Bored burbling on space colonies and volunteer communities

[beccaelizabeth]

Today I successfully managed to only play The Sims for a coyple of hours.
... it got more interesting once I learned from the internet how to make whims show again.
... but not by much.

The trouble is after that I just kind of sat here and stared at the tv.
The tv has in the whole not been on.



I watched a few songvids I have seen before (Captain Cold and Heatwave, Flash and Reverse Flash) but Youtube is being rubbish about recommendations. I only use it to watch songvids, why is half my recs page breaking news? I do not go to the vids place to see the real world.

It's also rubbish because it doesn't filter by pairing. I should probably go on Ao3.
What's the magic words to make it give you vids?
But then I'd have to do a lot of searches to make them go on the tv.
or give up and get an account and tell it to my tv.
ugh.
modern stuff, so convenient and yet not.



I read tumblr and decided it does not really improve my day. Just in general, not anyone in particular. Somthing about the format means just images go past the eyes and then it's later and where did that day go?

Also everything is Good Omens and while I am happy about the show apparently being good I feel I have seen it in gif form several times over now, and it's starting to feel like drinking from the firehose. New content is nice and fandom just overflowing all at once is super cool but I'm not going to see it until it's on the BBC or DVD so it's... frustrating? And, also, flooding out all things.

Except bits of reality.





I was thinking space colonies again so I sat down today to do town planning for 40,000 people, or make a list of useful books, or something. But then I found out Salisbury has 40K people. And then I got sidetracked via Ely Cathedral to read about the Withburga controversy again. And then the battery was running out so I put the tablet away to go read a book.

And then I failed to read a book.


It's boring in my brain lately.




The thing with taking forty thousand of your friends and starting over in a new world though... that would be so tricky. Finding enough friends that could get along. Because someone on tumblr pointed out you'd choose your network of people and they'd choose and they'd choose and so on out, so you wouldn't personally screen or read the cvs of forty thousand people. But. You know on Facebook there's always that one person who is like politically your complete opposite, but for some reason unfriending them would be Drama? Imagine that, but you're on another planet and there's literally no new people unless you make them. Instead of vaguely racist relatives a couple of degrees away who you only have to see at Events, there's only one town, and they live in it. And since there's so few of you, some of you are the government. And whoever brought the most friendfriends is probably driving. And somehow back on Earth this seemed like a good thing.



I have been lurky on the internet and not exactly connected to hear all the Drama from assorted communities, but I hear there is always Drama.

Now imagine that when the Drama is about resource allocation not for parties at conventions but for food for the survival of every human on that planet.



I mean when it's regular politics we can in theory go to meetings and talk to our representatives and suchlike, but despite knowing a bunch of people talking politics on the internet at one time or another, it always seems that the people who get to make actual decisions are somehow Different. Further away. Sincerely unlikely to listen. Possibly having different Drama with bigger words.

But now I'm thinking about long running conventions and what happens with them eventually, and wondering how much of that would apply to going and living on another planet.

And the thing is any community has problems with people being two faced, and once you are out in the middle of nowhere it's a very bad time to figure out if that's your mission critical personnel.



Also I hear bits about volunteering that makes it seem like all the local charity work is done by the same people? In like different hats? Different shops, different places, same few people. It's already a demographic problem because a lot of them are the same age. But imagine trying to run a new community when you need to find and gather up the people who Do Things... but also find ways to distribute them to the ones that are In Charge each have their own bit, or just, stack the personality conflicts so the whole colony doesn't fall down.



Basically I have read science fiction where they're all going to fight some aliens or where they've got to outsmart the planet, but I have not read ones where they have the problems of the average volunteer run event and or organisation, and yet once we're on a new planet we're all volunteers.

Unless you want to reinvent hierarchy money and inequality for the new world.

I don't know.

It just seems like the human drama has the potential to be of a different and very familiar quality.




But I did read a story in the latest Asimov's that treated the two guys going in a spaceship as basically roommate drama, but like, turned up to Murder. Door closed door open door closed door open door closed NO DOOR NOW, DECOMPRESSION DANGER WHO? Which is all very petty human and neat. But it was a professional mission. With security clearance. And yet all the Ominous Warnings were only discovered after it launched? I had trouble believing thqt bit. Like, knowing but not thinking it matters, sure, but not knowing, in this surveillance age? Seemed awkward.

But also in thwt one they werenlt day shift night shift they were taking tuns in some kind of sci fi long term suspension, so once one of them decides the other is intolerable, I couldnlt figure out why they'd let him wake up. I mean they got a very viscerally satisfying murder attempt in that way, but not a very effective on. Just... keep them down, make them the problem of the whole community when you get somewhere that has one again. I don't know, it seemed inefficient.

Maybe I missed something.




ANYway, there are already fictions on the them of What If Roommate But Forever, and that's very Relatable.

But I guess once you get to a certain level of everyday humanity then you're just, like, writing a story. Of ordinary people. And then them being on another planet might be less than SFnal?

But it's like those Survivors type stories where almost everyone's dead. Except half the point of those ones is that the plague isn't fair and the people who live aren't the ones you personally would choose. But what if you did choose, and had every expectation of it turning out nice, and then it's... human?



I feel I need more social skills to write any such thung. And also to have left the house kore often in my whole life.
But.
Story.





I was reading about cities, which in teh UK are arbitrary designations but usually include a cathedral, and a lot of these settlements had a good set of roads and or rivers and then a religious community settled in. Or a military one sometimes, but, sometimes it starts with an Abbey? And like, a community of True Believers building something new, that sounds like a space colony.


Thing is though I see so many events shutting down because support dwindled away. Existing people stop coming, their network goes away, eventually there's a handful left wondering where it all went, and that happens over and over. Seems like there's a problem getting people to join in with the existing things when they could be setting something up from scratch.

... I dream on space colonies, I have noticed this tendency in myself.

Thing is the kind of people good at setting up a new thing and the kind of people good at keeping it going and the kind of people good at keeping it fresh by inviting new people in, they're often not the same kinds of people? And that how do we recruit thing can be very vs how do we preserve what we already like. So that would very much apply to new town in space.


And whilst retaining initial investment would be really easy if it was a one way trip, there's only so depressing a world can be and work. And the next generation? Kind of need recruited? For the task of building a world?

Thqt comes up a lot in terraforming fiction, where the new people born there have no emotional attachment to Eqrth conditions and just... don't build an Earth.

But it's also about everything else everyone dreamed of on the way to a new world. How do you get your kids to dream the same dreams? Because in the specifics they will not, they'll think of new things you wouldn't have imagined, as they should. But you want to set some parameters. Like you wouldn't have to bring vaguely racist relatives if you made them de novo on accident, and an isolated community could easily set itself up with a problem with outsiders.



In some ways you need to check a colony plan across at least three generations where it's still close enough to other humans to do something about if corrections come up. But in other ways it won't be able to replicate the conditions, if there are other humans. You'd want to build a community thqt somehow magically the kids wouldn't want to leave, even with the rewards available in the wider world, because then you could prove your new world could work without making the kids miserable. But humans kind of don't work like that? And if they do it's a concern that they have some deep suspicion going on about the neighbours, because otherwise the reaching out part would want to go see them.



New worlds would be *difficult*.



And if you want to encourage new settlers that didn't grow there from the initial wave... well there'd be so many new influences coming in.


And none of this is new, this is a lot like old Earth stuff, new communities meeting, traditional ways of life trying to hold on, island life trying to keep any people on the island. Lots of existing stuff.



... putting it on a new planet is almost the only way left to up the isolation in terms of travel time. The other being to go post apoc. And signal time would remain the same anywhere on Earth so you could always talk... but not in the same way between planets, maybe. So, isolation stories be very far flung now, cause they have to be.




Wanting to start again somewhere else is very like wanting to fort up in a nice castle, and neither really answers problems, let alone optimally.

The reaching out is the only way to sort things out.



... i just dont know what to do with a story that has, like, all this real world in it.



... I like Star Trek, but they kept the ships an jnreasonably controlled environment, just compares with the number of opinions you could have in a community that sized. Seek out new life and new civilisations... but all agree about genetic modification and cloning? Odd.

Making new deals with whoever we find is the good bit though.

Along with keeping the deals we have.





Ah well. Shall see what happens.



Might think of a plot, might not.