Planning a Colony: Who to bring?
Jul. 7th, 2013 11:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI tried to start a game on tumblr of Starship Crew, add a person and pass it on. Then imagine what kind of adventures would need that crew, and who that crew would need to have adventures. But I don't know many people yet so it not working as a game.
With a starship for storytelling purposes, you need adventures, you need a slightly lopsided crew that has needs they can't meet, it's more like designing an RPG party than anything sensible. Real life ships can go all the way up to floating cities. Sensible well designed crews have someone to do almost any job you can think of.
Space colonies need that, only more so. Any skill you do not bring with you either needs to be book/video learning compatible, or it will die out in that colony. The next generation cannot have a skill that the first generation lack, unless they teach it to themselves. There could be much reinvention of the wheel involved.
So I was wondering who to bring. You need food people, from growing to serving. You need security people, dealing with threats both internal and external, crime and invasions. You need health people, from carers doing the bathroom needs daily to doctors doing surgery once or twice per lifetime. Sustaining the skills of the rarer requirements is very, very hard indeed, and probably you're just going to have very rusty low skills to work with. That applies to everything from banquets to military action to emergency surgery. Large populations support dedicated specialists who train intensively and then use those skills over wide geographic areas, hence a lot more often. If you have two hundred people on the planet, some stuff just will not come up.
... and now I'm resisting a stuff that comes up pun, because there's other possible work could need doing. Every colony would have to decide: Do you bring sex workers?
Pretty much only Firefly goes there, though Star Trek kind of has a specialist planet. But throughout history and a wide range of different communities, people have sex, for reasons other than romance. Framework can be plain economic transaction, cultural like entertainers, or religious like temple workers. Lots of variations. But the oldest profession do seem to find a way.
So, do you deliberately bring someone of that speciality?
It would be one of the culture defining / defined by culture decisions, methinks.
But then there's other stuff, like dancing. Do you decide that dancers are essential personnel? Or musicians? Do you expect everyone to multitask and only bring scientists with a cultural speciality? Do you get all puritan and decide humanity doesn't need dance or music? Places have tried it but honestly it never seems to stick. You get religious communities making vows to give up dance and music and then somehow deciding that this particular rhythmic form is not in fact either. I don't know, leaving it behind seems like leaving out a large chunk of being human.
So do you bring bollywood, or ballroom, or belly dance, or burlesque? Pole dancers? Dance lessons, studios, stage performers? If you're going to have acts on a stage you need to plan your whole community to have a stage, or else people will be trying to fit performances into spaces intended to get maximum efficiency from packing a starship. And they'll do it, because humans are like that. There's entire dance forms that are basically bouncing and wiggling on the spot. Some of them associated with water ships already. Similarly with music, you've got a lot of instruments that pack small, and historically have been made by bored people with a bit of leftover anything and some time on their hands. Not bringing musical instruments in effect means having some of your supplies retasked to the entertainment budget, with varying degrees of skill.
So do you pack an orchestra and all their instruments, and just keep looking until you've found people with farming and science for their day jobs?
Even if everyone is intended to multi task, you probably prioritised somewhere. Excellent scientist and only passable piano player? Or cultural treasure, who can probably teach high school science?
My hypothetical 200 person colony divided into four shifts of 50 people, what if each emphasised a different skill set? All the farmers on days, all the entertainers on evenings? But health and security would have to be evenly divided, or closer to it, since people get ill or do bad things at all times of day and night. And firefighters would need to be on standby at all times. Probably with 200 people you wouldn't need a fire station manned all the time, it'd be smaller than school and schools don't have their own fire station, but you'd need someone who had all the knowing of fires or else the colony wouldn't be able to pass it on.
In the here now there's a lot of workers and they choose what they want to do and bosses choose among them. Many more workers than jobs. Except some essential jobs have trouble finding workers, which makes no sense. Seems like proper planning could fix that. Just it would be proper planning that tells people what they're going to do with the rest of their lives.
200 is very small. Very. Hard to imagine.
Even 20,000 is hard to imagine as an entire planetary population.
Planning a medieval city from RPG supplements involves planning small communities where nobody travels very far. So there's existing numbers for who ends up doing what, they're just very low tech. Medieval demographics made easy, or the Magical Medieval City Guide. The MMCG has as their top four most common Beggars, Housewives, Laborers, Elderly & Infirm; their frequency ranges from 1 in 7 to 1 in 12. In a well organised high tech society what do the numbers look like? Do you really get 1 in 7 unemployed people and then 1 in 12 ill or disabled people? That's a large slice of your society that's not doing work. Those numbers are available in a number of countries in the here now, I should look them up. What kind of settings tweaks changes the numbers though?
I need to study a different degree. ... I don't think society design is a degree, but I'm sure there's lots of things that are like all the parts.
When the MMCG starts being specific it reckons you need a whole lot of cobblers, clothiers, launderers, grocers, and dairy sellers. Would a colony pack a washing machine each or have a central laundry? Would you employ people to do the laundry or make all your specialists take time to do it themselves? Then there's bricklayers, which would need tweaking for different building materials, but I can see why they'd be common in an expansion phase, and you'd need maintenance people ever after.
But right up there at 1 in 160, there's prostitutes. So that table reckons my 200 person colony would have one prostitute, and a 1 in 5 chance of a second.
That's a medieval society, but really, does that wear off?
Possibly if there's less rules about sex then it do. ... now I'm thinking how complex it would get having a modern kind of multiple dating love life in a colony that small. Say there's 50 people per shift and 25 per gender. Is it really implausible to date 25 people in a lifetime now? I have no clue. But then you'd either end up having dated everyone you worked with or you'd date people on a different timetable from you.
... at this point I realise my imaginary society design would work better if I knew more about dating. Woe.
ANYways, on TV I've seen spaceships bring barbers (1 in 250) or psychological counsellors (not on the list, possibly taking over functions of clergy, 1 in 50). So now I'm looking over all the other professions and wondering what stories they have.
... stories I read are still mostly about people fighting and fucking. Possibly figuring out a bricklayer's story needs to be in a different genre than my usual, to make the bricks part relevant.
If you pack people in priority of how difficult it would be to reinvent it yourself or learn it from videos, you get a very different list than if you pack people based on how often their work is needed. Since on the whole carers are needed much more often than acrobats. And if you sort it by how likely people are to want to reinvent it themselves you sift things different again.
So many possibilities.
With a starship for storytelling purposes, you need adventures, you need a slightly lopsided crew that has needs they can't meet, it's more like designing an RPG party than anything sensible. Real life ships can go all the way up to floating cities. Sensible well designed crews have someone to do almost any job you can think of.
Space colonies need that, only more so. Any skill you do not bring with you either needs to be book/video learning compatible, or it will die out in that colony. The next generation cannot have a skill that the first generation lack, unless they teach it to themselves. There could be much reinvention of the wheel involved.
So I was wondering who to bring. You need food people, from growing to serving. You need security people, dealing with threats both internal and external, crime and invasions. You need health people, from carers doing the bathroom needs daily to doctors doing surgery once or twice per lifetime. Sustaining the skills of the rarer requirements is very, very hard indeed, and probably you're just going to have very rusty low skills to work with. That applies to everything from banquets to military action to emergency surgery. Large populations support dedicated specialists who train intensively and then use those skills over wide geographic areas, hence a lot more often. If you have two hundred people on the planet, some stuff just will not come up.
... and now I'm resisting a stuff that comes up pun, because there's other possible work could need doing. Every colony would have to decide: Do you bring sex workers?
Pretty much only Firefly goes there, though Star Trek kind of has a specialist planet. But throughout history and a wide range of different communities, people have sex, for reasons other than romance. Framework can be plain economic transaction, cultural like entertainers, or religious like temple workers. Lots of variations. But the oldest profession do seem to find a way.
So, do you deliberately bring someone of that speciality?
It would be one of the culture defining / defined by culture decisions, methinks.
But then there's other stuff, like dancing. Do you decide that dancers are essential personnel? Or musicians? Do you expect everyone to multitask and only bring scientists with a cultural speciality? Do you get all puritan and decide humanity doesn't need dance or music? Places have tried it but honestly it never seems to stick. You get religious communities making vows to give up dance and music and then somehow deciding that this particular rhythmic form is not in fact either. I don't know, leaving it behind seems like leaving out a large chunk of being human.
So do you bring bollywood, or ballroom, or belly dance, or burlesque? Pole dancers? Dance lessons, studios, stage performers? If you're going to have acts on a stage you need to plan your whole community to have a stage, or else people will be trying to fit performances into spaces intended to get maximum efficiency from packing a starship. And they'll do it, because humans are like that. There's entire dance forms that are basically bouncing and wiggling on the spot. Some of them associated with water ships already. Similarly with music, you've got a lot of instruments that pack small, and historically have been made by bored people with a bit of leftover anything and some time on their hands. Not bringing musical instruments in effect means having some of your supplies retasked to the entertainment budget, with varying degrees of skill.
So do you pack an orchestra and all their instruments, and just keep looking until you've found people with farming and science for their day jobs?
Even if everyone is intended to multi task, you probably prioritised somewhere. Excellent scientist and only passable piano player? Or cultural treasure, who can probably teach high school science?
My hypothetical 200 person colony divided into four shifts of 50 people, what if each emphasised a different skill set? All the farmers on days, all the entertainers on evenings? But health and security would have to be evenly divided, or closer to it, since people get ill or do bad things at all times of day and night. And firefighters would need to be on standby at all times. Probably with 200 people you wouldn't need a fire station manned all the time, it'd be smaller than school and schools don't have their own fire station, but you'd need someone who had all the knowing of fires or else the colony wouldn't be able to pass it on.
In the here now there's a lot of workers and they choose what they want to do and bosses choose among them. Many more workers than jobs. Except some essential jobs have trouble finding workers, which makes no sense. Seems like proper planning could fix that. Just it would be proper planning that tells people what they're going to do with the rest of their lives.
200 is very small. Very. Hard to imagine.
Even 20,000 is hard to imagine as an entire planetary population.
Planning a medieval city from RPG supplements involves planning small communities where nobody travels very far. So there's existing numbers for who ends up doing what, they're just very low tech. Medieval demographics made easy, or the Magical Medieval City Guide. The MMCG has as their top four most common Beggars, Housewives, Laborers, Elderly & Infirm; their frequency ranges from 1 in 7 to 1 in 12. In a well organised high tech society what do the numbers look like? Do you really get 1 in 7 unemployed people and then 1 in 12 ill or disabled people? That's a large slice of your society that's not doing work. Those numbers are available in a number of countries in the here now, I should look them up. What kind of settings tweaks changes the numbers though?
I need to study a different degree. ... I don't think society design is a degree, but I'm sure there's lots of things that are like all the parts.
When the MMCG starts being specific it reckons you need a whole lot of cobblers, clothiers, launderers, grocers, and dairy sellers. Would a colony pack a washing machine each or have a central laundry? Would you employ people to do the laundry or make all your specialists take time to do it themselves? Then there's bricklayers, which would need tweaking for different building materials, but I can see why they'd be common in an expansion phase, and you'd need maintenance people ever after.
But right up there at 1 in 160, there's prostitutes. So that table reckons my 200 person colony would have one prostitute, and a 1 in 5 chance of a second.
That's a medieval society, but really, does that wear off?
Possibly if there's less rules about sex then it do. ... now I'm thinking how complex it would get having a modern kind of multiple dating love life in a colony that small. Say there's 50 people per shift and 25 per gender. Is it really implausible to date 25 people in a lifetime now? I have no clue. But then you'd either end up having dated everyone you worked with or you'd date people on a different timetable from you.
... at this point I realise my imaginary society design would work better if I knew more about dating. Woe.
ANYways, on TV I've seen spaceships bring barbers (1 in 250) or psychological counsellors (not on the list, possibly taking over functions of clergy, 1 in 50). So now I'm looking over all the other professions and wondering what stories they have.
... stories I read are still mostly about people fighting and fucking. Possibly figuring out a bricklayer's story needs to be in a different genre than my usual, to make the bricks part relevant.
If you pack people in priority of how difficult it would be to reinvent it yourself or learn it from videos, you get a very different list than if you pack people based on how often their work is needed. Since on the whole carers are needed much more often than acrobats. And if you sort it by how likely people are to want to reinvent it themselves you sift things different again.
So many possibilities.