Re: Generation Ships
 

If old farts try to become kings or something, and refuse to let go of their "power", the generation ship's mission is doomed.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Well not necessarily. A society could survive to it's destination under those conditions.

Re: Generation Ships
 

The "younger" people would probably be greatly outnumbered (given that life extension combined with the need to maintain zero population growth produces very few children per generation). But of course cryogenics isn't available at TL 8 so that's a moot point.

Re: Generation Ships
 

The ship will still arrive somewhere with some people alive onboard. They can decide if the ironfist government will still rule planetside. I'm curious if a "mission" is still on their mind.

If there were too many revolts on the ship, I don't know if their mission would be a success.

Re: Generation Ships
 

A generation ship's mission is getting to it's destination with people on board.

Ironfist governments seem as likely to follow other aims of the original colonists as any other. Especially if it is a gerontocracy.

Re: Generation Ships
 

If you freeze a corpse, of course you've already failed. However, it might be possible to treat a living mammal in such a way that they are not fatally damaged by the cooling process or the re-warming process.

As for accommodations in general, if it is a near-c craft it may be practical to gradually extend living space backward in the shelter of the ship's wake.

Other useful preoccupations may leverage the generation ship application's plentiful resources of vacuum, radiation, and isolation with its unique ones including its position in space, its exact personnel, and its relative velocity. I'd say various kinds of instruments for astronomical observations would have a high priority, including long-term studies of the solar system's neighborhood at high and low energies augmented by the doppler shift.

Aha! Maintaining some sort of communications with other generation ships directly or by earth relay, to exchange problems encountered and solutions tried.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Yes, I mentioned that. However, a fleet of ships gives you several different types of redundency. This would make for a better safety margin in a score of different ways. Any group of planners building a generation starship is going to be very focused on having a nice wide safety margin because they'll never know how wide a safety margin they need.

Re: Generation Ships
 

It matter not wheather or not it is possible, we don't know how to do it now. Moreover, we have no proof that, if FTL travel is possible, humans will figure out how to do it in the next thousand years. So it is of marginal interest to this thread.

However read Far Centaurus by A.E. van Vogt.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Recipes for cheez Whiz are trivial. Fine wines and cheeses, exotic honeys, Brazil nuts, those are far harder.

Re: Generation Ships
 

The definition of "Younger" would change. If it became normal to live to the age of 180 years, then 70 year olds would be young whipper snappers. People would be required to attend school until they at least 45.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Would a gerontocracy risk the loss of control that leaving the ship would risk? A dictatorship that legitamates itself by saying "We do what we do so that our community will survive this crisis of the long voyage!" has no interest in saying the voyage is over. The old sci fi trope of the degenerate generation starship which arived at the colony world centuries ago fits in here.

Re: Generation Ships
 

They have no choice. There's no way to design a big machine to last forever, still less an artificial ecosystem. And the margins involved in building a generation ship are so tight there's no way it could be designed to last all that much longer than the projected time of arrival.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Way back in the 1980s, before most of you were born, a Traveller supplement had a pretty good premise for a generation ship that worked. it was an asteroid-hulled ship, crewed by belters who were used to the life in restricted environments, and who didn't mind "going somewhere interesting." The European Space Agency put colonists aboard in cold sleep, but specified that a small percentage were to be periodically revived so that the crew and colonists did not drift apart culturally. Eventually they settled the Island Clusters in Reft Sector.

For an example of a colony ship where cultural drift led to a drastic rift between Crew and Colonists, read Larry Niven's A Gift From Earth.

Re: Generation Ships
 

It might want to say that but then again lots of governments might want to say that. It may not be possible for them to keep the knowledge secret.

They could also go for very slow expansion out of the generation ship when they got there. It makes a lot of sense really and some people might have no interest in leaving the ship.

Sure it could last longer. An artificial ecosystem is a lot longer lasting than many big machines. If your ship is going to be travelling x long and you can build a ship that can survive for 2x you could send the longer lasting ship to the shorter distance. You could design a ship that is falling apart by the time it gets to it's destination but it seems a lot safer to give it a margin for safety reasons and on a long voyage that margin might be big enough for a decision maker to feel letting the ship sail a bit further won't affect him.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Another one, more recent, is Alistair Reynolds' Chasm City.

Re: Generation Ships
 

One of the many big advantages of doing it at TL9 instead of attempting at TL7. AI's can run stuff.
Mayor: Okay other powerful elites, we're going to just tell everyone the planet isn't safe and we need to stay aboard. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! Computer patch me through the P.A. system!
Computer: Sorry, I have the honesty disadvantage. No can do.
Mayor: But I want to be mayor for life...
Computer: I can give you a fancy title if you want. Oh and first colony pods launched.
Mayor: :(

Re: Generation Ships
 

Where is this supported?

Re: Generation Ships
 

Since it's possible for a big machine to fail immediately it's a safe, but not meaningful assertion.

Re: Generation Ships
 

I don't know what you mean by "where" but it is based on the fact that an artificial ecosystem probably incorporates an intrinsic repair ability whereas many big machines don't.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Unfortunately the stability of a ecosystem is proportionate to its size. Farming is a chancey business and when one bad growing season can put the whole balance of oxygen and CO2 out of whack, you may not have a chance to recover.

Re: Generation Ships
 

the Amtrak Wars had a nice setting for a closed community regime, but they also went outside, though with another locked community, a land battle train

Re: Generation Ships
 

Jeff meant "Where is your example of such an item performing as you beleive it should?" and of course you don't have one.

Since an artificial ecosystem on a generation ship is going to depend on many machines such as pumps for air and water plus srtificial sunlight it is not likely to achieve un-machine-like levels of self-reliance.

Re: Generation Ships
 

The birth control part is easy, trivially easy, at any technology level that can make a viable genship anyway.

The hard part is that sex (as part of the general pattern of male/female relations) is psychologically and culturally explosive. When we look closely, we see that a significant part of the cultural structure of earthside societies exists precisely to regulate sexual matters into channels that let the society survive and function.

With the smaller margins for error and higher social 'tension' of a genship's population, this will be a major issue. You are not likely to see the sexual tropes of the modern weathly West in play on a genship. There are various forms it could take, but all of them will be fairly restrictive. Easy marriage, easy divorce, 'sex is a private matter', those wouldn't work on a genship unless it was gargantuan and carried an immense population. It certainly wouldn't work on a genship that could be built at TL8 or even TL9.

But the sex part will be culturally limited, from necessity, and gaming takes free time.

Realistically, a genship probably will be so organized that most people are busy most of the time with something, even if it's only make-work. There are various reasons for this.

One is that constant practice keeps skills up and ready to use in the event of an emergency, when they have to be ready right then. If you want every adult or near-adult member of the complement to be as capable as possible, you'll cross-train them as well.

Another reason is that 'idle hands are the Devil's workshop'. In a tight situation, one thing you do not want is people with a lot of time on their hands. That's why you could expect lots of work, if necessary consisting of make-work, to keep people occupied and out of mischief. Probably all the adult and near-adult members of the complement could expect to spend 90% or more of their waking hours involved in some sort of pre-planned activity. This would not necessarily be as onerous to them as it would seem to us, since it would be their familiar 'normal' throughout their lives.

Still, the whole point (along with maximizing skills and knowledge base) would be to burn up most of the excess social energy that might otherwise become a danger to the mission and survival of the ship. Naval vessels are an example of one form that this can take.

(BTW, on a genship 'near adult' would likely be very young by our standards, they wouldn't have the margin for error necessary for the long extended adolesence of modern rich Western countries. Childhood would necessarily be short.)

Re: Generation Ships
 

No, you don't need that many. If you can manage to do it, it helps a lot, but you could create a fully viable genetic base with a few thousand (or less in a pinch if you're willing to pay the genetic price) just using traditional breeding. If you can carry gene banks with you, you could do it with even smaller populations.

Culturally and skill-wise is a different issue, a bigger population helps a lot here, but again, if you've got the tech to make a viable genship, you can still get by with a relatively small population base, accepting that some skills and knowledge will be lost and have to be redeveloped later. (But that's true even with a population of hundreds of thousands, just less so.)

Set against the advantages of a larger population is the offsetting cost of mass, and that mitigates for the smallest viable population you can get away with, just as the skills/genetic diversity issue presses for the largest. The choice of where to set the dial would depend on the available technology and resources.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Doubtful. Research and development takes a lot of time and resources, even just theoretical work does, and you'd have to do experiments and tests to support the theoretical side, and it's not entirely clear that a genship could afford to let people have the kind of free time necessary for serious scientific research anyway.

Also, there are likely to be very limited margins of material and equipment that could be diverted to anything not mission related. It might well be true that Dr. Gzint could cut 500 years off the rest of the mission if he just had access to a few tons of platinum. How does it matter if that platinum is not available, or is absolutely required for other applications?

Re: Generation Ships
 

Hmm...no, monitoring everyone would be a breeze on a genship, compared to planetside environment. Even if the population is the size of a major city, the necessities of space travel mean they'll have to follow a regular set of routines (and I do mean have to, the alternative is the ship dies), and the volume within which they exist is sharply limited.

From necessity, the tech will be in place to monitor the ship pretty extensively anyway, for safety reasons. That tech could easily be applied to keeping a fairly close eye on everyone pretty much all the time. The only real limiting factor is having someone to do the watching on the other end, which in turn depends on what your information tech can do.

Add in the fact that with a relatively small population and nowhere 'outside' that anybody can go, you're going to get a small town sort of dynamic even with a population in the 100,000 range, 'everybody knows everybody', so to speak, and the rumor mill will churn.

Don't expect privacy on a genship. You probably won't have it, or if you do it will be an artificial sort of privacy.

Again that might not seem as onerous to the occupants who grew up with it as it would to us.

Yeah, but that's not good enough. A genship would have to have a fairly authoritarian power structure to survive, because when the emergency comes, you have to get it right the first time, right then. A naval vessel or other sea craft have time enough in theory for discussion and debate most of the time, too, but you still can't run them as democracies.

A genship could have a democracy of a sort, but there could be very little room for much real dissent and whoever was currently in power could not tolerate much dissent. You might end up with a sort of elective dictorship, or some other tightly organized form that included some democratic elements, but it won't be, it can't be, democratic in the familiar sense of a Western liberal democracy. Survival won't permit it.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Education is overrated for these purposes, you can't change human nature through it. If the crew is made up of our familiar kind of human, you can't teach them to behave in ways that go against their nature.

Fairness and awareness don't count for much. A culture that shapes behavior in ways that support the survival of the ships, on the other hand, would be necessary. If we're looking for indicators of how such a culture might work, we should look to the closest things in real-world history to our hypothetical genship.

This gives us: naval warships, monasteries, polar science outposts, isolated oasis communities and tribal hunter-gatherer groups, etc. Of them all, the monasteries might be the one that tells us the most about what would work and what would not.

Re: Generation Ships
 

That's part of the genship concept, they have to recycle everything, including the corpses. Just part of the deal. (Ditto an O'Neil habitat.)

Re: Generation Ships
 

They could, depending on how big of a ship it is, hold the corpses for maybe a few years for social or forensic reasons. Too many murder mysteries involve killers trying to destroy the body before full examination. And if you get more than a couple of people, eventually someone will despise someone else enough to kill.

Re: Generation Ships
 

The cost of putting stuff in orbit according to spaceships, at TL 9, is under 10$ a pound for fuel* (with a decently designed ship from earth). Then just assemble the raw materials in orbit (easy with AIs and fabricators). There is no reason an arbitrarily large ship couldn't be built assuming the people of Earth wanted to devote a significant chunk of resources to it at TL 9.

*Give or take a bit depending on what ship design you use. And the ship can be automated and run by AI, so we don't need to pay the crew, and even with only 40 launches the cost for the ship will be about 1$ per pound.

Re: Generation Ships
 

That doesn't matter in essence, all it does it move the range of choice.

The laws of physics still press you toward the smallest ship and crew that can carry out the mission, with an acceptable margin of error. Ever extra gram of payload implies fuel and reaction mass to accelerate it, more fuel and reaction mass to decelerate it, plus the mass of the engine and propellant themselves to be accelerated.

Likewise, materials strength considerations mean that a bigger ship is harder to build, harder to hold together, etc.

If the ship is not a rocket, you still have to pay for that kinetic energy somehow, physics may let you get away on the straightaway but it'll still catch you on the bends.

Re: Generation Ships
 

A very good point, but it just shows that we don't really have any good prototypes.

The warship and polar science outpost don't even try to be permanent communities. The people are there for a few years, and then they return to a larger society. There are no children, no very old people, and very little forming of families.

The monastery is long-term, often for life, but it relies on importing its population. It has a very strong sense of community purpose and doesn't admit people who don't share it. Members who fall out with the community can leave.

The isolated oasis community and the hunter-gatherer tribe live in environments that are harder to mess up than a generation ship, and often have mores that favour marrying outside the tribe; they usually have some contact with other groups.

Brian Aldis' Non-Stop is a good SF exploration of a generation ship whose planned society collapsed.

Re: Generation Ships
 

That would be a good scene in a film.

Re: Generation Ships
 

They'd need to be careful about how they recycle (both to prevent prion infections and for the psychological comfort of the crew/passengers). But if the ecosystem is large enough, people won't think of it as recycling; just like Earth. Yes, the vast majority of human bodies have been recycled by Earth's ecosystems.

Re: Generation Ships
 

That doesn't make any sense. The larger the ecosystem in terms of sheer biomass the more difficult it is for a problem to eliminate all of it. The larger it is in variety the more it can resist a problem. If the farmers are capable of having a bad "season" that throws the whole balance off in a generation ship then they are totally incompetent. Even if you don't have a chance to recover sometimes many big machines don't have a chance to recover at all which still puts an ecosystem up.

Of course I don't have any examples. I never implied I had any.

It won't include any pumps if it can get away with it. Artificial sunlight just means that the ship will have to rely on other machines. An ecosystem that can repair some damage is still tougher than a machine that can't repair any damage.

One approach is limiting sex to avoid explosions but as you said it's "psychologically and culturally explosive." Which suggests that the cultural explosiveness could be reduced.

It seems to me that it would be better to engineer a culture that likes to spend it's time learning new skills and in hobbies like roleplaying than relying on fake work. You can still get cross training if you let people learn about other skills because they are interested.

I'm not sure about a shorter childhood. With people spending a lot of time on their skills there is a lot of backup for the society. It can afford to have a generous childhood, especially since extended adolescence is useful for teaching people the basics of many areas and letting them try many ideas before they join the society as a whole.

The generation ship of the thread is defined as having the time for research. Especially since research is a good way to keep people's skills from rusting. Limited margins for practical application of theoretics doesn't mean that people wouldn't be interested in developing the theories. Plus Dr. Hajou can reduced that to only a single ton &c.

Or a democracy with a dictator. (Note that my posts use dictator in it's Roman use by default.)

So what? "Human nature" is generally defined as that which cannot be changed. Of course it can't be changed. There is still substantial changes in a culture that can be accomplished with education and other methods.

I do agree that fairness and possibly awareness are questionable virtues on a generation ship.

Those examples are helpful, thanks.


That's a great idea!

I don't know if the environments are harder to mess up. You trade a reliance on artificial sunlight often for all the natural disasters and bad weather in general. The environment itself is tougher but the environment in a form that can support people seems about equal.

Re: Generation Ships
 

All societies limit sex (defined broadly to include marriage bonds and other social activities built around it), they have to. Rich, safe, stable societies can get away with more than those poorer and closer to the edge.

Some of the traditional considerations governing such things would not apply to a genship, but others would. For ex, the number of kids each couple could have would by necessity be limited. OTOH, the genship might well require that every female have 'x' number of children to ensure population size. A genship culture might not recognize females as full adults until they've had their quota, for ex.

If genetic quality is an issue (and in a high-rad environment it might be, especially with a limited breeding pool), some people might be disqualified from reproducing because of genetic damage of some kind. This would make them second-or third choices in the marriae lottery, and could become explosive (again).

Jealousy never goes away, either. On a genship, a divorced couple can't get all that far away from each other, I would not be at all surprised if a genship found it necessary to limit divorce to extreme circumstances with lots of limitations.

The relatively easy-going, relatively egalitarian nature of modern western society is made possible by powerful governments, enormous social safety nets, it's an effect of wealth and security, and historically anomalous.

People would have to keep learning new skills throughout their lives, the 'short childhood' would refer to the limited margin for freedom and lack of responsibility. Again, the long adolesence of modern Western societies is anomalous historically, it was made possible by wealth and security. The genship would need to keep the young busy, and to make use of every hand, one would never stop learning but the working life and family life would probably begin in the mid-teens (at the latest). On a genship, it's like that by the time you're 14 or 16, you're expected to be mostly or completely an adult.

(Not that unusual historically, but not how the modern West does things.)

Re: Generation Ships
 

I meant limiting sex to an above average degree. In the context of a generation ship societies are discussed in terms of artificial cultures which may be different from extant cultures. If something is said to be true of all societies it should be true of all plausible societies as well. Thus I disagree that all societies limit sex.

It seems that an artificial quota system would be more problematic then a culture that stressed stability of population and socially pressured others to having less or more children depending on the current population.

Jealousy never goes away but what people are jealous about and to what degree does change.

I'm aware of the historically anomalous nature of western society. That said... It doesn't matter. A generation ship is not made more plausible by maximally resembling the average of historical cultures. A generation ship has a powerful government and far greater social safety nets than western society.

It still doesn't matter that it is historically anomalous. A generation ship has access to significantly more labour than it needs for psychological reasons. It can keep them busy before a transition to adult life. It has no need to put children to work early so all that needs be considered is whether a modern western childhood is beneficial or detrimental. I think that a prolonged period of freedom and lack of responsibility is a useful way to let off pressure in a very rigid society and help maintain a decent minimum of understanding of a modern societies technological and scientific knowledge before they decide what to do as their first primary job. Learning throughout life is helped significantly by introducing people to areas enough that they get what is involved in them so they can see if they are interested in them.

Re: Generation Ships
 

I don't believe you can get away without any pumps. Water will still run downhill and have to get back up some how. Air needs to be circulated too and is unlikely to go where you want on its' own.

Also, your "ecosystem" is going to be an ecosystem of _farms_ with maybe a park or two. There's no way you can have enough spare growing space to have significant amounts of wilderness. Wilderness ecosystems can crash non-retrievablely too. The Sahara was grasslands during the early Roman Empire.

You're going to start out with a chunk of vacuum and import _everything_. There isn't going to be anything "natural" about the results.

Re: Generation Ships
 

You can simply declare it a given and that's fine, but the longest lived self-contained animal-supporting ecosystems I know of are the shrimp/algae/bacteria globes that last up to 10 years with a median of 2-3 years, while Hoover Dam's lasted 76 years.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Compartmentalize then. If the farm in one area breaks down restart it. Even if the farms break down every other year, you just need say... 30 and you'll have an average of a few hundred million years before a catastrophic failure where every farm system goes down.

Of course, Hoover Dam is maintained by people. Its lasted for 76 years because people repair it.

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.

Re: Generation Ships
 

No, I mean total isolation of all systems and consumables. A "destabilizing element" can be something as subtle as a given brownwater component's relative level that impacts the rate of reproduction of a necessary microbe. The microbe's already present in all the farms, and the people moved between farms are free from pathogens, but time after time the introduction of new European families into Asian-majority farm modules presages waste treatment failures and a pernicious black mold growing indoors. The introduction of milk-consuming humans and consequently of stools containing lactose and galactose digestion products alters the brownwater chemistry, even though there's nothing wrong with the milk and the same milk drunk by the established European families in the same farm modules has not caused the problem before, both because their internal flora had adapted to produce different proportions of the digestion products, and the external flora had been able to adapt to the smaller milk-drinking's population's proportionately smaller milk intake, as economies of scale had disfavored dairy herds; there's only so many picket fences and plaster walls for their lactose-intolerant Asian neighbors to whitewash.

Simple solutions like airlocks, suits, and hand sanitizer won't address complex interactions like that.

Re: Generation Ships
 

For a genship, you're better off getting people without the silly emotional baggage that gets perpetuated by both the conservative parents and the pathos-filled media in Modern Western Society. Take a look at The Culture, Modern Terran Bonobos, or (maybe, depending on how good I understand it) Beta Colony. Those are the frameworks and treatments of sex that are safer on a genship than the current mess.

Re: Generation Ships
 

That makes quite the assumption that sexuality is purely cultural.
I'm pretty sure some of my sexuality is genetic. I and my life-mate are monogamous by nature, not choice, for example.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Yeah, this is probably going to go a lot better if we select for a predisposition to polyamory (within reason - yes, I still consider technical skills more important) at the outset and then raise the kids that way... Strongly monogamous and/or jealous types are just going to be trouble in this scenario, both for social harmony and genetic diversity...

Re: Generation Ships
 

These things aren't really particularly hard to solve. You just have to set up things to not have the problem. It is quite hard to predict problems like these though.

Yes, exactly. There will still be issues related to sex but a culture could remove the multiplicative effects sex tends to have.

If you are monogamous by nature that doesn't necessarily mean your monogamy is genetic. Even if it is lack of monogamy isn't really necessary for these cultures. The key difference is looking at sex based on it's intrinsic nature without any cultural effects bundled in to make it seem more important, be more volatile &c.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Covering up natural monogamy is going to cause more trouble than just having an open honest up front society. You can't make me poly, and you can't make polies monogamous. Society tells us whether our natures are good or bad, not what they are.

Re: Generation Ships
 

I'm not suggesting that we try to change you guys; I'm suggesting that we should probably leave you off the boat. ;]

Naturally a certain percentage of kids born to the initial crew will trend toward monogamy, but every society has its idealistic teenage rebels. Most (as always) will conform to the perceived norm.

Re: Generation Ships
 

That's just not realistic. Forcing people to act contrary to their nature will usually cause more trouble than simply allowing freedom of expression. Let the monogamous be monogamous, the poly be poly, the asexual etc. and make it the norm to be up front about one's nature before initiating relationships. That sounds far more harmonious to me.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Yet another possible reason to exclude Sindri from the generation ship. : )

I agree, but plenty of societies have forced all their members to be one thing.

Re: Generation Ships
 

I do not suspect this. What I have had in mind is something like the O'Neill cylinder from UT p.71 with some sort of propyulsion system added.

Probably a solar sail for a period of enhanced intiial boost with rotation begun afterward durign the long coasting period. This is one of the reasons I go for something higher than TL8.

I suspect our differences have more to do with our respective opinions on how difficult all this would be.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Of course. But I thought we were trying to set up a society most likely to best survive small population isolation over extremely long times. For that, we need the most harmonious type possible. One bloody revolution or severe act of terrorism attack could kill them all.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Nah, we just need a society that good enough. Trying for an extreme set-up is not necessary. In fact it's proabbly a way tos tir up trouble.

Specifically we need a socity where people on the losing end of normal disputes don't think they need to start bloody revolutions of commit acts of terrorism.

If you stepped up mental health screenings to catch actually insane people like......let's say the Arizona shooter who attacked Congreswoman Giffords the current type of government seen in the US would probably do this pretty well.

The Engineering dept might need to be run under near-military levels of discipline but it will need to subordinate to a representative civilian council who will in tuirn be properly respectful of the Engineering Dept's technical expertise and the true necessities of the ship's ongoing survival. You want balance and rationality and you don't want to make anyone who loses in the political process truly desperate.

So, no Prohibition, no Sexual Jihads, no permanant Comitteess of the Emergency. These might be ideas with interest for roleplaying purposes but that's because they will cause people to live in "interesting times" as defined in the Chinese curse.

It's not because they would make sense. They'd start more trouble than they would ever prevent.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Only if they are forbiden to have sex or form romantic ties. Heck, if A marries B, and B is unable to reproduce, they can get gametes from elsewhere amoung the populace and use a surogate. Just like gay couples and fertility challenged hetero couples today!

More like, restrict marriage. Restricting divorce leads to murder.

As we get more cosmopolitan the sexual rules keep morphing. A generation starship would want serious comitment to caring for children and a free and easy view of sex. The latter being like keeping gunpowder cool and dry, and the former being the lifesblood of the project.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Jeff, there are sealed terrariums from the Regency period (1810-1820) which are still healthy. The plants in these sealed systems are still alive and healthy inspite of being sealed up in a glass jar since before Queen Victoria was born.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Yeah a maximally stable society is desired. However societies did manage to survive while forcing their members to be one thing so it's not immediately lethal to a society and so if it has advantages that outweigh it's disadvantages it's worth going for. That said I think the disadvantages outweigh the dubious advantages significantly.

Making things extreme just to make them extreme is liable to cause trouble but I don't see what the problem is with a set up that happens to be extreme. The thing is that "good enough" isn't really good enough. Quite small risks have the possibility of negating all the effort and resources that went into the generation ship. It's much cheaper to design the best society you can for generation ships than to send more generation ships. Prohibition is probably a bad idea but I think a teetotaler society might be more advantageous. A Committee of The Emergency has disadvantages but also substantial advantages. Neither of these are senseless trouble making societal features that people are only suggesting to make the setting interesting.

Yes this makes sense. I wonder who would be involved in the raising of children.

Wow that's cool.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Yes, there are, and living macroscopic animals are to be found in how many of them?

Re: Generation Ships
 

Again, where is this sublime confidence supported? If you want to invoke JURRASIC PARK biology, that's your call for your game, but the WHO and the CDC put in long hours on this sort of stuff and yet disease remains with us.

Re: Generation Ships
 

In the example you gave there is the obvious answer of not drinking milk.

Again I am not implying that my opinions are derived from specific sources and it is thus inappropriate to demand them.

Fighting disease in an uncontrolled environment is substantially different from fighting it in a controlled one.

I'm not sure what the end result will be disease wise. Speculation is welcome.

Re: Generation Ships
 

I have no faith in people's ability to "design" societies. I know of no truly successful examples. Particularly examples that won't be able to export unhappy people when adapted to generation ships.

Re: Generation Ships
 

"Not having sex" is the obvious answer to overpopulation, and "not having disagreement" is the obvious answer to the unstable government.

That's really not how we roll here. If you are free to assert X, I am free to assert Y, even if Y -> X must be supported to be believed. Even some general hint of why you think X would help, we have several top-notch googlers here and generally one or two will rise to the occasion and find something more specific for the general edification of parties to the thread.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Skepticism is reasonable but surely the demographics of the original population would allow at least some designing? If, for example, we filled the ship with RPG players then surely more of their descendants would be interested in RPGs than the population the original population was drawn from? If we can do that we can do at least some other things.

Unless you really like milk it's far easy to avoid than sex or disagreement. I think it would be relatively easy to keep the people with bizarrely strong appreciation for milk off the ship.

You are not asking for "some general hint". You are asking for locations of sources to back up beliefs. I'm more than willing to clarify why I think something is the case. I'm also willing to volunteer citations. I'm not willing to accede to demands for them.

I create threads to help make my settings consistent, plausible, realistic, and flavourful. As a GM and setting designer I have to pay attention to practically everything about a world. I am not an expert on all necessary fields. Much of the point of these threads is for my natural inclinations and conclusions to be tested. It will only distract from the discussion if I have to find some source supporting every such belief (and then possibly have it objected to at which point I have to find another one...) if someone knowledgeable in a field thinks something I believe is wrong then they can state the reason why (possibly involving a citation, possibly not.) if someone in a similar situation to me believes differently then they can state their impression. At which point I can attempt to respond. Citations are not helpful to this process.

The majority of this thread has managed to get by without explicit citation upon demand rather than upon offering for every point in disagreement. My experience has been that people demanding citations where none was implied is a path that leads to the reduction in usefulness of a thread. So this is not a thread in which demanding citations is reasonable. If you are unwilling to engage in a thread in which this is the case then fine.

Re: Generation Ships
 

For some people, it is, but dairy is a powerful drug for many people, some literally. I used to drink a couple of gallons a week until I had a kidney stone and it was easy to cut back but I didn't stop. In western Pennsylvania, the dairy industry has prevented the adoption of Daylight Saving Time. Celebrities *ask* to do PSA's for milk. Mooky white people have been swilling milk from every mammal they could manage to domesticate for thousands of years, and you'll get a literal crowd of angry farmers with pitchforks if you try to dictate they stop now.


I mean, look at cholera! "Don't crap where you eat or drink" should take care of it, but 150 years later millions of bacteria are still managing to get from people's butts into other people's mouths on a regular basis in a dozen countries run by college-educated people. And it's not like there's a well-financed "crap where you eat" lobby.

Re: Generation Ships
 

I was born lactose intolerant, but take my dairy away and you will not smell me coming up behind you.

But a generational ship would be foolish to include huge inefficient cattle.

Re: Generation Ships
 

So like I said, don't invite people who will be noticeably unhappy if they can't have milk. There will be many other foods and drinks that the ship population will have limited ability to eat so milk will hardly be singled out.

Cholera hasn't been totally eliminated because knowing the various precise measures to avoid it isn't enough. Those measures also have to be enacted. Things like these are generally of medium difficulty in understanding how they work, relatively easy to design a plan that will stop them, quite hard to find where the plan fails, and of medium difficulty to build the infrastructure required by the plan. Plus, it's a generation ship. It doesn't really matter how hard solving something is. As long as it's possible given the tools available ridiculous amounts of effort can be put into solving the problem for limited increases of survivability. And if you are building a ship in space anyway lots of infrastructure is a lot easier than retrofitting stuff into a place where people live.

I suppose the ship could include the lactase supplementations, though I don't know enough about those to know how easy they would be to produce.

Much smarter to include tiny, freakishly efficient cattle.

Re: Generation Ships
 

That stuff never worked for me, so I'm a bit skeptical of its efficacy for everyone else.
If you have advanced genetic engineering, why go for real cattle at all? Why not just go vat fac. like THS? I would guess that making milk would be easier than growing meat in culture anyway.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Interesting.

Well the comment was meant as a joke and vat facs aren't nearly as funny as tiny freakish cattle. Maybe I just have an odd sense of humour.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Alternate contraceptives that still allow for sexual activity of some sort are probably TL0 and certainly exist by TL1 in all societies.

Technology doesn't solve all problems, but we do tend to get new ones that result from unintended consequences of previous solutions. Overpopulation because of lack of effective contraceptives is pretty much a dead issue by TL8.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Technologically yes, but cultural dislike and misinformation of contraceptives happens at any TL.
I can imagine a religious revival on a generation ship causing havoc.
Never underestimate humanity's ability to act completely contrary to long term survival.

Re: Generation Ships
 

This is why I would select neurologically for mental stability and not culturally for specific traits.

Especially not for intense committment to a specific idea. People sometimes change the ideas they're committed to but a general attraction to fanaticism is more enduring.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Kind of hard to get funding if you announce that you will refuse candidacy to a large percentage of humanity. While most are weakly religious, they tend to at least vote for more vocal "intense" co-religious members and their opinions.