spaaaaaace life

[beccaelizabeth]

Am playing fantasy house with rightmove again. Have made a map that leaves out London and looked for properties over £3 million. There's only a few hundred of them.

Have realised again the places I like best are the places that remind me of boarding school.

A proper long term space colony would also be a boarding school. and a university. that greatly resembled home schooling. You'd have all the students of all the ages living and studying in such close proximity it wouldn't much matter if you called it home or school. You'd need to pack a lot of distance learning courses and download a lot of online lectures and suchlike. ... very, very long distance learning. Communications constraints would depend on technology plus location. You probably wouldn't want to bring a lot of paper books, but it depends on the propulsion system, there's some mad ideas where you wouldn't mind carrying a ton of them. And they have advantages in the not crashing department. If I went through a Stargate I'd want to bring a bunch of paper books, in case we got cut off.

Running a boarding school would be tricky. I mean, it's hard enough keeping small numbers of small children vaguely under control and unlikely to explode stuff, add to that trying to raise them to sufficient competence to run the place when you want to retire and it gets very not easy. If you were choosing people for your space colony you'd need not just people who excel in their field but people who would be happy teaching it to others, including small children. You'd want to leave out the kind of people who kids would try and avoid due to excessive creepy and/or yelling. Every single one of your co-workers would be someone who would help raise your kids, and you'd help raise theirs. And then their kids would be the ones making sure you don't die too early once you're old.

There's aspects of this smaller scale that's hard to get my head around, even knowing villages worked like this for the longest time. I mean, granted, even in Dereham it's hard to employ someone who isn't related to someone related to someone I went to school with, but it would be even tighter in a space colony.

What size colony would you need to be self sustaining? I mean, if there's no other tribe over the hill, who gets married to who and how many do you need to keep it going? Does anyone study this stuff?

You could maintain genetic diversity by bringing a sperm bank, that'd probably be a good idea whatever size you go with, because you can't fit a representative diversity of humanity in when humanity is seven billion and a colony is... not. I mean, you'd be more than one in a billion but getting up to one in a million would be giant. Especially if you have to fit them all in a tin can to get them anywhere.

Imagine having less than seven thousand people on your entire planet.

Imagine having lived in submarine type conditions to travel for more than a year before landing and building probably only marginally larger permanent dwellings... with everyone on your entire planet.

You'd have to be really, really sure you liked them first.

Which gets back to boarding school, because really, is there anyone who went to a school where they liked all their teachers? Doesn't every school have the crazy one and the stinky one and the VERY LOUD MAN and the one who you're not entirely sure is mentally speaking in the room? And just like school, you wouldn't have a choice about turning up and interacting with them every single day. But unlike school, this would be true for the rest of your life.

... I realise every group with me in it has some of those types covered and I'm unlikely to contribute to the social harmony of any endeavour but it's my daydream so I go if I want to.

If the Stargate programme sends people to another planet then the US military gets to filter who goes. If private enterprise does then the money is the filter. These things seem unlikely to be maximally conducive to long term harmony.

Would you want a group where everybody had to choose everybody else? Like, if everyone in a group of two hundred needed 199 matching votes and no vetos... you could probably do that out of seven billion, but it wouldn't half take some doing.

Is filtering a group for 'everybody likes each other' going to change the nature of humans, or society, or just store up problems for when the argues start? I mean, even if it goes perfect in the first generation, teenagers are going to shout, that's what they do, so you might get like a decade of happy shiny lalala and then have to cope with Kids These Days and there's a sudden generation gap.

Packing kids and teenagers for the build phase seems unhelpful, but once you send humans somewhere together there will be kids. If everyone gets contraceptive implants on the way into the spaceship you could have a few years to build.

Human biology isn't very forgiving of waiting though. Everyone has a tick tock.

but if you don't send kids then you don't send people that have kids. filtering out a whole space colony made of people more interested in going to space than having kids does not seem maximally conducive to a well adjusted second generation.

requirements for a space colony: entire colony made of good parents? ... humanity never leaving Earth...



boarding school must be tricky to run. has to make good diet, get it all delivered on a timetable, hundreds of kids all very varied and difficult, all have same bed time, not all need same amount of sleep. even before the education stuff, just adding all the kids together in the same space and keeping them alive be tricksy. Olders supervise youngers, helps a little, but still not simples.



Space colony not need space alien vampire snake whatevers to attack. Has a few hundred humans and no way out. Plenty much dramas right there.

Boarding school stories are a whole genre on their own. Boarding school on another planet where getting out just means working with instead of being taught by the same few shifts of people who all have essential jobs... yow.


Getting a first gen space colony going be tricky. Getting it to survive means making the second gen survivable. When none of them chose the place and their options are severely limited compared to what current rich western humans are used to.


stories. many.



and of course if you get it right you have a functioning economy that takes care of all its members. so practicing on Earth right now seems like good plan.

Comments

[chordatesrock]

Now, that would be a fascinating setting. ysabetwordsmith has something similar in one of her poetic series, but not exactly.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

I forget who said it, but there was a quote about O'Neill colonies somewhere that went, "It would be like being trapped in a science fiction convention that you could never leave."

Need to make some notes about this for my "For Your Safety" verse. :)

[beccaelizabeth]

put like that it is on the line between awesome and awful.
I had an actual story plan where someone found a stargate in their back yard and announced it to the world by holding an SF con on the other side... and then the gate shut down...
I was planning which actor-guests to bring for maximum useful. Peter Wingfield is obviously on the list because being a doctor now. but planning to keep him for my space colony could be considered creepy.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

The easiest way to handle this is brain uploads. It's easier to ship a big computer full of digitized brains than a pile of meat, and the programs can all talk with each other while traveling. Or just send a computer and big antenna, and then zap the digitized brains to the destination after the ship arrives.

[beccaelizabeth]

but once you're talking uploads their experience has diverged so far from human that they're their own species now, and there's no reason to go back to meat, or indeed bother with planetary bodies. Doesn't really preserve humanity on a different egg basket that way.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

When shipping meat, it's easier if it's all packed in cans than if it's animals walking around. So let's do that with the humans. Surgically remove all the bits you don't really need, like arms, legs, and genitals. We can grow them back once we reach the destination. Then stick in some feeding tubes and catheters, earphones and nice high-definition video display goggles. The humans can wander around in a big video-game environment, with as much space and scenery as they need. With the savings in space and weight, we can cram in more people to get more diversity.

[beccaelizabeth]

If you're talking about space travel in the distant future these things might be options. But I was thinking more, if we made a space colony today. There's some plans that make it doable if we're willing to use nukes for propulsion.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

We still should pack the colonies full of humans-in-cans. Most people will just sit around all day watching free-fall cat videos on SpaceTube anyway, so no need for limbs. And if we need to repopulate the Earth after an apocolypse, we can regrow the limbs and genitalia if and when that happens.

[beccaelizabeth]

er, you know we can't actually regrow limbs or genitalia, right? I mean, that's not a technology we have now, or anywhere near close to it for the next couple of decades.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

NOW you tell me!