Orphans of the sky: Does Human nature prevent multi-generational interstellar travel?

Great Debates
81

YOU can. But there were large periods of time where and whole societies where this wasn’t the case. I think you are doing a bit of projection here. As I said, it’s fairly obvious that you would be unsuited to such a venture (personally). However, not everyone thinks or reacts the way you do.

Let me put it this way. Are you top dog now? Are you trying to be top dog? Myself, I have no desire to be top dog (perhaps the dog behind the top dog at most). Again, I think you are projecting here. When I served in the Navy I wasn’t top dog nor did I strive to become top dog…nor did I resent the fact that I wasn’t and would never be top dog. I live in America and I’ll never be President, don’t want to be President and don’t resent the fact that I’ll never be President. I think most people feel this way and that those who don’t are going to be the only ones who feel some kind of angst about not being top dog…and perhaps have the ambition to actually try to BE top dog. In which case, they will probably ultimately move up in the power structure of our theoretical ship.

You have never been in the military obviously. :wink: I say this tongue in cheek, but again what this really shows is that you, personally, would not be suited to be one of the crew. You don’t have the discipline, training, orientation or upbringing to do so. You probably would be tearing your hair out if you were forced to live in Japan or some other places I’ve been too as well. The point though is that not everyone reacts to a situation the way you do. There are societies on earth that are or were MUCH bigger pressure cooker environments than our theoretical generation ship society.

Well, you can do this kind of thing NOW. There are nations on earth today where weapons are hard to get (if not impossible). Why haven’t they degenerated into some kind of Darwinian free for all?

I disagree…I think the behaviors you are projecting WOULD be ‘abnormal’. Human society evolves to put some kind of checks on these things…that’s it purpose. Mores, stigmas, attitudes, rituals and formalities…all of these things, coupled with laws, provide those checks and balances and dictate what is or isn’t considered normal in their given society. Otherwise we would run wild all the time and the biggest or smartest (or most ruthless) would always be the top dog.

It might happen…but it’s unlikely, IMHO. :wink:

-XT

82

Indeed!

83

Well…we will have to disagree… :slight_smile:

I do want to say, though, that you are bringing up Earth societies. These societies have a history and, more importantly, the force necessary to enforce these positions.

On a ship…say of 60 people…if a couple of tough guys get together and say that they won’t be janitors anymore and will beat the crap out of anyone who disagrees…who is to stop them? These sorts of people will be born.

Also, to stop fixating on the alpha male type…what about a generation that refuses to be subservient all their lives? My boss is so-and-so and I have NO opportunity to move up…so why do it? Screw this…I am going to relax in my quarters…until we die.

Even just plain bickering and dislike could grow with no opportunity to leave. Temperment only applies to the first crewmembers with diminishing affect into later generations.

Where I am coming from is thinking about my first job after leaving teaching. I liked the place…but if I had been stuck there …born into it with the owner placing her own kids in high positions giving me orders and I was supposed to do that all my life…I don’t know man…I think I would have rebelled…and that doesn’t make me violent, psychotic, abnormal etc. It makes me normal! There are many people that really do question "why should I be the one taking orders…why shouldn’t I be giving them’. Any society you design would have to be VERY CAREFUL to allow social mobility. Before you say ‘OF COURSE!’ remember that people LIKE their own kids and want them to succeed and after several generations they WILL do so. Even if they don’t, people who don’t do as well will tend to blame others than themselves - and so see injustice and a right to rebel.

Not everyone would do so…but many would (but we disagree)

84

Well there’s your seed of generational religious schism right there. The moment you predicate your whole society on a lie, you’re f***ed.

85

No not at all. It’s not a motivator. It’s a biopsy, a clinical extraction of the cancerous tissue.

86

It makes you normal for someone who grew up in the society that you did. If you’d grown up in a caste system or as a medieval serf, it’s much more likely that you’d think “that’s just the way life is”. Personalities don’t develop independent of any kind of society. You’d be a very different person if you’d been born a serf in medieval Europe.

You grew up in a society that values independent thought and social mobility, so you find it hard to imagine fitting into a society that doesn’t. But there have been such societies throughout human history, and they’ve managed to survive for many generations. More generations than our modern liberal society has, for that matter. Our current model for society might be very good at competing in the world we live in now, but that doesn’t mean it’s the optimum society for every environment. A multigenerational starship is a very different environment than the world we live in now- why should the same sort of society necessarily be optimal in both?

87

The reason you didn’t see many serf rebellions is that it was very clear to the serfs that the ruling classes were experts at using sharpened bits of metal to poke holes in rebelling serfs. The ruling class spend their time fighting and training to fight, the serfs spend their time farming and handing over their surplus to the guys with pointy metal bits. In a serf vs aristocrat fight the aristocrat wins every time.

So you can keep the serfs downtrodden as long as you’re willing to enforce your superior social status with deadly force if neccesary.

88

Additionally it seems unlikely that serfs would make very good techs and troubleshooters. Even farming on a ship like this would be a highly trained skill and not serf-style farming.

89

Right it would be monitoring computers and hydroponic protein and light levels. It would be installing feeding tubes and removing cancerous plants.

90

That would lower some of the psychological barriers, though. They wouldn’t be leaving home; they’d be taking home with them.

91

I wouldn’t be too confident about that. The general physical traits of a planet (atmosphere, temperature, and such) could be surveyed across interstellar distances with relatively modest advances in 21st-century astronomy, but there could be all sorts of more subtle problems.

92

Almost any planet we found that had a similar type environment to our own would still probably take a lot of work to colonize. The soil could be different, there could be native plants and animals that would be incompatible to our own, the mixture of atmospheric gases would almost certainly be different, the green skinned women may have 3 breasts instead of 2…there could be a lot of issues.

I doubt we would ever send a generation ship off to another planet before we have explored it. In fact, I doubt we’d ever send a generation ship out at all. I could maybe see some kind of suspended animation thingy with a fleet of ships, some exploration and terraforming, some just full of crew-sicles along with animals, plants and equipment. But I don’t think the reasons in the OP would be the reasons for not doing a generation type ship…the reasons would be the huge expense of trying to keep all those people alive and fed for such a long journey and the huge increase in size it would require to build something to keep them all alive and fed for it.

-XT

93

Right. It might be pretty easy to detect a planet, figure out its mass and diameter, figure out that it has a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, figure out that it has water, and so on. Then when you get there you find that the entire planet is inhabited by 500 foot tall radioactive lizards that breathe fire. Just because you have a planet that can support life doesn’t mean it would be a nice place to live. Look at the sorts of problems the colonists from Larry Niven’s Known Space ran into.

94

Although I realize this is a basic assumption of the o.p., I feel compelled to point out that it is not necessarily “of course physically possible for us to travel to another solar system.” There are in fact many technological constraints that make it infeasible for us to make a manned interstellar transit even given any interval of time, as outlined in previous threads:

[thread=398767]Getting to the stars[/thread]
[thread=441422]How do you slow down your colony ship?[/thread]
[thread=477444]Do we have the technology to build a probe to visit another star?[/thread]

However, assuming that we do have some indistinguishable-from-magic propulsion system, a virtually limitless energy source, a biosystem capable of sufficient recycling efficiency suitable for the voyage, et cetera, what of the sociological issues that the o.p. asks about?

First of all, we’re going to have to assume that the vessel has a self-contained, self-sufficient society. Never mind the small crew of die-hard explorer engineering and science types; you’re going to need doctors, teachers, historians, technicians, cooks, farmers, plumbers, administrators, et cetera. Indeed, assuming that it will take generations to reach a new world, it makes little sense to pack the ship full of xenobiologists or cosmologists, except as necessary to maintain basic scientific literacy; below a certain sufficiency threshold, highly technical skills and intellectual conceits are not maintainable as there just isn’t enough of a brain trust to maintain concerted stimulation and creativity.

Second, we have to assume that whatever planned society is initially implemented or imposed, it will not be remain static. Once the ship achieves escape speed from the system we’ll have little influence and no practical control over events that occur. To this end, it makes sense to either divide the crew into independent (or at least widely separated) societies, and to provide as much automation for navigation, propulsion, power generation, food production, et cetera as technologically feasible, allowing the passengers to adopt whatever sociological model works best. It might actually be desirable not to provide the crew with skills or access to do this themselves due to concerns that later generations may bollocks it up in a cargo cult type attempt to replicate the form of maintenance without a fundamental understanding of how the technology works as the necessity for knowing and advancing the state of knowledge is eroded. Simple skills like farming, tool making, textile weaving, et cetera are readily maintained by simple lore, but complex skills like manufacturing, advanced medicine, et cetera require an extensive educational and technological basis that may not be sustainable even in a society of 10,000 or more.

Third, given that we have the technology to make a spacecraft capable of sustaining a large population for hundreds or thousands of years not only off of a planet but away from the rich energy source of a star begs the question of why we would bother trying to colonize another world at all. If you’ve developed this capability, you can essentially build your own self-contained worlds, and with the degree of automation, robustness, and self-repair implied, explore nearby systems (and given a sufficient period of time, a good portion of the galaxy) by proxy. This may not sound as exciting as setting food on another world (or rather, having your great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren set foot on another world) but the odds are that it’ll be a lot less interesting than Corfu by the time you’ve gotten there, what with all the kids nagging about wanting to go to Disneyworld the entire trip.

Regarding the ethics of committing your offspring to making this voyage; what of it? Everyone reading this is where they are because of decisions made by some ancestor or another to relocate out of curiosity, desire to improve circumstances, whatever. Assuming that the hypothetical parents on this voyage are not insane, suicidal, or terminally insane, they’re not committed their children to a worse hardship than they themselves are presumably willing to endure for the rest of their lives, and the chance, perhaps, to perpetuate their genetic line beyond those who remain on Earth.

I personally think it is unlikely that we’ll populate other words in this way; more likely, we’ll send out something like Freeman Dyson’s Astrochicken, or indeed, even evolve ourselves into some kind of self-replicating distributed consciousness, which makes a lot more sense than plopping farms down on barely inhabitable worlds or zipping about space at warp speed in multi-colored spandex uniforms with phasers set to stun.

Stranger

95

Well, seems to me that the aprentice program is teh perfect solution. When the sprog hits puberty, after going through kindergarden through high school graduation - and believe me, if they do not expect vacation, they will not whinge about going to school 5 days a week.

Once they have teh basic education down, the teachers would have some idea about their abilities, tech track or college track.

If they are tech track, they get assigned to a working tech and they jobshadow them as an apprentice until they can do the exact same job as their boss. You learn to do by doing.

If they show medical inclination, they job shadow their boss, nurse, shrink, respiratory tech, doctor or whatever until they can do their job as well.

Combining book education and hands on education, you can teach anybody anything. People die, so you have autopsies to train for actual anatomy. You can raise bunnies for food that you train vascular surgery on.

People, we educated our youth long before there were universities by using the apprentice system. If we add good teaching computers and reference computers into the mix, you can train a replacement … think of it as the ultimate in 1 on 1 tutoring. I went through 3 years of high school spanish in 1 year, 3 hours a week solo with my teacher. I learned basic machine tool.machine technology working in a machine shop as an augment to the schooling … we learn a lot of IT in on the job training.

96

Ask one of our general practitioners on the boards … how frequently do you have to treat someone for something amazingly Houselike? In the grand scheme of things aren’t you generally dealing with low grade chronic issues like allergies, chronic infections like sinusitis, common diseases like colds, excema, acid reflux.

how often do you have something whacktastically wrong with someone, and have to decide it is lupus? it is never lupus

If you have screened the population to eliminate as many hereditary conditions like cancers, diabetes, thyroid issues, downs syndromish stuff, how much do you think will happen in a very highly cotrolled environment? I see injuries, as accidents happen but I dont see an issue with most other issues if everybody starts out healthy …

97

What if we didn’t send the “first generation” on the ship? While the ship is being built you could place the required number of people into some form of sterile environment for a “conditioning programme”. The second generation ONLY knows the societal mores that are then created, they would be more compliant (for lack of a better word) to some form of pre-ordained roles, true meritocracy and socialism etc. IN other words - thy to eliminate some of the current social problems you would face.

Also, would breeding neccessarily have to be “natural” or could it be some form of lab matching. What I have in mind is that sperm and eggs are both “harvested” from the crew, and then either artificial womb or more likely surrogate mother programme.

Would the children neccessarily have to know parents and vice versa? Yes the idea of brother / sister mating is kinda squicky, but isn’t this more to do with increasing the liklihood of damaging reccessive traits than anything else - so as long as that was screened for why could brother / sister produce progeny.

I am thinking some form of absolute communcal upbringing, with the “parent” being a job that raises ALL the children…

98

I’m an atheist pacifist anarchist- as I see it, all modern society is predicated on several lies. Yet still, it works!

You find out the truth (or a new lie), and you get over it.

99

Sounds like kibbutz. Jews…In Space!

100

Sure it works with bloody wars over ideology.

Unless you’re trapped in a metal can and the war kills off certain key personnel while also destroying vital equipment.