Would it be immoral to send out a generation starship?

[kevindavis007]

If human beings are ever to colonise other planets – which might become necessary for the survival of the species, given how far we have degraded this one – they will almost certainly have to use generation ships: spaceships that will support not just those who set out on them, but also their descendants. The vast distances between Earth and the nearest habitable planets, combined with the fact that we are unlikely ever to invent a way of travelling that exceeds the speed of light, ensures that many generations will be born, raised and die on board such a ship before it arrives at its destination.


A generation ship would have to be a whole society in microcosm, with hospitals and schools, living quarters and perhaps entertainment districts, a security force, maybe even a judiciary. It would need to be able to provide food for its crew, and that might require agriculture or aquaculture, perhaps even domestic animals (which might also be needed for the colonisation effort). Its design therefore presents a major challenge: not just to engineers but also to social scientists. How should the crew be selected and the environment structured to minimise interpersonal conflict? What size of population is optimal for it to remain committed to the single overarching project of colonising a new planet without too much of a risk of self-destructive boredom or excessive narrowing of the gene pool? Does mental health require that a quasi-natural environment be recreated within the ship (with trees, grass and perhaps undomesticated birds and small animals)?


As well as the technological and social challenges confronting the designers of such ships, there are fascinating philosophical and ethical issues that arise. The issue I want to focus on concerns the ethics of a project that locks the next generation into a form of living, the inauguration of which they had no say over, and that ensures their options are extremely limited.


A generation ship can work only if most of the children born aboard can be trained to become the next generation of crew. They will have little or no choice over what kind of project they pursue. At best, they will have a range of shipboard careers to choose between: chef, gardener, engineer, pilot, and so on. Given that allocation to roles must be tightly controlled, they might not even have that degree of choice, since once a sufficient number of people have enrolled in chef training, for example, there will be no more places available. They will not be able to choose a life of contemplation, of withdrawal into a religious community or (to take a role that is more common in the society their parents leave behind) of working in a service industry. They will not be able to choose part-time or full-time work, and so on.


Read more: http://www.interstellar-news.net/2016/06/would-it-be-immoral-to-send-out.html

[Sanguine]

Of course they have to start with the "given how far we have degraded this one". 

Overall an interesting question.  As for the gene pool, obviously you would start with a fair amount of diversity, and, I guess like cattle breeding, you could bring straws from other men to further widen the possibilities. 

As for working and children, it is only fairly recently and in 1st world societies that doing otherwise has even been an option, so, no, assuming that supporting oneself is an integral part of life is not an ethical issue in my opinion. 

[Chieftain]

More nonsense.  Nobody can even point to a destination, much less build a ship, much less come up with a power plant.

Without anything of substance to consider it is ridiculous to try and judge the morality of anything.

 

[geronl]

It is way off in the future. The idea that it is immoral because we'll mess another planet up is ridiculous. The idea that it is immoral to raise children on a ship might be an interesting question. I guess it would depend on the ship.

[bolobaby]

"which might become necessary for the survival of the species, given how far we have degraded this one"

Lost me right there with that lie.

[Chieftain]

All right Boys and Girls, Science Class is in session.

Open your laptops and Wiki "Betelgeuse".  Yes, it really IS pronounced Beetlejuice!

Distance to objects in space is measured in terms of how far light travels in one year, because light is the fasted thing we know of.  That distance is about 6 trillion miles, so you can see why a light-year can be useful for explaining vast distances that are difficult to grasp using just enormous numbers of miles.

Betelgeuse is a red giant star in the Constellation Orion.  It is an enormous star larger than the orbit of Jupiter, because it is in the final stages of its life, and will, relatively soon in astronomical terms, explode into a super nova.   Betelgeuse is already the most luminous object in the sky even though it is over 650 light years away from earth, so the explosion will be vastly spectacular and visible during the day all over the planet earth, potentially for weeks or months.

Consider though, that if Betelgeuse had exploded and gone Nova during the early rein of King Henry the VIII in the 1500's, the first light of the flash would still be on the way, and not visible here on Earth for another 150 years or so.  If it exploded today, it would be almost 7 centuries before the first light got here, traveling at the speed of light.

Thing about that for a bit.  That's the kind of distances these "interstellar" fantasies are woven upon.  Many a good summer novel has been based upon such a premise and I can name off a couple of dozen it we want to convert this to a Sci-Fiction/Sci-Fantasy thread.  The ugly truth is that we cannot get out of low earth orbit, nor as Spacex proved again today, easily recover and reuse chemical booster rockets to get out of the atmosphere and the bottom of the local gravity well.

Space is hard.  It is based on pure physics and properly discussed in the complexities of the language of mathematics.  Fantasy is easy but it will get us nowhere.

[r9etb]

The author makes a lot of assumptions here -- basically, he's playing a stealth game of SimWorld and building what he thinks would be the society (authoritarian socialism) necessary to make it work.

But if you think about the required resources ... the ship would be huge (e.g., a hollowed-out asteroid), and there would necessarily be a lot of people on-board.  The economy and society would probably strongly resemble that of a self-sufficient small town of the late 1800s.

It's quite true that there are certain tasks that have to be done; and with sufficient population there will be people available to fill them.  A vibrant society is quite possible without undue authoritarianism.

The demographic trends in Western culture suggest that pressing problem would almost certainly be anti-Malthusian in nature -- not "how do you limit population over generations," but rather, how do you ensure that people have enough babies? 

[geronl]

authoritarian socialism would pretty much guarantee a failed colony

[Chieftain]

SpaceX says their Falcon9 suffered "rapid unscheduled disassembly" during landing on OCISLY this morning.  The landing engine didn't develop full thrust & it appears it landed with all the grace of a lawn dart...

Another try on land in July...

 

[HonestJohn]

Just take a nickel-iron asteroid, focus the sun's light onto it from thousands (tens of thousands?) of mirrors... and you will melt it.

Then turn off the light and spin the asteroid so it blows up into a nickel-iron bubble and let it cool.

Voila, instant generation ship hull (that'll have a very thick hull to shield against the radiation of space, too).

Transport water, soil, air, and a suitable full-spectrum light source for the interior and you have the ship set.

Install mass-drivers that catapult some of the nickle-iron out... or explode megaton-sized nukes outside the hull and you have propulsion.  Sure it'll be a slow acceleration, but 5-10-20 years of it and you'll be moving at a sizeable chunk of the speed of light.  Of course, you'll only be able to slow down as fast as you accelerated, but one can plan around that.

And once you get to your destination, you'll end up with a new mini-moon around the planet, too.

[Doug Loss]

This is the sort of question we consider at the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop every 18 months: https://tviw.us

And here's a write-up from one of our working tracks at the last Workshop back in February: http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=35251

To quote myself (from the above write-up):

"We asked ourselves what historical analogies might inform our thinking, as a way in which humanity might expand to the stars as a matter of course. The best analogy we thought of was the Polynesian expansion across the Pacific Ocean, where small groups moved from one island to another, stopping to colonize any useful island found and then the population of that island expanding on toward other islands as their island was fully colonized.

"We decided that this kind of expansion might be needed in space, since we are not currently able to create a closed biosphere, or even one that will be stable for decades or centuries. The expansion we envisioned would be to habitats gradually further and further from Earth, where the possibility of rescue or large-scale repair/replacement of materials would be less and less possible. As these habitats would be created, we would learn how to improve the biospheres, gradually having them be self-sufficient for very long periods or even indefinitely."

After such self-sufficient habitats were old-hat, existing further and further from Sol, it might not be all that great a leap to just push out toward other stars.  Would it be immoral to the descendants?  No more so than living in a space habitat in the solar system would.