Re: Generation Ships
 

If, as you claimed in post #133, you believe that the drives to monogamy and polyamory are at least partially genetic (as I do), then why would you assume that a society that begins by selecting for polyamory would produce future generations rife with monogamy? By that logic, it should be a small and manageable problem exhibited by a minority in whom genes buried a generation or more back have, against the odds, expressed themselves, even before we factor in peer pressure...

Re: Generation Ships
 

Nah, you spin it the other way. You announce inclusion of only a rigorously tested and screened population rather than exclusion of most of the losers out there.

Messages and spin campaigns are something you can design.

Besides, if you screen a million people when you're only looking for 20,000 nobody wonders too much about who didn't make it or why.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Really? If eugenics was that easy, world history would be quite different. One generation of selection is not even in the ballpark.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Religious groups would wonder why there are few if any priests and their ilk on the list.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Maybe for something like blue eyes, but for something more nebulous that (IMHO) many non-statistical-outliers would voluntarily choose in the face of near-necessity and absence of near-overwhelming peer pressure against it? IMHO Doubtful.

Who cares? If they're a disruptive influence, they can complain about it from off the boat...

Re: Generation Ships
 

Your version is starting to sound more and more dictatorial and dystopic.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Whose version and why?

Re: Generation Ships
 

Gold's post right before mine. Multiple forms of harsh human eugenics.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Would it really be less dystopic to pick the people who will be unhappy in such an environment? The preachers who will rant about the community lacking faith? The jealous fanatical* monogamists who'll keep raising anxiety whether they're together or divorced? The glory hounds who went into science for the Noble Prize and not for the discoveries themselves? Do you want these people to go along, be unhappy, and disrupt the happiness of others? That would seem dystopic.

* == Specifically talking about people with a strong opinion on the issue.

Re: Generation Ships
 

If everybody who doesn't get on the boat is going to die, then this is a harsh situation no matter how you slice it and we need to prioritize the survival of the species over social objections to expedient measures because otherwise everybody in the human race dies. If not, they get to live out their lives in peace and nobody suffers except for hurt feelings among those who wanted to make the cut and didn't.

Re: Generation Ships
 

To be fair the thread so far was mostly about establishing the ideal set up. Not that funding and public relations aren't interesting.

Sure they do. Everyone will be challenging why [member of group a] was selected when [member of group b] has the same qualifications from their point of view. Often they won't actually have the same qualifications because of the psychological examination or something but that won't keep the [members from group b] from criticizing it.

Priests at least you can explain by pointing out the priests that did get on the list, saying you don't want to disrupt the hierarchies of earth religions, and mentioning that you need experts from many fields. Having people trained in theology is important if you want to maintain the knowledge of humanity and might have practical benefits too. Once you have a certain amount of priests and all the religious related writings you can get your hands on additional priests don't add much because of their priestliness. They might be more able to complain about the lack of intense laymen or the specific varieties of priests. It occurs to me that maybe the population of the generation ship could be kept secret for privacy reasons.

That makes it harder to actually remove the genetics in question though and has the cost of dissatisfaction among those being forced by peer pressure.

Well since the discussion has turned to matters of funding and related things they could disrupt the generation ship while it is being set up.

Re: Generation Ships
 

_Some_ people will wonder and an even smaller group will sue. These are almost certainly among the people who you could not satisfy anyway. You can't please everyone. Some of those people would probably complain that you weren't accepting enough neo-nazis.

As to how you chose between equally qualified people? Once you have them grouped as well as possible into equally qualified batches you have your computer make random choices in each category i.e. mentally and phsycially healthy geneticists with a well-adjusted family that wants to come with them. You have similar categories for engineers and so forth.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Some people of every group b which makes a lot of people. You can't just ignore the people who you can't please because they might have influence with your funding.

Re: Generation Ships
 

I'm not ignoring them. I'm engaging in memetic combat agaisnt them with plausible deniability. It's the only option since I really _can't_ please them.

Re: Generation Ships
 

I'm lucky I know about the terrariums with the living plants. Moreover, a terrarium of this type is just a sealed jar, nothing all that sophistocated.

If something as crude as a terrarium can keep going for more than 18 decades, a starship with crew and a TL 10 knowledge of eccology should do much better.

Re: Generation Ships
 

The generation ship has harder problems. The terrarium gets light, temperature and pressure support from outside. The genship has to provide light for the plants without frying itself with the waste heat.

It also has to provide more requirements, for a large number of creatures whose metabolisms are fairly wasteful (humans), whose demands will change in ways that can't be predicted at the design stage (fashions in food, clothing, etc.) and who may try active sabotage on a small scale. It also needs to be very reliable. How many terrariums have died in 18 decades?

Re: Generation Ships
 

Contrast the cautionary tale of Biosphere 2 - which had the advantages of a terrarium over a starship, but had to support rather more complex creatures.

Re: Generation Ships
 

The two biggest problems were oxygen troubles, food supply and inter-group conflict. The first problem would be dealt with easily by not using "magical" life support. Standard spaceship designs are capable of recycling CO2 into oxygen, biosphere 2 lacked this capability. Secondly they had a limited food supply, easily (at TL 9 at least) dealt with by devoting double or even triple the standard number of open spaces to farming. Finally the small group dynamics should be helped by a larger amount of room and people, and in addition at TL 9 genetic engineering should help a lot as well.

A generation ship could be (and should be) built to avoid most of the given problems.

Re: Generation Ships
 

The reason you don't know about any surviving Regency terraria with animals is because there are none. I had researched the matter before, which is why I repeatedly qualified my negative closed environment statements as being with animals or people.

Why, their animal-less terrariums might last for millennia!

Re: Generation Ships
 

I agree. Also you could save time designing new life forms to deal with problems by keeping an emergency genome bank full of pre-made life forms for specific emergencies.

Re: Generation Ships
 

You can't count on that. The interaction of culture and genes is so complex that we literally can't even assign a probability to it. Given our knowledge, either outcome has to be considered as likely as the other.

What might tell you more about what kind of results you'd get would what kind of role player. I suspect that a starting population of munchkins would give you different results than a starting population of super-anal rules lawyers, because that would indicate something about the personalities.

(Extreme example, of course but I suspect it would have some truth.)

Re: Generation Ships
 

Realistically, both would be highly regulated. I suspect that in practice a lot of the marriages would be pre-arranged, though maybe in a soft kind of way.

Yeah, but that's just the point. The crew and society of a long-term genship will not be a cosmopolitan place. It can't be, it's too self-contained. We're talking about a small isolated city-state that effectively has no 'outside' during the journey, and very narrow margins for error. Life for the grandchildren will be pretty much like life was for the grandparents, generation after generation.

The place to look for examples is not the modern-day Western big cities, it's medieval monasteries, isolated 19 century villages, traditional farming societies (not for technical details but for psychological feel). None of them are perfect, but all of them would come closer than modern-day NYC or Paris.

Even the psychological prod toward cosmopolitanism that was provided by the advent of effectively instantaneous communication will be absent. There will be instantaneous communication within the village (i.e., aboard the genship and maybe between genships in a single fleet, which might be only a few light-seconds apart and travelling at the same velocity, and to and from which travel might be possible) and beyond that...any contact with Earth, or other worlds, or anywhere else, lacking FTL, is going to be years or decades or centuries old.

Don't think the avante garde, think small town with no radio, television, telephone, telegraphy, or pony express outside the town.

Re: Generation Ships
 

The Culture is wish-fulfilment fantasy, it has no bearing on any realistic setting. Banks assumed a post-scarcity economy of limitless wealth, spacecraft bigger and with greater resources than worlds as the background (i.e. Orbitals), personal and collective security at a level that made threats almost a nullity, and even so he still couldn't even make it work plausibly in his own stories without introducing the Minds as a dei ex machina. We might as well just put a crew incorruptible Lensmen in charge of the genship.

Real-world bonobos don't exist in the peaceful, relaxed free-sex society the way the popular culture likes to portray them, and aren't human anyway so again, they don't provide an example even if the myth about them was the reality. Humans are not chimps of any sort, any more than chimps are gorillas or alligators are crocodiles.

If we want to come up with a viable approach to analysing a plausible genship, the best place to start is to look at real-world history of real human beings, and see what patterns we find in parallel situations. No perfect parallel exists, but a lot of partial ones can be found, and they are instructive. The trouble is that the instruction often looks rather unpleasant and restrictive and un-individualistic to our modern Western eyes.

Re: Generation Ships
 

One effect you will get is the ability to shape the culture by picking the people on the ship. Nature has been discussed, but there is also nurture. In the previously mentioned case where the ship was filled up with role players, the children will be much more likely to be roleplayers. Not because of genetics, but because of their exposure and the prevailing attitudes.

And I'm going to second the idea that thinking cosmopolitian is the wrong idea. Even if you start out that way, the ship will fade to something completely different in a short time. cosmopolitanism relies on the constant influx of new culture.

You will end up with a single, fairly strong culture. You can leave this up to chance, or you can have some influence on what it will be.

historically, a society founded by Idealists will maintain at least the form of that society.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Fashions are dictated by supplies. It would be interesting to see terrarium death percentages among those that were not made with a mistake.

Biosphere 2 didn't fail because it had to support more complex creatures it failed because of specific technical problems.

Interesting idea.

I was talking about their immediate descendants. Since there isn't a roleplaying gene the genetic influence will be subtle. So you don't think that choosing people who play roleplaying games, or dislike alcohol, or like science fiction combined with an environment to encourage those traits will increase the amount of people in their immediate descendants who share those traits will be higher than the population they were drawn from? Even beyond the immediate descendants if the first descendants culturally rebel against RPGs as part of their generational culture that increases the probability that the next generation will be interested in it.

The ship is defined as keeping their current level of technology and developing some more and nobody lives outside the "city". Cosmopolitanism didn't start with effectively instantaneous communications and cosmopolitanism through fast communications only cares about fast communication to the parts of the world they care about. They can speak faster than practically any cosmopolitan world before them among the ship and they have to feel a significant enough separation from Earth for psychological well being that fast communications to it don't matter.

Your objections to The Culture in general are irrelevant when it comes to discussing an idea that happens to appear in it as well as other works.

Bonobos don't have to live up their myth they just have to be able to reasonably successfully demonstrate the cultural trait in question.

Being inspired by the closest things to generation ships we have is useful but seeing as realistically they are all highly different from generation ships it is dangerous to attempt to simply transplant them.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Unless the designers really, really screw up I fail to see how it could fail barring running out of power completely, or catastrophic acts of terrorism. They have artificial wombs starting TL 9; even if every single person the population can be restored. Genetic engineering prevents any worries about having to small a gene pool. Fauxflesh and food vats even eliminate the need for normal farming by TL 10. Oxygen is and water are created by life support.

Your argument seems to be that it is impossible because we can't do it at TL 8 easily enough to make it practical and worthwhile. So forgive me, but what exactly do you think the problem will be?

Re: Generation Ships
 

Modern eco-domes fail because they always rely on solar power, I think.
With huge amounts of power from whatever drives the ship, they should be pretty easy to maintain on a purely biological level.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Probably, once we had enough practice. Biosphere 2 was a fumbling first attempt, but it did have some lessons to teach.

Of course, a genship might not carry as much power as one would think at first glance. It might use a drive that involves very low accelerations over very long periods, and the peak power output might be less than one would first guess.

Re: Generation Ships
 

For a generation or two, probably. Beyond that it's a crapshoot.

Which is why they won't be cosmopolitan.

Cultures in a closed system, over time, become steadily less diverse. After a while, there's only going to be one functional culture throughout the ship (or fleet), and since there's no new input coming it, it'll be very, very stable as long as the conditions aboard the ship/fleet are stable.

On Earth, instant communication had begun to 'cosmopolitanize' even remote areas well before the end of the 19th century. Even so, small rural towns remained very, very parochial. The genship will lack even that limited outside goad, and will have greater external pressures toward conformity than any small farming town ever did.

The genship might be really diverse at launch. For a while, the inhabitants may combine and recombine the various elements, creating new arrangements and new ideas...but the possibilities are finite, and after a while things will stablize.

They aren't human, and as such cannot demonstrate anything about human cultural traits.

The problem is that they aren't all that different from the genship. Some of the specific parallels are fairly close, psychologically. I've tried to find examples of such real-world parellels that support the idea of a cosmopolitan, easy-going genship society...and I just can't find any.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Yes, exactly. People always bring up Biosphere 2 as if it disproves the idea of closed ecosystems but plenty of viable things fail because of specific technical problems the first attempt.

For some things working for a generation or two is still worth the effort of specifying the original population. Especially since the first few descendant population will be some of the more challenging generations.

First of all specific features that developed with cosmopolitanism doesn't necessarily require cosmopolitanism to stay around. Second while there is a noticeable pressure towards a single culture given sufficient mixing even if there isn't a way to design a culture in such a way to work against this areas of the ship might be designed to be sufficiently isolated to retain different cultures. Third generation ships do exert a powerful pressure to conformity but the conformity doesn't need to extend beyond what helps the ship survive. Fourth I'm not sure it mattes if possibilities are finite, after all generations could shift through finite possibilities in turn.

Sure they can. Bonobos and humans share lots of features. It's quite true that they might not demonstrate anything about human cultural traits. I don't believe the point of mentioning The Culture, Bonobos and Beta colony was proving anything but rather demonstrating the cultural trait in question

They are quite different. Out of naval warships, monasteries, polar science outposts, and tribal hunter-gatherer groups;

Naval warships and polar science outposts are small, temporary in terms of a given population living there, have periodic contact with their originating society, don't maintain their technology level by themselves and while some people will go on to train the next generation of they don't produce and train their replacements by themselves while isolated.

Monasteries have frequent contact with their originating society, are small, don't produce and train their replacements (in fact their lack of producing the next generation is often part of the definition of being a member of a monastery.), they can maintain some parts of their technological level but not all.

Historical tribal hunter-gatherer groups are small and would have difficulty maintaining high technology by themselves.

The generation ship needs to be significantly larger than similarly isolated societies, maintain it's own technology and develop more, produce and train it's replacements on the ship, last for a significant period of time, and deal with very limited contact to Earth. Comparisons to similarly isolated societies are very helpful but a given cultural feature not being present among them is not in any way proof that it cannot survive and thrive in a generation ship.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Biosphere 2 was run by a bunch of flakes and huxters. The whole thing was poorly designed and badly run. So the lesson for a starship are 1) use real science in all designs, 2) be realistic, and C) act like your life depends on getting things right, because it Does Depend on getting Everything right!!!

Re: Generation Ships
 

The Polynesian Islanders were as isolated as any starship might be. Their sexual mores tended to be free and easy, at least until religious fanatics from outside came and imposed their customs by force. In fact, we Westerners tend to look at all premodern societies through a medieval Catholic lens. Saint Augustine did not define all human societies.

Re: Generation Ships
 

The culture of a generation ship will be defined by those who set it up. Read Albion's Seed and you'll see, in the context of the USA, how the first setlers define the culture of an area. On a starship, with very few if any new immigrants, the people who are the first pessengers/crew will massively define the culture.

If you pick people with a relaxed view of sexual morality, but a serious additude toward caring for children. They are likely to set an example to the children of careful parenting and carefree sexual passtimes.

Even today, New England is far less violent than Texas. Even the poorest New England towns have lower rates of violence than the richest Texas suburbs. Why? New Englanders make it clear, violence is not going to be tolerated, period. Meanwhile, Texas has a long history of admiring violent "heros" and tolerating violence. If the starship's population comes from New England, violence will be rare. Things are riskier with Texans, but then they seem to like that.

Re: Generation Ships
 

And the supporting evidence for this claim is?

Re: Generation Ships
 

Assuming that's possible en masse without a vast supporting infra-structure of social and technological margin. History shows very little support for the premise, and quite a bit of reason to think it won't work under the conditions innate to a genship.

New England is two centuries further removed from the frontier than Texas. That's a key factor in the differences. The local geographical and climatic conditions are important variables, too. The founding stock (especially genetic) is important, but predicting how it will interact with the environment it operates in over generations is impossible. The results are usually obvious and clear...in retrospect. Beforehand the results are almost never accurately predicted.

A genship will be non-mass-violent for the simple reason that violence=death. It's unlikely a genship could survive a civil war aboard, so those genships that survive will be those who don't have one.

OTOH, dueling and culturally-constrained single combat, even to the death, might be a viable possibility.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Absolutely not. Glorifying violence in any way leads to impulsive outliers doing even more damage than they would otherwise.
Maybe a culturally important game or sport could relieve stress from disputes.
But realistically it's better to use words and reason rather than arbitrary contest.

Re: Generation Ships
 

That's why I said 'culturally constrained'. The point would be to channel the outliers to such activities, to keep the violence contained and remove the worst of the troublemakers. A societal ethos of 'settle it yourself, in the tradutional ways' rather than bringing in others.

Whether it could work would depend on the cultural mechanisms and whether the genship could afford to risk losing the talents and abilities of such people.

Some people are so wired as to be unable to settle for that, though. Every society needs a mechanism for dealing with those people.

A genship probably couldn't have prisons, as such, unless it was an immense one, certainly a genship possible at TL8 is unlikely to have prisons.

They might have jails for holding people for short periods as a penalty, or until somebody cools off, but years-on-end imprisonment? Spending resources to hold people in economically useless confinement for long periods? Highly doubtful. Killing them is cheaper and gets it over with.

The most likely penalty for most serious infractions would be death, or maybe enslavement to the community, if that could be made to work. Death looks more likely, though. The definition of 'capital crime' would probably be fairly broad by our standards, too.

There have been places and times where the penalty for stealing a horse was death. That's not as extreme as it sounds, because in those places and times taking a man's horse could deprive him of his livelihood or lead to his death. There are a long list of things aboard a genship that would be utterly unacceptable for similar reasons, that would be minor offenses on the ground.

So there would be motives for channeling anger and frustration into tightly regulated channels.

Re: Generation Ships
 

The gen ship-inhabiting aliens in Alan Dean Foster's Quozl use highly ritualized formal no-contact hand-to-hand duels to settle personal disputes, fighting with a style built around Karate (Sport). Making contact is considered embarrassingly clumsy and forfeits the match; failing that, the winner is determined by mutual consent, which is typically considered the more satisfying outcome by both sides.

Re: Generation Ships
 

So long as it doesn't damage the ship and doesn't sufficiently damage the population so as to endanger the mission ... I'm not seeing what the problem is?

All sports are violent, all games are abstracted violence or mere problem solving exercises.

Using words and reason is an arbitrary contest!

It is test of innate and learned social ability; it invariably degenerates into a status contest between the participants. It is also only rarely emotionally satisfying to all involved parties, and it isn't physically satisfying at all. Privileging such a thing will only result in culture-wide systematic stress that will eventually resolve itself in a very, very, destructive fashion.

Realistically? The solution to such requires many and multiple methods of release, or the societal willingness to recycle those that the accepted method doesn't satisfy before they endanger the ship and its' mission.

Re: Generation Ships
 

One fairly major problem for a practical genship at TL 9 is the existence of practical seed ships. Once you have AI, fabricators and artificial wombs humans aren't needed to make a colony. Humans can be assembled on site.

So what you need is a group of people, who are isolationist, and far sighted enough to want to build a generation ship and expend the time to construct one. (Which with those magical fabricators is all you really need. That and something to get you to a nice moon/asteroid to start the process.) Simply wanting to propagate humanity is much better accomplished by having no humans on the majority of the journey.


Hmm... actually this could lead to a more interesting society on the gen ship than one that is optimized for surviving and making a colony. And it would probably answer the question that started the thread: what would they focus their research on? It would simply depend on who makes up the gen ship!

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.

Re: Generation Ships
 

I don't understand the question. Human "ghosts" are AIs.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Yes, and no. They are artificial in the sense that it takes technology to create them. But they are still human in how they process information and think.
More like artificially copied intelligences.

Re: Generation Ships
 

He's asking because Margaret Mead's work on the sexual permissiveness of early 20th century Samoa has been debunked as being chielfy informed by the sexual boasting two individuals. Other reports of Pacific Islander promiscuity in earlier periods include what was more like prostitution than free love between social peers.

Re: Generation Ships
 

I would imagine that free love is only possible in a non-sexist society. But since nearly every single society in human history has be grossly patriarchal...

Re: Generation Ships
 

He's asking because "asking" for supporting evidence is what he has been doing throughout the thread. Skepticism is reasonable but it's not what I object to. I have attempted to make clear that demanding citations where none were implied is a conversation ender that reduces the usefulness of a thread and often clutters it as well. If citations are important to a poster they can supply them themselves as contrary evidence instead of doing fake responses that shut down discussion.

That's an exaggeration. Most societies are somewhat patriachal but not nearly as many are grossly so.

Re: Generation Ships
 

I don't think we can do a multi-generation human-sustaining closed environment at TL8 because we're not even close to doing it here in the middle of TL8. The prospect that it might be do-able on a TL 10 starship doesn't help, unless we're planning on the TL8 genship meeting one along the way.

The extrapolation from the terrarium examples is woefully simplistic, similar to reasoning that if a pizza bakes at 400 degrees in 16 minutes, then it ought to bake at 800 degrees in only 8 minutes. If an ecosystem with 10 organisms is hard, is one with 20 organisms twice as hard? 20^2 / 10^2 as hard? Is it easier? Making a decent pizza with fewer ingredients is harder. Who here is qualified to guess?

Re: Generation Ships
 

It's not clear to me because that is not my experience. If asking people to support their unsupported assertions ends their "contribution" of them to the thread, I consider that a reduction in clutter and an increase in the thread's usefulness to reasoning people.


Who are you to judge when my response is fake? You're doing very poorly at judging my responses if you are considering my asking the person to support their assertion is a demand for a citation. I explicitly mentioned earlier that I was not demanding a citation and that even a vague articulation would be movement toward supporting the assertion, but you pooh-poohed me.

How then should we address the bogus assertions of other posters?

Re: Generation Ships
 

This is not a solution to a problem discovered while the ship is underway. Did you miss the part where I mentioned people moving between farm modules?
Even if you go the "don't drink milk" route, what do you replace it with in their diet? What do you do with the unconsumed milk and the dairy modules dedicated to the excess supply now that the demand has been arbitrarily and abruptly reduced? Are you going to crew the ship entirely with people who have no strong preferences and are willing to accept an indefinite stream of arbitrary strictures? Can we realistically expect such unmotivated people to succeed in their duties in perpetuity?

Re: Generation Ships
 

Plenty of relevant subjects are fundamentally matters of opinion or matters about which there is extremely limited research. For these reducing the pool of responders to those who can find some random thing to support their belief is highly unhelpful. Well established matters of fact are different of course.

Well I'm a poster on the forum and the original poster of the thread. That's more than enough to judge for myself whether a response is fake. If a response consists entirely of a demand for a citation then in my opinion it is fake. Saying that you aren't demanding citations isn't the same as not demanding citations.

If you consider another poster's assertion bogus you could
1 Mention you disagree
2 Provide citations
3 Ask the poster why they made the assertion
4 Dispute their points
5 Ignore them

None of these involve asking people where support for their assertions may be found which is a request for a citation in disguise.

If a generation ship is encountering unexpected real problems (as opposed to minor necessary adjustments) after the ship is underway then it is in real trouble. You replace it with any of a number of calcium providing foods. There isn't any unconsumed milk and dairy modules because if the solution chosen to the problem of lactose intolerance was not drinking milk then people don't drink milk and thus there never was any to begin with. You crew the ship with people whose preferences match the foods they will either be eating on the ship or will be free to cultivate as a hobby. The crew will have to deal with an indefinite stream of arbitrary strictures anyway since it's a ship (or fleet) alone in space that has to survive for multiple generations. I certainly expect such people to succeed in their duties in perpetuity as well as they would otherwise.

Re: Generation Ships
 

The historical and anthropological records.

Re: Generation Ships
 

I was responding mostly to people like Flyndaren who were claiming that programming "AIs" to raise children was going to be a challenge. From that context, I inferred that we were talking about de novo AIs.

Re: Generation Ships
 

History showed no support for the United States of America being able to survive for more than a decade or two as a continent spanning republic, let alone as a republic that grew MORE democratic. Mass participation of women in politics is without historical support. Before the 1800's no large scale society on Earth eliminated Slavery.

The past is an important source of evidence, but it doesn't limit either the future or the present.

Evidence of various kinds (historical, archeological, literary) shows that late 17th century New England, in spite of King Phillip's war, had a lower rate of violence than late 19th century Texas. The culture of New England always restrained and disapproved of violence. The Texans always glorified violence. Culture counts.

We've done without dueling for well over a century. They could find other ways to fight on a starship.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Much of this is tied up in controversies. One of the main sources of this controversy is the simple fact that many modern Pacific Islanders are devout Christians and are offended by outsiders knowing about their ancestors freewheeling ways.

It's much like this Iranian woman I met once. I was told she was a literary scholar. I asked her what she thought were the best Pre-Islamic Iranian literary works and were could I get good translations. She told me Iran had no Pre-Islamic literature of any kind. It was a source of shame for her and many of her co-religionists (in her type of Islam) to admit that there was any link between modern and Pre-Islamic culture. Many societies in the modern world find anthropological studies of their recent ancestors deeply embarassing. Especially the acurate studies!

The Pacific Islanders, and those who hold that humanity needs to submit to tight generally patriarchal sexual rules, want to erase or edit the history of these islands.

Re: Generation Ships
 

"Where is this supported?" is an idiom that a reasonable person can take to mean at least 1 and 3, the same way a reasonable person can understand that, "What are you doing?" needn't literally be a request to name an activity.


I think I see our fundamental mismatch of expectations. You seem to see the TL8 genship undertaking as something essentially perfectible on the first try with sufficient preparation, while I see it as an attempt to build a mobile TL8 civilization in a bottle, having such nigh-unaddressable complexity that even if the entire resources of the earth were exhausted in nothing but preparing and making TL8 genships, we could not expect to discover and solve beforehand all the sorts of problems likely to crop up on the next ship.

This is why I suggested waiting until it is demonstrated that similarly enclosed habitats can be maintained aloft in the atmosphere of the earth. If it can't be set up to work here with the resources of the world available, chucking them into space is a non-starter.

Re: Generation Ships
 

I have never encountered someone asking where something is supported when in fact they meant why it was supported, how it was supported, or by what it was supported before. For that matter I haven't encountered people asking what are you doing without expecting at least some vague abstract activity being named. Of course it is in the nature of idioms to confuse people. For me asking where something is implicitly involves a location and thus cannot be answered without giving a location. I apologize for misinterpreting your posts.

I think you have discovered the mismatch yes. What about strictly technical problems not including social or other issues? You build one generation ship and crew it until the society breaks down then repair it and fix the technical issues and try again &c. Would you think it reasonable to get rid of all technical issues over time?

Well yeah I assumed that before the generation ship set out there were a series of tests of increasing closeness to the conditions of the generation ship. First you build some kind of closed ecosystem capable of maintaining the oxygen level for human life then you build one capable of totally supporting humans then you enclose some humans in it for a decent period of time then you make one in space and enclose humans in it for a decent period of time. (Just an example progression and missing all kinds of steps.)

Like I pointed out above though this isn't supposed to be a thread rigidly about TL 8 generation ships but generation ships in general with an emphasis on lower TLs.

Re: Generation Ships
 

It's a bit tricky (not impossible, but tricky) to create a believable scenario for a genship if AI isn't operating under certain limitations. (Sort of like trying to set up a scenario for a global trade system based on sailing ships, when cheap diesel tech and diesel fuel are also available.)

Re: Generation Ships
 

I'm not sure what that means, exactly. There isn't a general history of such things. Most actual attempts to implement anything like that on even a small scale have ended badly. There have been many attempts on a small scale, there seems to be a cyclical tendency to them (mostly recently in the 1960s and 1970s), but it's yet to work very well.

That doesn't prove it can't be done, but it does suggest that it's not a very likely possibility, based on what data we have.

That might work, depending on the genship culture, and if they had enough margin. OTOH, it probably wouldn't have a great deal of deterrent power, and it leaves open the possibility that someone might let him out.

It would be a more viable option for a lone trouble-maker than for someone with some organized support.

Yeah, but that's the easy part, in a way. A more difficult question for the planners and decision-makers aboard is what constitues a threat to the mission, even if it doesn't direclty affect the machinery. For ex, how much free expression can be tolerated? What subjects are verboten even for discussion, if any? What is compulsory and what is forbidden?

That's where it gets tricky, and the decisions are necessary. The outcome is not pre-set but the decisions have to be made.

Re: Generation Ships
 

No, as a matter of fact I have not done that, other than this one time. You have me confused with someone else. Unless you mean my point that we need to look for real-world examples of parallel situations. If we're not going to do that, then anything we do is pure speculation, with no grounding at all.

Well, no, they don't support the idea that Polynesia was a free and open sexually permissive society (or rather set of societies). There was quite a bit of sex, but it was heavily culturally regulated. It just wasn't regulated in the same way as in the West. The 'free and easy' part is largely a myth, like the 'peaceful, non-violent Maya' or the 'ecologically sensitive Amerind'.

As an activity, popular anthropology has been notorious for sometimes letting wishful thinking cloud assessments.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Probably, the best way to prepare a genship (assuming time existed to do it) would be to build it in the Solar System, and let it work for a generation or three, at least, along the lines of an O'Neil Habitat, before actually setting out for the stars.

Conversely, the population of such a habitat, if it had been in operation for a few generations, would be a good starting group for the crew of a genship.

Re: Generation Ships
 

The general history of sex and parenting as interpreted by Sindri not the general history of carefree sex and careful parenting. My limited knowledge of such subjects makes me believe that there isn't anything intrinsic in "human nature" that keeps it from working and that if it worked it wouldn't require unusually large amounts of support.

If you can isolate them with the life support necessary to support themselves it doesn't cost any margin. That's the whole point. Assuming the ship wasn't under unusual pressure before the ship could support it's population and keep whatever margin it has before. Isolate one person and one persons worth of life support and the rest of the ship is in the same situation they were in before. That said it does have some significant disadvantages and won't work in all cultures.

Yep that's a lot harder. Of course under some situations the planners and decision makers might have difficulty keeping the community from lynching someone they think is a threat to the ship.

Yeah that's a really critical step before you actually send it off.

Re: Generation Ships
 

While I don't necessarily disagree that future human societies could deliberately engineer or 'naturally' develop social customs emphasising sexual freedom, I'll note that the roots of sexual jealousy appear to lie in fundamental urges, easily seen in many animal species. If females mate with other males, it reduces the odds that their offsprings pass on your genes. Thus, you fight other males to prevent it and you might even kill offspring that you deem unlikely to be yours.

Even in societies where sexual congress is not especially relevent to reproduction, it is not obvious that deep-seated impulses arising from millenia of evolution will be responsive to calm and rational analysis.

That being said, the history of human civilisation is the history of learning to ignore our nature and invent more sensible and equitable rules by which to live. Human nature, as all nature, is frankly [expletative relating to solid waste]. Red in tooth and claw, all that. We're murderous, xenophobic, ignorant bastards. But we try harder.

How hard it would be to change this particular facet of our bastardry is an open question. I'd lean toward pretty damn hard, because even enlightened people who've spent their whole lives condemning jealousy as a foolish relic of a possessive and destructive view of human relationships appear to be curiously vulnerable to an onslaught of it, almost certainly without conscious thought. Humans even experience jealousy in relationships that are not sexual in nature, apparently just because our natures miss no chance to remind us how truly despicable we are.

Re: Generation Ships
 

That's why I would want more freedom for the individuals how ever their nature dictates. I'm by nature monogamous, not choice. I however have no problems if my life mate chose to engage in safe sex with others. But she is also monogamous by nature... though she is possessive of me.
I wouldn't want to be forced to act contrary to my nature any more than I would demand the polyamorous to try monogamy.
It all sounds as disgusting as forcing (hetero/homo/bi/a)sexuality on others.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Sure! Insofar as "human nature" means anything, jealously is part of it. What exactly people are jealous about however isn't. In our carefree sex and careful parenting culture jealously might be largely based on parenting instead of sex. As long as nothing is threatening (or looks like it is threatening.) to challenge the inheritance of someone's children they might not care anymore about who else their fellow parent is sleeping with than who they are spending their time with.

Re: Generation Ships
 

No, logical thought has little to nothing to do with innate feelings.
Just because we have little concept of jealousy, does not make it any less normal for humanity.
The fact that I am neither emotionally nor financially capable of having children, does not stop that little urge in the back of my mind to procreate.
Years or even centuries of society cannot erase hundreds of millions of years of evolution

Re: Generation Ships
 

I wasn't saying that they wouldn't care because of logical thought but because their culture associates limited emotional significance with the position of being someone who has sex with someone else so that people in a relationship with them are as jealous as with someone who plays RPGs with someone else.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Yeah, good luck ignoring close to a billion years of evolution. Your game, your rules. But unless you radically genetically change humanity, you can't sweep away monogamy, or completely eradicate us outliers.

Re: Generation Ships
 

You think there is a genetic basis for sexual jealousy specifically rather than a basis for jealousy that happens to apply to sexual jealousy a lot of the time?

Re: Generation Ships
 

Of course. Animal sexuality is genetically based.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Though I'm afraid I cannot point to specific studies, I believe that my personal experience and the anecdotal evidence of the vast majority of queried respondents supports the idea that sexual relationships are subject to substantially increased incidence and severity of jealous episodes.

Jealousy in non-sexual relationships appears to me to be an abberational outgrowth of a much stronger and more primal instinct that arises when sex is involved. It suggests that the relationship in question may function in some ways as an emotional surrogate or at least adjunct for a sexual relationship.

Valuing friendships so highly that self-image becomes reliant on the exclusive possession of the other person is seemingly a learned behaviour. With sexual relationships*, this tendency seems innate, in so far as anything can be.

I can imagine a lot of things that I think would be easier to condition people into effectively suppressing. And I imagine that even if you successfully managed it in most cases, there would be outliers that were difficult to prevent and that in succeeding generations, others would arise.

Cultural forces are rarely stagnant and I can remember few societies in history where a century went by where you could say that mores changed so little that it would be meaningful to discuss a tendency one way or another. Even a society with a strong cultural bias toward non-possessive sexual relationships might find that the next generation or the one after that rejects these mores absolutely. Or at least significant sub-groups among them do.

Happily, however, sexual behaviour in a generation ship need have very little or even nothing to do with procreation. Sexual behaviour, pair-bonding, marriage or anything else to do with mating need not concern the officers on board at all. Breeding does, but combine strict laws and effective technology that already exists and breeding and sex aren't related any more.

*Though not in all sexual encounters, obviously. Even so, sexual vanity and the disproportinate weight people will give to the opinion's of their sexual partners, past and present, or even just the objects of their sexual desires, is extraordinary.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Controlling breeding has had worse success than controlling sexual behavior. How do you stop people from doing it when and how they want?