Dilandu wrote:Bluestrike2 wrote:If they wanted to have a more active role, the command crew’s tech base would have allowed them to monitor the planetary population and remove anyone who jumped a bit too far. Take them to the enclave, explain the situation, and give them a choice: return home and work with the command crew, stay in the enclave, or sit in cryo until your genius can be safely appreciated. Beyond that, they could subtly manipulate events and philosophies, reintroduce the scientific method at some optimal point to lay the ground work, and generally getting things ready for when they can kick things off into high gear.
And this could pretty well led to another bad situation: the technocratic elite in enclaves which controlled and suppressed the outside population for centuries under the pretext of "Gbaba threat".
Sure, but that sort of control and oversight would be intrinsically tied to sophisticated AI systems even though you aren't tagging everyone. It would be simple enough to program in certain fixed restrictions on both what's made accessible to human users and what they can do with it. Add in other restraints, such as cutting off access to various TF tech if it's abused, and you've got a strong incentive to avoid such temptations.
With that said, I do think that a command staff becoming resentful or otherwise corrupted would be one of the risks the mission planners would have at least considered. Maybe not with alarm for the first generation, but with the following ones even though I don’t think it was a
significant risk relative to everything else. Their extended lifespans would go a long way towards hedging against that; with the majority of the original command crew still around to help raise their children and grandchildren, and with them firsthand knowledge of the threat *and* what's needed to be able to stand up to the Gbaba, I think you'd have a collective ethos that's remarkably resistant to such temptations (whether they be bitterness or a desire for personal power).
Part of that would be because of who they are: almost all of them are military personal. Everything suggests that the TF grew out of western democratic traditions; if that's the case, then it suggests that their military traditions carried over as well. Obedience to the Constitution and elected civilian control, as well as finely-honed principles of honor and a commitment to duty, are all bone-deep cultural principles in the military. They're drilled into its members at every level from the very beginning. It's one reason why the military accepts and recognizes civilian control as "the proper subordination of a competent, professional military to the ends of policy as determined by civilian authority" (Samuel Huntingdon) so absolutely.
The risk of a widespread military coup in the United States is effectively zero. The same would likely hold true for the Terran Federation. That also explains why they didn’t mutiny against Langhorne when they learned what he did and his actions in pushing Shan-wei and those who would vote against him off the Administrative Council. Despite his actions, they still recognized his role as chief administrator and accepted the situation once it was voted on by the civilian government. It wasn’t until after a brutal act of mass murder that a number of command crew members were willing to mutiny.
Besides that military ethos, they were all raised in a unified, democratic culture that shaped *all* of their political experiences. Abandoning it entirely is a significant step, the sort that’s really unlikely absent some overriding factor. The goal of the original command staff, as well as any AIs and virtual personalities present, would be to reinforce those ideals and prevent any deviations from arising in the first place.
The other major factor would, of course, be their numbers: textev suggests that all TF ships were heavily automated with small crews. There weren’t a large number of them present; maybe a few thousand at most.
Even if their total fertility rate was equivalent to that of the United States today (not a guarantee, since the TF’s culture saw bringing children into a doomed world as irresponsible and selfish—not a mindset that’s easy to change quickly), they’d never have the sort of numbers needed to build an authoritarian planetary government capable of going interstellar while also building up a military force capable of holding off the Gbaba or any other species that might threaten them (remember, they traveled ten years in hyper across a region of space they have zero knowledge of). To build up their forces and colonies, they’d have to integrate non-enclave society in massive numbers. While simultaneously educating them and giving them access to modern tech.
In any case, the religious approach didn’t really avoid the possibility of an abusive, authoritarian power. It created one all on its own and gave it divine backing. In truth, it’s probably an even worse outcome. The people in the Temple might not understand the technology behind its mystic systems, but the end result is the same: they’re isolated in a cocoon that separates them from the normal Safeholdian experience.
