Comments on: Cultural drift and knowledge transmission…. IN SPAAAAACE!

By: languagehat

languagehat — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 18:46:52 +0000

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.

By: BitterOldPunk

BitterOldPunk — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 15:22:15 +0000

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?

By: synaesthetichaze

synaesthetichaze — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 14:57:48 +0000

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.

By: Meatbomb

Meatbomb — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 10:51:15 +0000

Trippy, man.

By: Josh Millard

Josh Millard — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:50:15 +0000

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.

By: BitterOldPunk

BitterOldPunk — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:51:52 +0000

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.

By: Eideteker

Eideteker — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:21:26 +0000

“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?