Not much to add to the thread, except that for pretty sf good books about societies on generation ships, check out Joe Haldeman’s Old Twentieth and Adrian Tchaikovksy’s Children of Time.
Robert Reed had a bunch of stories set on board a generation ship. First thing to note, the technology was advanced enough that everybody was immortal (think genetic engineering, etc., so that old age and presumably radiation and other hazards are not a problem). Also, it was a ludicrously big megastructure and billions(!) of people simply decided to stay on it, for a few hundred thousand years anyway, and explore various parts of the galaxy; they developed their own culture of course.
There is no need to turn to SF, look at what seems to have happened in the Easter Island / Rapa Nui, at least according to some. What does ecocide look like on a generation ship? How many people did you say were on board? Too many and the chances of collapse rise exponentially, too few and they will not be able to survive, as they are not sustainable.
Why so?
Because with more people the possibilities that something goes wrong rise exponentially, like entropy.
ETA: Perhaps not exponentially, but factorially. !
I’d think the other way, as in the other thread, smaller systems are more brittle. Large systems buffer with redundant pathways and are more stable against perturbations.
But a Generation Ship will be built to be right and work, will it not? There is no room for failed social experiments, it would get out of hand fast. But if there are enough people to allow for things to happen, many of those things will be bad. And you need a lot of people for the Generation Ship to work in the next generation, and the one after that, and… it must be flexible, it cannot be static. But there is no room for this flexibility, because the resources are limited. A ship is not a planet. And even a planet has limits, as we are seeing. A ship would encounter them much sooner.
It would have to be built right and work.
And failures, including but not limited to failed social experiments, are inevitable.
A system therefore persistently works not because there are no failures but because a system is designed to be failure tolerant with built in redundancies and buffering for potential shocks to the system. In the best cases failures are opportunities that improve the systems. Even as potential signals of needs to adapt and to evolve. Drivers of it.
A system that has “no room for failures” will not work for any reasonable length of time let along a long haul.
Think ecosystem stability. The ship as a whole is one and the humans aboard with their interactions are part of it. An ecosystem is more stable and resilient with greater diversity, more varied interconnections, and multiple species that overlap niches. An ecosystem like that tolerates shocks: one species hit hard by a certain shock and another one adapts to fill the niche. The system can evolve. This is seen from grasslands to gut micobiomes: interconnected diversity begets stability, avoids collapse.
That’s my mixed mind: on one hand I think docility and obedience is vital in this context. On the other I see the need for the social structures to be able to evolve which requires dynamism. I also would be skeptical that a ruling elite would not end up looking out for themselves and not any greater good.
I’m not sure if I’m more a fan of the hollow world whose inhabitants are not aware is a ship, allowed to evolve culturally how ever it goes with no attempted control, or swarms of ships with different societal starting structure conditions, or the aware inhabitants big ship …
Presuming genetic engineering to create humans best suited for living in space, what would they be like? Does The Expanse have it right?
I don’t think the Expanse had any genetic engineering for the Belters. In fact, it’s a major issue that poorer Belters didn’t have access to drugs and pseudo-gravity environments when growing up, and so developed all sorts of medical problems that made it impossible for them to function at all in high-g environments. This was actually a big driving force behind an entire war later in the series. Belters felt that they were going to be left out of the economic boom happening, because they were all stuck living only in space.
There’s parts of that I disagree with, but that’s another thread.
So if ideally genetically engineering humans for the environment, what would the result be?
While that need is there, I don’t think it’s even that teleological. Over 10,000 years, to say nothing of 100,000 years, a human society will undergo change. Any scheme predicated on the idea that we can set up a system and expect it to remain static for eons is going to fail. Human societies don’t sit still.
That was my first thought. But I do have one caveat. The organisational activities that will lead to social change (public meetings, secret societies, overt or covert sharing of ideas, formation of guilds, unions, political parties, revolutionary cadres, subversion of the Praetorian Guard etc etc.) all rely on people having both time and energy to do stuff. But what if they don’t? What if our careful calculations about energy needs are worked out to the last calorie, and pinned there?
Total subsistence. Everyone has barely enough energy to do the work to feed themselves. There is simply no surplus available to allow people the luxury of even questioning the system, still less considering whether it might be improved somewhat, still less actually beginning to do anything about it. Anyone who spends even as much as an hour a week working towards a marginally better world is risking starvation.
If that sounds both breathtakingly immoral and highly impractical for any of a million reasons, we’re left with a society where there is a degree of surplus. And therefore collective decisions to make about its use. And therefore politics. And therefore change.
I don’t see that there’s anything you can set up that you can expect to be in place 100 generations from now. I’m highly skeptical that it would be possible even to keep this society attuned to its mission - no matter how it’s presented, whether as enlightened value, or fait accompli, or divine instruction, there will always be objectors, rebels and heretics. And at some point they will be in power. And then what?
If we’re talking about unaware inhabitants, I don’t see how we manage to keep the population within the parameters necessary, except possibly by the ineffable hand of Malthus.
There would have to be a lot of changes. Not so much the hands-for-feet, although that would be cool.
Changes to how we grow and maintain bone density would be the biggest one. Weak bones make everything harder, zero g or not. Second would be the same for muscle mass. Muscles are less critical than bones, but you’d still want it to be easier to maintain muscle mass when in zero g.
Then we start messing with their heads. The human sense of balance is highly dependent upon gravity. We’d have to fix that, while also making it easier for them to maintain a sense of direction no matter how they’re oriented in relation to other people, and their local environment.
Other changes would be less zero g related, and more just “living in space” related. Others have mentioned how smaller people use less resources overall. As well, they’ll almost certainly be exposed to higher radiation doses on a regular basis. Greater resistance to radiation sickness, and things like cancer, would be good for everyone, but would be particularly useful for Belters.
Remember our debates about Covid? It is not the first time we see that you are more optimistic than me. I guess that is OK.
Can you make things that evolution by natural selection would never do, like growing wheels or extremities that can rotate while holding an instrument? That would be interesting. Or piano players with 88 fingers. But beware the unintended consequences! Better 3D sense of equilibrium? Fine, better orientation and coordination. But you get more prone to nausea, which is awful when wearing a helmet in space. But in general yes, what Horatius said.
I think what they’d need to do is send the ship off with 1000’s of frozen embryos that have already been genetically engineered. There is too much variance in offspring of sexual reproduction for a 100k+ year mission to succeed. I’m sure that an optimum initial crew can be selected from the billions of people on Earth, but there’s little chance that their natural offspring would be as qualified or motivated to carry on the mission. In fact, just genetically engineer the first crew. Have one of the engineered aspects be that the human is sterile so that the only offspring can come from the embryo bank. This way, the 1st, 100th, and 1000th generations are all exactly the same. Might as well make all the embryos exact clones so that there’s little difference between individual crew members and less cause for agitation and conflict. There would still be normal embryos which would be used to create normal humans to populate planets, but the crew humans would all be genetically identical throughout the entire mission.
But even then, how do you stop Generation XXXX from saying, “Screw this, I want a new face to look at?”, and decanting the “normal” humans?
I’m not sure. I guess it depends on how many personality traits can be genetically designed into a person. If they can make humans that are ultimate rule followers, then maybe they wouldn’t think of breaking the rules. But I agree that it seems very unlikely. Humans, as we know humans, would not do very well in this sort of environment. It seems like the crew would have to basically have robotic personalities rather than what we think of as a human personality. Any kind of independent thought would be a detriment to the mission.
“Weak” is relative to the demands placed. Why be heavier, larger, denser, than the demands would require? Biggest demands on them, other than their metabolic and endocrine functions, might be moving objects against inertia, but there are mechanical solutions for that.
Now if this spacefaring race needed to tolerate accelerations and decelerations of significant forces that would be different.
Agree with this, radiation tolerance, and cognition and propioception more suited for low gravity with no distinct up vs down.
I’m picturing slow moving spindly thin hobbits. Feet able to grasp yes but not the fine motor of hands. Long enough limbs to reach in narrow tubes.
Which has me coming to a conclusion others have reached that this spacefaring population will never disembark. They may be “gardeners”, setting up colonies with old style humans maybe modified for specific environments while they live in space structures around them using resources of the planet. They would however be sure to keep those colonies technologically backward by all means necessary so to prevent any competitive threats from them. The planet occupying races would be well maintained subjects in their service. That might not be the intent of the founders but I’d think that is the direction that multiple paths would lead to.
I don’t see it as optimism so much as the only path possible. As stated:
The system has to built with room for change and able to survive and grow from failures or it will never make it.
This still seems to assume that you can have some control over the kinds of change that will happen, or at least that there are certain avenues you can seal off, or a set of parameters it will operate within. And I don’t see how that’s possible.
It almost doesn’t matter what you set up at the beginning: a liberal democracy with elaborate checks and balances, enlightened philosopher kings, technocratic socialism… 20 generations in there is absolutely no telling how society will be organised or what ethos or worldview will hold sway.
When you say it has to be built with room for change that implies that there is an option to build it without such room, and…no, there isn’t.
And that is why I say you are an optimist, because I don’t think this path (or any path) is possible for a Generation Ship. Nice idea, but…
I’m smiling while I write this, we will not live to see the resolution of this dispute in our lifetimes. Just shadow boxing here.