Generation Ships--- Can we build one now?

Zardnaar said:

Exploring for the sake of exploring mostly came later.

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How... Eurocentric a view you have.

Think farther back than that. Like, ten thousand years and a hundred thousand years and more. Back before money was invented. Back to when nowhere other than Africa had humans. We spread around the globe when we have *extremely low* population densities. We didn't *need* to move at that time. We did anyway.

Hussar said:

Sorry, [MENTION=6716779]Zardnaar[/MENTION], but, morally wrong is just morally wrong. Full stop. It doesn't become morally right because we have to do it. It's just that that's the choice - abandon morals or not.

Although, not to get too far into politics, but, it's extremely doubtful refugees are going to be much more of a problem in 50 years. At least, no more or less than they are now. It's just that the current population of most first world countries have forgotten that, not that long ago, about 10% of their populations were foreign born. Give or take. It's only in the post war era that we saw such a drop in immigration and mobility.

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Your the guy in the zombie movie who questions our moral right to survival shouldn't come at the expense of the zombies.

hearts in the right place, but you don't lead to surviving to a future positive outcome.

Your way of thinking leads to taking no action because of the moral implications on anything else.

We kill things to survive.
We go to other places and kill things there to survive
We make sacrifices for a larger future plan, like a pyramid. Some of you didn't get a choice in that, but it's a sacrifice somebody was willing to make.

As Umbran says, if we don't get out of this solar system, our species will die when the sun dies. Everything we've ever done will be lost and thus be as if it never happened. Biggest waste of time ever.

Hopefully we can be nicer about it than the guy who made the pyramids, but yeah, it's gonna suck for some people for awhile, in order to achieve the next big thing.

And yes, I can make that decision for future generations. It's the ultimate right of all people in the present, because they are here, and the future is not.

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btw, I just thought of a horrible metaphor that seems to apply.

If you don't think it is morally right to get on a generation ship because you would subject your descendants to generations of hardship and restriction of rights, think about that and find a parallel situation here and now.

Like, you know. Black people. You are basically saying black people should not breed because they are knowingly bringing future generations into the world that they will face the kind of things we don't talk about on EN World.

Now I know Hussar don't mean it that way. But that's the extreme end of where that line of "moral" thinking goes. And it turns out, that ain't right either.

Hussar said:

Sorry, @Zardnaar, but, morally wrong is just morally wrong. Full stop. It doesn't become morally right because we have to do it. It's just that that's the choice - abandon morals or not.

Although, not to get too far into politics, but, it's extremely doubtful refugees are going to be much more of a problem in 50 years. At least, no more or less than they are now. It's just that the current population of most first world countries have forgotten that, not that long ago, about 10% of their populations were foreign born. Give or take. It's only in the post war era that we saw such a drop in immigration and mobility.

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I think we're around 20% foreign born, in Auckland its 40%.

Morals are subjective and vary by time. Survival of the species is basically natures primary goal. If things get as bad as the horror stories make out (11+ billion declining food and oil etc) due to global warming I bet on violence.

Umbran said:

How... Eurocentric a view you have.

Think farther back than that. Like, ten thousand years and a hundred thousand years and more. Back before money was invented. Back to when nowhere other than Africa had humans. We spread around the globe when we have *extremely low* population densities. We didn't *need* to move at that time. We did anyway.

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Hunter Gatherers, we probably followed the animals.

Hussar said:

Although, not to get too far into politics, but, it's extremely doubtful refugees are going to be much more of a problem in 50 years.

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There is a fine line between "refugee" and "people suffering economic dislocation". For example, as climate shifts, weather patterns shift. That means the temperature and rainfall shifts - that means where you can grow various crops will move. Much of the heartland of America, currently devoted to agriculture, may become untenable for that purpose. All the farmers, and the people who support the farmers, will need to move. These aren't foreign refugees, they're our own citizens.

As another, only partly related branch of discussion, we were talking about how immoral it is to restrict breeding rights - we have 7.5 billion people on the planet, and that number is growing. The planet does have a limit on its carrying capacity. That limit is apt to drop as the climate warms. As we get close to it, we need to ask ourselves what is more moral:

1) Instituting broadly distributed population controls.
2) Letting people starve.
3) Having wars that end up reducing the population in a host of unpleasant ways.

If you don't do 1, you eventually end up with a mix of (2) and (3). Choose your poison - a limit on reproductive freedom, or nasty population losses.

Suddenly, controlling population growth through planning and contraception doesn't sound so ugly, now does it?

Zardnaar said:

Hunter Gatherers, we probably followed the animals.

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It isn't like *all the animals* suddenly decided to flow into North America, dude. Asia was still full of critters. Early humans *chose* the direction the went.

Umbran said:

It isn't like *all the animals* suddenly decided to flow into North America, dude. Asia was still full of critters. Early humans *chose* the direction the went.

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We don't really know. Humans got to America over the Bering Strait or over pack ice in the Atlantic (or both).

There was a very small Pacific Island. It could only support a small population and in their culture old people got on a boat and sailed to their deaths. They may have theoretically survived reaching another island but it was Logan's Run in a way.

The groups rights outweighed the individuals. Other cultures had human sacrifice and left babies out to die if they couldn't support them. Other cultures practiced infanticide.

Horrific by our standards but human rights is a very modern concept as such and far from universal.

I'm glad we don't have to make those decisions but still kind of think the rights of the many outweigh the rights of the individual. Every society functions this way to some extent it's why we have prison's.

Umbran said:

There is a fine line between "refugee" and "people suffering economic dislocation". For example, as climate shifts, weather patterns shift. That means the temperature and rainfall shifts - that means where you can grow various crops will move. Much of the heartland of America, currently devoted to agriculture, may become untenable for that purpose. All the farmers, and the people who support the farmers, will need to move. These aren't foreign refugees, they're our own citizens.

As another, only partly related branch of discussion, we were talking about how immoral it is to restrict breeding rights - we have 7.5 billion people on the planet, and that number is growing. The planet does have a limit on its carrying capacity. That limit is apt to drop as the climate warms. As we get close to it, we need to ask ourselves what is more moral:

1) Instituting broadly distributed population controls.
2) Letting people starve.
3) Having wars that end up reducing the population in a host of unpleasant ways.

If you don't do 1, you eventually end up with a mix of (2) and (3). Choose your poison - a limit on reproductive freedom, or nasty population losses.

Suddenly, controlling population growth through planning and contraception doesn't sound so ugly, now does it?

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There are answers (4), which is to provide better education, especially to women, and to provide more reproductive control to women, and (5), have economic policies that incentivize lower birth rates (basically, make it such that one's offspring do better if there are fewer of them, generally, by having offspring do better if they are better educated and have a richer upbringing). From what I've read, these are effective at reducing birth rates.

I can see that these would be ineffective for certain groups. If a group firmly believed that they should have many children as a mandate, that would counteract the effects of (4) and (5).

There is also the option (6): Infanticide and killing elders. See for example, the practices of Inuit Eskimos. Generally, the Inuit seem to be a very useful example against which to compare the population of a generation ship. Those are repellent to modern sensibilities, but are strategies which were used historically. (Infanticide seems to disappear as a strategy when effective contraception exists, and where woman have control over whether to initiate a pregnancy and can choose their child's gender.)

But, this might be the wrong problem: The problem might be too few children, not too many. And, there is the same moral outrage to the idea forcing women to have children as there is to the idea in preventing them.

Thx!
TomB

Janx said:

btw, I just thought of a horrible metaphor that seems to apply.

If you don't think it is morally right to get on a generation ship because you would subject your descendants to generations of hardship and restriction of rights, think about that and find a parallel situation here and now.

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I saw an article on a Current Events / News site: A man from India who is suing his parents for bringing him into the world.
I can post a link if anybody thinks it important.

tomBitonti said:

From what I've read, these are effective at reducing birth rates.

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They have not, IIRC, shown to reducing them to the point of zero population growth in a reliable manner. We will, in general, eventually fill up the planet and need plans to institute reliable control. We may experience periods when the world, or parts of it, do not need those controls for a bit, but then we'll need them again.

There is also the option (6): Infanticide and killing elders.

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Yes. Logan's Run is a possibility I missed.

But, this might be the wrong problem: The problem might be too few children, not too many. And, there is the same moral outrage to the idea forcing women to have children as there is to the idea in preventing them.

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That issue can arise on our generation ship if there's a problem that causes population loss, or on the new colony it may be viewed as necessary to increase reproduction rates. On the Earth in general, it requires a pretty major disaster do drop the population so much that we'd need to force reproduction.