penny wrote:I long for a vacation to see the Great Wall of China. It is on my bucket list. I once longed to see Niagara Falls from both sides of the Falls. That is now off my bucket list. The Grand Canyon. Amsterdam's Red Light District. The Black Forest. And the many of the many castles around the globe have all been conquered by the inner curiosity that will always be a part of mankind.
Those are touristic things. It's something you want to do because you're told they're nice, not because you've got memory of their being nice. I've been to the Amsterdam Red Light District and found it funny in my 20s, but it's not something I'd long to repeat now. I've also visited Brussels and was
very disappointed when we finally arrived at the Manneken Pis. It did not live to all its hype. On the other hand, I've lived in Paris, and I'd visit it again in a pinch.
I imagine there are huge gathering areas aboard ship to watch television both as entertainment, and as a reminder of the journey, the mission, and from whence and why they came. I have always imagined versions of the old drive-in movie theaters aboard generation ships; for those of us who are old enough to have experienced them. And where has the average man gotten ideas of where he would love to vacation? From television.
A sense of community and duty is good. But you know teenagers. Try to convince them to go on a family trip to somewhere that is on their parents' bucket list, not somewhere "fun."
I think you take for granted the living conditions aboard ship. On TV, the kids will see bicycles. Snow sleds. Snow! Rain! Running until your heart is content. Dirt! Sandboxes! Baseball. Football. Making out with girls! Etc.
The adults will see other adults owning their own homes. Making love without having to worry about unwanted pregnancies. Making love in a bed in a home where there is total privacy where one can run around naked; and not having to steal a quickie in the bowels of a stinky ship because you have to. Not want to. That surely must be romantic.
And I think you take for granted the living conditions aboard ship being poor. A generational ship is probably huge in volume, though low in density because it has huge open spaces. In order to have a viable ecosystem and with plenty of living area, this is probably a large-diameter cylinder world with engines, so it actually has a huge open, central space, with homes and yards on them. It might even have wind. There's no reason why people couldn't ride bikes aboard ship. It would be good exercise. Though they might have to have learned to deal with the Coriolis, depending on the radius, and the sports that would have developed along the way wouldn't apply on-planet any longer.
There would probably not be any owned homes. All property would be communal and procreation may be restricted due to limited resources. But the families that did get to get a licence to have kids would be assigned a family home.
And besides, why would they watch videos of kids on bikes? Those colony ships are supposed to be launched 300 to 450 years from today (
Calvin's Hope was launched on 220 PD, so 2326 CE), so what will kids be watching then? Why won't their main entertainment be VR?
I also repeat that the population of the Sol System will by then also have a substantial portion off Earth. It won't be majority yet, but there may be as many as a billion people off planet, with Earth's population in the 15 to 20 billion. What mode of entertainment will apply to them?
And where would the colonists be recruited from? There's a good chance they came from space. Granted, they may be going to colonise because they were denied the opportunity to live on the planet, so they wanted to get one of their own. But all their experience of living aboard space stations would transfer to their kids and grandkids, who by then may no longer have the same longing because they don't see a planet off their portholes.
BTW, what form of birth control will be practiced? Where will medicines come from aboard a generation ship? Adults and children alike will see people in movies wanting to get out of small towns. Well, you can't get any smaller than the town aboard a generation ship.
I can only speculate, but it shouldn't be difficult to medically force people to be sterile unless given permission. The medicines, like food, will have to be made from local resources.
A generation ship of 50 to 100,000 people isn't a "small town" by today's standards. But I'll grant you it may be in 350 years. This is all the more reason you should launch a fleet of ships, so if you want to get away from your parents or some quarrelsome neighbours you just can't mend fences with, you move to another ship.
That said, "getting out of a small town" is driven in part by there being better economic opportunity in the bigger town, which requires feedback from those who have tried that. Since no one will have done that in generations, there would be no impetus to do so.
I disagree with that. Though I do understand your sentiment. That attitude commonly hails from people who have never ventured outside of their own city, let alone their own state or country; and who have never had the urge to. But the average person I think would readily disagree. I guess what I am trying to say is that the human experience is "the grass is always greener on the other side."
You're forgetting the continuation to that, which is that once you get to the other side, it's not as green as you thought it would be. And it smells, and it needs tending to stay green. And yet it looks green on a further, other side.
There is no grass aboard ship.
Of course there is. There should be large parks and green areas too. And I'm talking even the real kind, not astroturf that probably does exist in even greater quantities and may be enough for people.
I personally imagine that the living conditions on a generation ship is worse than the worse small town. One does not have to have been anywhere else to want to leave that small town in the rear view mirror.
Maybe, but that's a recipe for a failed expedition before it even arrives. If people aren't happy living their entire lives aboard the ship, they will revolt and the second generation could decide to turn around. You have to give people a good living condition and give their kids hope for a good one too. That's why they may arrive thinking it's perfectly fine to continue aboard ship.
I just do not see aimlessly wandering the heavens making no contribution to mankind and only meeting the same people in your small town as living. Your mileage may vary. They have been there and done that. Boldly going where no man has gone before for the people aboard a generation ship translates to finally seeing a planet.
Starting new colonies is making contributions to mankind. Imagine being immortalised forever on the same annals as Columbus and Magellan as the first captain to have reached the edge of the Galaxy?
Can you imagine crime aboard? Rape, theft, murder? Jails? How long do you incarcerate them? If you ever free them they will live in your "town," forever.
Crime is a very good question. You can't incarcerate a lot of people who don't produce to your ship, and yet consume resources. But given that it's a completely artificial environment, with sensors everywhere, unpunished crime may also be unheard of. Crime exists in part because the criminal thinks they won't get caught.
What a hell of a way of life for all concerned. There is already a limited amount of suitors aboard. Adults and children need romance. Making a pit stop and decreasing the population aboard the ship, ripping children from their friends and girlfriends and doing the same for the adults will make people detest that ship for certain. At least when this happens on the planet you will meet new people, eventually. Who will stay aboard? Who will go groundside? Adults? Children? Families only? Sounds cruel in real life.
And yet we make those decisions today. Parents get job opportunities far away and must decide whether to take them or not; kids are ripped from their friends because of this. And then they go to college or find employment elsewhere, moving to other places.
And do remember that minimum population needed to properly seed a planet.
Which you can regrow to on your long voyage there. You don't need to set out with the final tally.
Was boarding the ship in the first place negligent? Unfair question isn't it? The original mission was made to escape the horrors of the Final Wars. No?
No, the Final Wars hadn't happened yet and wouldn't happen for another 600 years. It was to escape whatever the colonists thought was oppressing them, though.
But my point stands that the second generation may view that as a folly: it couldn't have been that bad, could it? The grass must have been greener behind us than what the "old folk" keep telling us.
And going back to the original point of this entire discussion: if your expedition has to find the perfect conditions on arrival, lest everyone die, that's the epitome of recklessness and negligence. You must give them a contingency if things are not as ideal as you'd thought they'd be.
Medicine and the medical establishment itself will be limited aboard a generation ship. Heck, how many people even want to go into the medical field per thousand people. Are you assuming forced careers? Forced relationships? The politics aboard ship is already beginning to sound like a third world communist country. Life aboard a generation ship probably isn't all that different from living in North Korea from the sounds of it.
There's also a supply and demand question. There will be fields with open positions and fields without them. If you must find work, then you find the work that is available.
With modern medicine, they should be able to make do with 1 doctor per 1000 people, so they won't need more than 50 to 100 of them in the entire ship. However, crew positions (maintenance, etc.) will consume a lot more.
I hear what you're saying about looking like North Korea. As I said above, you
can't do that. First, if you did, then wouldn't you agree it was negligent of you to subject your children to it? So, second, you design your expedition so it isn't, that there's plenty of surplus resource and energy budget so people can choose (within reason) their vocations, and you don't subject them to authoritarian control.
How will people aboard a generation ship know about the advances of medicine centuries down the road? Even a year down the road? If they can receive communication from the outside world, why would that communication contain trade secrets from the medical establishment?
They may not, but that's a good point. I imagine they have a deal with pharmaceuticals and technology companies to supply with third-to-last generation content or so for the next 5 years, then second-to-last, then last generation, etc. Given time lag in transmitting back, even if they tried to, by the time the origin point heard that it would no longer be latest gen tech. They will be out of the state of the art by 20 years by then, but it will be still advancing.
