Depends on the length of the voyage and the population of the ship. Presuming a voyage of at least a century or two and a population of more than a few hundred, I think that any people who survive the trip might not be recognizable as modern humans to us.
By the fourth or fifth generation on the ship, people will inevitably have lost touch with what we consider “reality” in a very primal way. Records of Earth, the nature of their mission, and the world to come (presuming those records survive, of course) would have a completely different meaning to those whose personal experience and understanding of the universe is entirely within the context of the ship and would, effectively, become a religious text. And like all religions, eventually this will get messy. Think splitting of factions, leading inevitably to bloodshed and nastiness.
Even the functions of the ship are entirely automated, with no need for repairs, I think people will accidentally or intentionally wreak havoc. Imagine that you’re born on the ship, indoctrinated from birth with the garbled mission and promise of the World To Come sometime in the future. Well, maybe if you just destroy the engines, or perhaps shoot the food storage units out the airlock as an offering to the spirits of the Ship Builders, maybe you you can hasten the coming of the New World!
Trapping a bunch of violent, irrational primates in a large jar for hundreds of years probably isn’t going to end well, no matter how many bananas you leave them.
The first mission should sort of be like the mars rovers-expected to last a little bit, but get valuable data from it before it fails. If it keeps working,cool bonus.Especially one that require new generations. There’s so much we don’t know, we can’t take anything for granted. Who knows, having babies in space might result in perfectly normal children that all develop extreme psychosis in their 20’s. Gotta have a trial run, 100 volunteers for 25 seasons of Big Brother in space.
The big problem is that any social system that we impose on the crew is going to have to be somehow imposed on the children and grandchildren of the crew. And the problem is that the children and grandchildren of the crew are going to take a look around and ask themselves why they are bound by obligations that their parents imposed on them.
It’s one thing to imagine that the ship is run along the lines of a navy ship. So every kid who is born onboard is going to be conscripted into the Navy? With no retirement and no escape?
The real solution is that there’s no way we can build a generation ship capable of traveling to another solar system unless we could also build orbital habitats that could sustain themselves independently for indefinate periods. If you can’t imagine people living for 100 years on an isolated space station orbiting Pluto, then how can a 100 year voyage to Alpha Centauri possibly work?
The technology and social arrangements that would allow permanent occupation of space have to be invented first. Then it’s a simple matter to strap fusion rockets onto a space habitat and head for Tau Ceti and plan to arrive there in 100 years. But the people who would do such a thing would probably seem pretty much insane by 21st Century American standards. And they’d have to already have a belief that separation from the mass of humanity back in the Solar system was a good thing in and of itself, regardless of the destination. Because the people who leave on such a journey wouldn’t be colonists. They’d have to be people who liked the idea of living in a tiny isolated space habitat for the rest of their lives, and furthermore that it would be a good idea of their kids.
I think a caste system would work against the meritocracy that such a trip would seem to need and increase the chance of strife and rebellion. I also and probably guilty of using the term poorly as I was hoping to have it imply classless.
I agree on the economy part, there would be a minor grey market but it should be minor. It should be a socialist or quasi-military system to minimize problems.
If they are rational and make sense then there is no reason why the children would rebel against them. You teach them all the workings of the ship so tehy know what’s going on. Teach them the entire purpose of the mission.
Yes of course. The entire notion of liberal modern ideas would be anachronistic in that setting.
Right of course, we’d obviously have colonized the solar system before we’d go to another one.
I don’t see any reason to believe that this is true.
As for the religious argument, the historical texts wouldn’t be occult in nature, they would have a strong grounding in critical thought and be given historical texts to study. It wouldn’t be the problem we have with our old texts where people who were a bit smarter than the average bear left opaque texts for future generations encoded into a mythological framework.
We’re talking about explaining precisely what is going on. And the way people are talking it’s like the kids would be separated from a parental cultural tradition, they wouldn’t. Their parents would be their teachers. If the parents treat the children well, they will have no reason to rebel violently against them.
All basic necessities should be provided for and entertainment systems should be communal. No one needs their own PSP when there are terminals you can log into from anywhere on the ship.
Based on my military service on a carrier, despite everything vital being supplied while at sea there was always a little something extra going on. It wasn’t major but gambling, possibly illegal booze, extra snacks, service exchanges to get some job done quicker in exchange for new boots sooner, etc.
A balance needs to be struck to keep people motivated, productive and happy and to keep the grey market economy from getting out of hand. At least there would not be loss like most militaries have experienced of supplies being taken off the ship or being diverted from it.
If there’s no good planet to live on, why would they have left in the first place? Finding habitable planets from Earth is a heck of a lot easier than sending people there.
And all you folks saying that the ship absolutely must be a communistic society to work, why would it be any different from the examples on Earth, where communist societies fail while capitalist ones succeed?
There are lots of possible scenarios. I don’t know if it’s possible to learn if it’s possible, short of sealing people up in a dome and seeing how well they get on. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle suggested that using a closed “arcology” might be a pretty good way to see if Space Travel would be possible, at least from that point of view, in their novel Oath of Fealty.
Lots of folks besides Heinlein wrote novels of generation starships. Usually (but not invariably) they forget they’re on a voyage, or are deliberately kept in the dark. Or else the story is picked up after they reach the planet. I once wrote a story that took place mid-voyage on such a starship. In order to keep things going, I made the crew all members of a religious sect who believed that God had revealed to their founder that they HAD to make such a voyage. I figured that religious faith would be one way to guarantee allegiance and commitment.
Historically, caste systems have usually done the opposite: made people accept their pre-ordained roles.
If the nature of the voyage were such that only consistently brilliant leadership will suffice, then perhaps a meritocracy would be best. But if this is so, the mission has a small chance of success. The military model seems more likely to work here: know your job, do it, subsume your ego in pursuit of the common goal.
But has there ever actually been a human society that really was a meritocracy? I think a real meritocracy might go enough against human nature to not be possible. There’s just too much temptation for parents to favor their own children, even if somebody else’s children might be better qualified to succeed them as leaders.
You might be able to do it if the colonists were members of a new religious movement, sort of like the Mormons when they colonized Utah. Religious people take on all kinds of obligations, and often because they were born into a particular religious tradition.
Unless the crew falls completely out of contact with Earth, I don’t think there’s any danger of them forgetting their purpose and growing some crazy religion out of ignorance. If they ever get to the point where they can’t repair their communication link with Earth, that means they can’t repair life support either, and the mission is doomed.
Earth-bound authorities will have a bit of a carrot to help keep the crew motivated: they can offer the latest entertainments, and scientific and technical advances over the communication link.
I don’t think the crew will want to stay shipboard forever. As long as they’re on the ship, that means draconian breeding and other restrictions. The desire for more freedom will be a big impetus to the crew to actually get out and colonize once at their destination. Maybe the majority of the crew will have adapted and actually likes it that way, but I’m sure there will be malcontents happy to move off the ship, and the rest will be happy to see them go.
It would probably need to be at least that strongly enforced. Everyone has to be indoctrinated in the faith that the future goal is worth whatever sacrifices are called for along the way. Any persistent tendency to question the assigned mission would have to be treated as a serious (probably capital) crime.
Obviously the kids wouldn’t be separated from the parent’s cultural tradition. They’d grow up in it. But the parents would be a self-selected group of people who thought that locking themselves into a steel can for the rest of their lives was a good idea. The parents wouldn’t be pioneers and explorers and colonists, they’d be people running away from the outside society. They wouldn’t even be like the Pilgrims who left Europe to found a utopian society in the new world, their goal for a utopian society wouldn’t be on Tau Ceti, it would be on the ship itself because anything else would be pointless.
So the ship would have to be crewed by some splinter group that was already almost completely isolated from the rest of humanity and felt that even more isolation was even better. They’d have to believe, not that life on Tau Ceti would be better than life back in the Solar system, but that life on the generation ship would be better than life back in the Solar system. And if they believed that, why plan to stop at Tau Ceti in the first place?
I think Religion could lead to schism though very easily. It seems like even a single religion could lead to problems. This would be especially worrisome in the later generations.
I think to sustain the population of trained scientists, engineers, technicians, doctors, nurses, teachers, agri-techs, astrogators and etc. you will need a military style meritocracy to encourage the best from the entire small population. Leadership was a less important issue in my proposal and I don’t have a great suggestion for it. I would think an oligarchy would form at the top could be entered but was not terribly democratic.
A single religious sect might work but could a small sect supply the initial field experts and wouldn’t a large sect be cohesive in belief enough to avoid strife over religion and interpretation of said.
Who would own the ship? Who would own the galleys, the staterooms, etc.? There are no new jobs and no new land. The jobs that exist must be done. You can’t have competing air plants and waste systems. On Earth, you can buy land and build new factories. A ship would be a closed system. You could theoretically build a mobile asteroid colony that would be designed to allow excavation and expansion over the course of the trip, but without enough space, resources, and manpower to allow competition than any capitalist system would be facade.
The military is a caste system, but (in the U.S. today, at least) it is not a hereditary caste system. A hereditary system would cause a split between officers/enlisted/colonists, or what have you that could warp the mission. When you arrive at the colony, who would be in charge? Would an officer class be willing to give up their power at the end? The ship is just step one, step two needs to be considered as well.
I wonder why anyone thinks the children will forget about the mission and home world. For the ship to function, the computers need to keep working. The whole idea rests on the idea that we can build a ship that will function the entire time. With a small, busy population there will be very little in the way of home grown art and entertainment, but people will still watch movies and read books. The second and third generation may have no direct experience of life on a planet, but they will be exposed to it in countless ways over the course of their lives.
There won’t be ANY real scientists on board, because science requires membership in a scientific community. You can’t send the kids off to a top-notch university, because they will be stuck in a tin can, and it will take years for lightspeed messages to travel between the ship and the Solar System. There won’t be any engineers either, because there won’t be anything for them to design.
The problem is that once the parental generation of real engineers and doctors and scientists are dead, the educational system onboard the ship probably won’t be up for the task of replacing them. So the ship will have to be designed to run by people who don’t know how the ship works. The Polynesians could bring their entire technology with them because everyone could understand how to build a ship or farm taro. They could bring along their entire culture too, since every poem and story and religious belief had to be transmitted by oral tradition anyway. But that won’t be possible onboard a generation ship.
So you won’t have scientists and doctors and engineers. You’ll have to train technicians and nurses and maintence guys instead. Perhaps you can have canned computerized training courses, but a ship with a thousand people onboard isn’t going to be able to support a medical school to turn out real doctors, or an engineering school to turn out real engineers, or a PhD program to turn out real scientists. You can’t become a doctor by taking an online course, even a really well designed online course.
And so you have to rely on technology, and the technology has to be run by people who don’t understand how the technology works. Our modern technological society is too complex to be understood by a subset of 1000 people and those 1000 people certainly couldn’t effectively transmit even the smaller set of what they know to another 1000 people.
You’d have to plan for a radical cultural and scientific bottleneck. Sure it would be possible to take along scientific and cultural works so that when the future society on Tau Ceti becomes established and the population becomes large enough that they don’t have to start over from zero as neolithic farmers. But how do you re-establish a scientific tradition when the answer for generations to any problem is “look it up in the computer”? Then you have a culture of scholasticism, not science.
Lemur866, it was not that many years ago that entry to careers as Engineers, Scientists and even Doctors did not require a full blown university degree. The next generation of these types will do their advance studies with the prior generation. It would be an apprentice system effectively. Maybe they won’t be as book smart was a Doctor on Earth, but a well trained Doctor can be trained without a University. On the Job training would become the main form of advance training.
I wasn’t sure if such a thing was possible. I find the ability to overcome the issues of making such a ship easier than detecting planets with suitable atmospheres from Earth.
At some point green and a lust for power are going to come into play, making things even tougher.
