet no "real" way to make them.
But even if they were implacable and efficient, I still wouldn't want the future of the human race to be raised only by them with no living human parenting.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Also if A.I.s are just as good if not all around better than humanity, why send human gametes at all? Let our creations inherit the universe.

Re: Generation Ships
 

I know the standard GURPS assumptions seem to imply it. On the other hand, given that blueberry muffins and TL8 station wagons can be made as characters and the rules do not note how these generally differ from humans on a mental level, we might reach the same conclusion for a lot of things.

More properly, a realistic treatment of AIs would seem to me to require the author to work out the ramification of a truly alien intelligence and the game mechnanical traits that follow from that. This is not done in UT, being a setting trait.

Aye, I know that AIs in Transhuman Space are really, really human, so much so that it's almost credible when extremists there maintain that there aren't any AIs, just eidelons and whatnots with scrubbed and doctored 'memories'. But this is a feature of THS, there specifically because it's one of the enabling switches that allows the exploration of the themes intended by the setting, not because it is all that likely that this is the most plausible technological path for our future.

Re: Generation Ships
 

In fairness, you can't get experts to agree on the best way to raise children because you can raise them a bunch of different ways and still by and large have them turn out fine.

That said, while we're deciding what speculative technology to use...

Why have AIs raise the first generation of kids instead of human ghosts/uploads?

Re: Generation Ships
 

Another excellent possibility, except people might consider ghosting=fancy method of suicide. Plus uploading is a TL 10 invention. Also a funny way to traverse the universe? At TL 12 you can dissolve someone in nano-and rebuild them elsewhere. Just beam the data across the stars. (Its the non-superscience version of the ST transporter.)

Re: Generation Ships
 

This is perhaps the one application where that doesn't matter. These people aren't uploading because they want to live forever. They're uploading because the first generation of biological humans on the new frontier are going to need parents.

"Another excellent possibility, except people might consider [nanotech reconstruction]=fancy method of suicide."

Also, I'd call de novo AI or human brain emulation a toss-up, but this is likely to take longer than either.