Infanticide, not four year olds!
There’s a really significant difference. You’ve been talking with – not just to – that four year old for three years.
of course it was not - but you seem to conveniently confuse anecdote and statistics.
What percentage of high-sea sailings between - say year 500 and 1900 - in your opinion did end in mutiny? … 0.1%? …0.2%,… 0.5% …1%???
That leaves you pretty much with 100-1000 times more historic sea departures where the system worked than where the system did not work.
Of course, the system in those cases only had to work for - two months? Four? Six? Probably plenty of potential mutinies never even got started because there was a known port call coming up.
If your next port call isn’t for a few thousand years, you’ll probably have a lot more problems boiling over in time. Taking out a few malcontents pour encourager les autres is going to eventually make people feel like they’re cornered with nothing to lose.
Good point, SunUp. I believe that desertions in port were also fairly common.
My guess is also that when it did work, the system was modified by the possibility of mutiny: the people in charge felt limited in what they could actually do, because taking it too far did risk mutiny. I don’t think it was that everybody just passively acquiesced because they were sure they had no other choices.
I have no idea how accurate or representative this data is, but it appears to be data, and the percentage is surprisingly high.
But let’s take your lowest figure: 0.1% - and assuming that applies to sea voyages of somewhere between 12 months and a few years (let’s say 3 years)… A generation ship voyage is equivalent to multiple thousands of 3 year voyages maybe ten thousand or more of them - if you roll a D1000 (0.1%) ten thousand times, it starts to get quite likely you roll ‘mutiny’ at least once
good debate, alltogether
first off - my numbers of 0.1 - 1% were pulled right out of my arse 
one could probably make a case of when you accept a unfavourable reality for 3 years, you won’t start rebellying in year 4 … so in a way this unfavourable reality becomes your “normal reality”. So its not like you multiply the probabilities 10.000 times - as the probabilities will be ever lower (ceteris paribus) for every 3 year period following the period 0-3 years and lower than the one before.
there might - however - be a way more relevant factor here that I haven’t heard debated:
Historic autocratic regimes (“ships at high sea”, etc…) worked b/c people then had a believe system that they were what they were, because GOD put them in that place. E.g. John was the poor marine b/c god wanted me to be this poor marine, and the captain was the captain, b/c it was god’s design.
It wasn’t until the french revolution (a hugely forgotten effect of the FR is the effect that for the first time in european history, the poor killed the noble (who were always very vocal about being noble because - again - god had put them in this place) … and instead of making god angry and punishing the mob … NOTHING happened (god-wise that is) … which made people question the whole "you are in this position, b/c god put you there and its not up to the humans’ to change this god-designed-design )
Hey maybe we can change the whole shitshow and it was never gods will to begin with …
so that imho is an effect that makes any extremely vertical structures no longer adequate.
But I cannot fathom “democracy” on the ship, in a way that we’d debate changing course or so … a generation ship - by definition will be a “tight ship”, culturally speaking
That makes mutiny more likely rather than less.
Likelihood of mutiny is approximately proportional to level of grievance, which is sort of a paradox. If you try really hard to impose rule, you create grievance and risk being overthrown. If you don’t try hard enough, you get overthrown almost by default, because you’re weak.
Is there a ‘sweet spot’ somewhere in the middle where you can try just hard enough to make it work, basically forever, and for it to continue to work throughout multiple successions of power and rule?
I suspect the answer might be that it’s theoretically not impossible, but just incredibly unlikely.
No personal asceticism here … just the concept that status is power relative to others (not stuff or orgies) and those of the brain pod really cannot get any more than they would have. OTOH informed self interest leads to using that power intelligently.
There may be generations of brain pods that push the other pods too far. They wipe out multiple ones and the ship is weakened, able to support fewer, with enough redundancy to be resilient and to recover, but hard times … future generations learn from that history. Informed self interest.
Real question - throughout history which sort of structure has produced less grievance? Our sort of democracy with the concept of all created equal but some end up as more equal than others … or societies with strong established caste systems in which some born to be a shop keeper rarely thinks of being anything else.
I believe in our land of opportunity and the ideal of all created equal, but I do not think its highest selling point is that it produces the least grievance.
I think authoritarian structures are almost certainly more likely to create grievance than their opposites* just because telling people what they must do is logically more likely to result in refusal or resistance than letting people do what they want.
With authoritarianism, you risk failure in the form of rebellion; people might not want to do the things you tell them to do.
Without the imposition of sufficient authority, you risk failure in other more general forms (you fail because people didn’t do the unpalatable thing that was actually absolutely necessary, because you didn’t force them to).
Trying to tread a line between those two extremes is what seems to sort of work here on Earth, for maybe hundreds of years at a time, but it is unproven whether it could work indefinitely.
(*the opposite of authoritarian could be more than one thing I suppose - egalitarian, liberal, democratic, or reckless, laissez-faire, passive, etc)
Of course they can. They can use their power to extort more power. This is what elites do. They can insert themselves into the decision making process of individual pods. Demand approval for their political appointments - to make sure everyone is aligned with the great plan. Tread the well-worn path from independent arbitrator in disputes to permanent court of last appeal to effective ruler. They can use their powers to control social relations and culture by signaling approval or disapproval via their existing ability to control pods - indeed, we want them to do that to an extent. That’s what they’re their for. The problem is that there is no way to limit their use of this. And it really won’t be many generations before people wanting to have children first need to tithe - sorry, pay a registration fee to - the man in the special hat.
There may also be one generation of the brain pod that pushes the others too far, wipes out multiple ones, beyond the resiliency of redundancy to allow recovery. In a complex system no-one can actually know where that limit is. And it only has to happen once.
As for informed self-interest built on the examples of history: is this the mechanism by which, after the terrible warning of the deaths of Louis XVI and Marie Antionette, the Romanovs and Ceausescus died happily in their beds?
But this time it will be different, because reasons!
This is the heart of the problem. Obviously, in democracy the answer lies in the consent of the governed - we understand generally that politicians have a mandate to make decisions on our behalf. We also understand that we have the ability to remove them every few years if we don’t like their decisions.
But I think even authoritarian governments need consent from at least segments of their population. That can be achieved simply through violence and the threat of violence, but even then you need to have a degree of consent from the people who do the violence. I believe that typically, authoritarian governments do in fact have “clientele” groups that they buy off - be it the army, the secret police, the industrialists, landowners, even the proletariat. It’s not a democratic process, but there is a degree of negotiation about the terms of the deal, because you will always need some people sufficiently invested in the status quo that they have no truck with rebellion.
Like you, I think the chances of keeping that balancing act going for more time than human society has currently existed are just vanishingly slim.
And there are limits to the results of the violence. Maybe you can kill all the people who disagree with you, or at least enough to shut the rest up – but the work the dead people would have done won’t get done, and if the reason they disagreed was because they knew better than you how to do it, then the ones who shut up will wind up doing the work badly; and damage will be done.
And if everybody’s afraid to tell you that the air circulation mechanism’s going to fail one of these days because you don’t like to hear bad news and you murdered the last guy who said resources needed to go into fixing it instead of into the gardens for your child’s wedding party –
Relying on the “enlightened self-interest” of humans has a really really bad track record.
A better model than historical shipboard discipline would be historical slave societies. On a ship, no matter how bad things get, you know there’s a finish line at the end. One year, three years, whatever. People can put up with a lot if they know things will eventually get better.
But with a slave society, there’s no likelihood of things getting better for the slave. In a society like Rome, the state has essentially infinite power when compared to any one individual slave, or even a moderate sized group of slaves. The State had far more resources they could commit to slave control than any captain of a ship ever had.
And yet, the Roman Republic had at least three major slave revolts in les than a one hundred year span. And there were a whole lot of other, smaller acts of resistance and rebellion.
If the Romans couldn’t pull off perfect discipline for their entire history, how can you expect the generation ship to pull it off?
A completely different model of society in a generation ship would be the one depicted in Wall-E; sufficiently efficient automation, luxury and absorbing virtual reality-style entertainment would give the passengers enough bread and circuses to keep them from rebelling. They would grow soft and docile, and when the generation ship finally arrives at the destination, they would no longer be able to cope with the challenges of taming a hostile new world/solar system.
Perhaps the on-board virtual reality-style entertainments could be changed gradually as the ship approached its target, so that the passengers were given increasingly challenging tasks to perform and were educated in the skills required to adapt to the new environment.
Plenty of ways this strategy could fail, of course.
The author Lois McMaster Bujold wrote a novel Falling Free about a group of people genetically engineered to live long-term in zero-g/micro-gravity. They also pop up in a few of her other books as well. Probably not a perfect concept, but they have four hands instead of hands and feet, do not suffer bone or muscle loss, and seem to tolerate crowding.
Pssst – see post 54 linked below:
That is quite a way back in the thread. – I think they also have high radiation resistance, but don’t remember for sure. They definitely have excellent ability for dealing with orientations in which there isn’t any “up” or “down”, but I don’t remember whether that’s presented as being just a matter of practice.
Well, since most of them have lived their entire lives in microgravity determining whether they get that from nature or nurture would be a bit difficult.
True; except that if it were done deliberately the engineers would know it. The Quaddies have also been told about at least some of the ways they were engineered, and the viewpoint character gets told something about it by their “owners”. So there may be a canon statement on the matter, one way or the other; or there may not; I just don’t remember, though I remember at least one scene in which it’s commented on that the Quaddies don’t have a problem when at least one other character does. – Maybe that’ll be my next re-read in the bathtub book.