Generation Ships

[ClickMeNot]

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

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Sindri

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.

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.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Gold & Appel Inc

Sex: If they're firing those poor bastards off into space in a closed habitat with limited food supplies and no means of birth control reliable enough to keep the population exactly where they want it, no amount of WoW is going to keep things from getting ugly pretty fast...

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.

Originally Posted by Gold & Appel Inc

I'd try to emphasize hobbies that consume minimal resources, and discourage others. Sex and gaming are probably a great place to start - they contain enough variety to keep me obsessed for over two decades now, at any rate.

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.)

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Some observations.

First, a viable generation starship would need to be large. If not quite on the same level as RED DWARF, not a great deal smaller. Why? Population.

In order to have the kind of stablity needed for a interstellar settlement/colony, you need at least a few hundred thousand to a million people. That requiers a big ship.

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.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Frost

Leaving aside the question of why the ship culture is TL 8, whatever resources that are available are likely to be focused upon, primarly theoretical, studies related to improved propulsion systems, life support and colony infrastructure at the end of the day looking for ways to make the journey faster and easier and their position at journey's end more secure.

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?

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Frost

While I would suspect that you might, given sufficent computer support and suitible tools, be able to get by with a far smaller population at least during the flight I tend to agree that a colony will almost certainly consist of one or more very large vessels carying significant numbers of people.

In and of its self this is going to place a significant limit on how effectively a population can be monitored. With this in mind I suspect that many of the more agressively represive systems of administration won't actualy work.

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.

Again I tend to agree, this sort of structure is probably the best bet for any sort of long term coxeistence. It neatly avoids (or at least mitigates) the difficulties in handovers of power and authority between generations that may well occur under an authoritarian structure.

I would also have to disagree fairly loudly with Flyndaran, at the end of the day in the normal course of opperations the one thing generation ships do have is time to make decisions so slow decision making is a non-issue. Democratic structures are not incompatible with either restrictions upon either reckless or perverse decisions or robust contingency plans.

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.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

You'd need to be aware of what was happening to the crew as a safety matter. This is not the same as regimentation. An Open/democratic society and teaching children the values of Fairness and Awareness, as well as the need to listen to all parts of society as a major expression of both values, will give you the feedback to see where threats and problems are.

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.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Danukian

If you read the post I quoted, that was my point: a cruise ship has those issues because their entire mission is getting you off the ship, a Navy cruise plans for longer voyages and has far fewer problems, a generational ship needs to plan for generations, including political policies and what to do with the geezers. My suggestion? Soilent Green Ale! Aged to perfection.

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.)

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

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.)

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.

[Lamech]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

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.

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.