Thu 26 Jun 2008
It is the year Eleventy-Billion CE. The last vestiges of humanity have boarded the spaceship that soon will take flight toward what we hope is a habitable star system (Glorb-32, if you’re curious) some 10000 light years away. The ship can only move at half the speed of light, so the journey will take approximately 20 thousand years. Given that we have aboard a library of all human knowledge to date and the means to continually update that knowledge base, what procedures and protocols would you set in place to assure that the future settlers of Planet Glorb have the necessary cultural and intellectual equipment in place to successfully colonize the planet? Remember, they’ve been on the ship for twice as long as recorded human history on Earth. They’ve never set foot on a planet, never tilled a field, never dug a mine, never swam in a river. What methods could be used to make sure that our colonists are ready to leave the womb of the ship and start anew on Planet Glorb?
Posted by BitterOldPunkOkay, let's hear it.
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“they’ve been on the ship for twice as long as recorded human history on Earth.”
Shoot, why not just stay on the ship at that point?
Because then they’d still be enslaved by the evil robots, of course.
Did I not mention the evil robots? Yeah, there are evil robots.
20,000 years is a long shelf-life for technical documentation, that’s for sure. If they’re going to need to know how to handle a variety of civil engineering tasks, it might be a good idea to make sure that the documentation is handled symbolically: pictograms, video, maybe a formal symbolic language of some sort.
Some means of preventing a religious purge of significant portions of this documentation would be good, too. Or preventing mass suicide or some other breakdown of civilization during the trip. Which sounds like a huge sociological challenge — Eideteker’s question is pretty good, robots or no, because after 300 generations what was motivationally clear to the original colonists might be bizarre and frightening to their descendents.
Trippy, man.
So… didja see WALL-E last night?
This is a great question, actually, but there is a slight flaw in the premise. Yes, the humans aboard the Glorb Express have been en route for 20K years– to a 3rd-party observer. At speeds of a significant fraction of c, relativity kicks in. I don’t know how long it would be from their perspective, since one would have to calculate acceleration & deceleration as well… but, it’s likely to be much shorter than 20,000 years to the folks aboard.
I would approach this problem similarly to the Orson Scott Card (yeah yeah, I know) book “Lovelock,” where there is a technologically advanced society whose members live & work most of the time in an agrarian society while aboard. This way, while they’re on the ship they can be “practicing” for the real thing. The idea is that the constant acceleration of the ship provides “gravity,” so they’d be able to run around as per normal while in flight. I forget what happened during the shift to deceleration, but I remember it was fucking awful for everyone involved.
I DID see Wall-E (It’s brilliant! Go see it!) but I posted this question first, I swear. The question was actually prompted by my re-reading of Gene Wolfe’s Urth of the New Sun. The way the Ship exists outside of time and has developed its own ecology and culture was a really fascinating idea. How far removed from humanity can you get and still be human?
How far removed from humanity can you get and still be human?
You seem to be defining “humanity” as whatever we’re up to these days. That doesn’t make sense to me. Our ancestors of 20,000 years ago, who made those amazing cave paintings and had a stability of civilization we can only envy (since the style of the paintings remained constant for many thousands of years), would probably not see us as “human” in any sense they recognized (THEY HAVE FORGOTTEN THE SPIRIT OF THE BISON), but we think we’re human, and we should be willing to accord the same attribute to any of our descendants, no matter how different their culture and no matter how much we wish they’d get off our lawn.
That said, I think you’re going to have to have the robots keep them in line and push them out the door when the time comes.