Generation ships and aging.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

I really think it's up to the motivational factors that causes generation ships to be launched in the first place. Think about it. It's a huge endavour. It's a very long-term endavour.

It'll only get done if there is some very, very stark motivation behind it to finance something long-term, and 2ndly the people signing up to crew such ships also need to be extremely motivated.



So what kind of motivations lies behind it? Many reasons for doing the generation ship thing are nonsensical (e.g. "for the lulz") but after removing those you're still left with several non-nonsensical ones that are very different from one another.

Also think about health care. Obviously at higher Tech Levels, it gets easier to care for people who have become elderly and infirm but there is still some need. Retirement isn't just letting crew members retain their cabin, and giving them food, water, oxy and rplacement clothes, after they've become ex-crew members. You also have to care for them.

Unless they kill themselves (which is logical for certain brands of space colonization fanaticism), or unless the ship's goverance system does the killing (e.g. immediately upon a crew member bing deemed permanently unfit for activity duty, or after a traditional retirement period of perhaps 1500 days: "Citizen, your time is up, report to the nearest euthanasia department immediately!").

But still. Why do the generation ship thing? The motive matters a lot, the dual-motive of who does the funding, and who signs up to be a lifetime crewer and also accepting a duty to produce children who are destinied to not have the choice of doing anything other than crewing a ship that they didn't sign up for themselves.

Personally, I'm not going to have children, but if I were then I'm sure I'd be keenly interested in ensuring that they have a wide variety of options available for them in adult life, which is the exact opposite of the cul-de-sac that a generation ship is.



So what kind of person signs up to be a crew member?

Or maybe they don't sign up? Maybe they're conscripted. Usually conscription is done to the young and noneducated, but Haldeman's "Forever War" shows a rather reversed scenario.

I don't picture conscripts doing that; they will simply take over as soon as possible.

The only ones I can picture doing a generation voyage are ideologues. That way the parents can raise the children in a duty to continue the quest. Such things have been done before in colony ventures.