Generation Ships--- Can we build one now?

[dragoner]

IIRC, high literacy rates forestalls linguistic drift. As far as crew goes, they will all be heavily cross trained, multi-disciplinary, because otherwise if you lost a crew section, everyone would die. This is also big in business: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-training_(business)

 

[Umbran]

IIRC, high literacy rates forestalls linguistic drift. As far as crew goes, they will all be heavily cross trained, multi-disciplinary, because otherwise if you lost a crew section, everyone would die. This is also big in business: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-training_(business)

If you are in space, and you lose an entire crew section at once, that's probably the result of a catastrophic event that is apt to kill everyone else anyway.

 

[Shasarak]

Language drift is an interesting phenomena. I have seen one suggestion that it can happen because the whole concept of language is too big for a human to contain and in teaching the next generation you loose parts of it.

 

[Ryujin]

If you are in space, and you lose an entire crew section at once, that's probably the result of a catastrophic event that is apt to kill everyone else anyway.

But lesser incidents would become survivable.

 

[MarkB]

If you are in space, and you lose an entire crew section at once, that's probably the result of a catastrophic event that is apt to kill everyone else anyway.

Not necessarily. Life support failures come to mind. In one crew section the CO2 sensors have malfunctioned, which only becomes apparent after a defective replacement CO2 scrubber is installed and one dormitory's crew goes to sleep that night and never wakes up.

 

[Hussar]

I think that the issue that people tend to forget is the effects of deep time. Again, we're talking generation ships - so, we're looking at a thousand years, at least and quite likely more than that.

How much do you have in common with your 1000 year previous ancestor? Culturally? Linguistically? We're talking understanding gaps that would be virtually unbridgeable. In a generation ship, with such a huge paucity of referent points, language would morph almost instantly. Vast swaths of concepts would vanish virtually overnight - weather, animals, anything to do with nature in general. Sky blue? WTF is a sky to someone eight or ten generations removed? Sea green? What's a sea?

Sure, you could have pictures and whatnot, but, within a couple of generations, those images would have zero significance to people. A Butterfly Valve? What's a butterfly? On and on and on.

As it stands, if you could go back in time to talk to someone who shared your language from 1000 years ago, you could barely communicate. Over there, there are ak. Oh, no, I have red eyen. English, going back that far, had separate words for every plural, like we have child-children today. The plural S came from the viking settlers. You really can't directly speak to someone that far back. The language is just too different.

 

[Ryujin]

I think that the issue that people tend to forget is the effects of deep time. Again, we're talking generation ships - so, we're looking at a thousand years, at least and quite likely more than that.

How much do you have in common with your 1000 year previous ancestor? Culturally? Linguistically? We're talking understanding gaps that would be virtually unbridgeable. In a generation ship, with such a huge paucity of referent points, language would morph almost instantly. Vast swaths of concepts would vanish virtually overnight - weather, animals, anything to do with nature in general. Sky blue? WTF is a sky to someone eight or ten generations removed? Sea green? What's a sea?

Sure, you could have pictures and whatnot, but, within a couple of generations, those images would have zero significance to people. A Butterfly Valve? What's a butterfly? On and on and on.

As it stands, if you could go back in time to talk to someone who shared your language from 1000 years ago, you could barely communicate. Over there, there are ak. Oh, no, I have red eyen. English, going back that far, had separate words for every plural, like we have child-children today. The plural S came from the viking settlers. You really can't directly speak to someone that far back. The language is just too different.

Due to migration, cultural separation, and lack of ability to communicate over distances. These factors would not be an issue on a generation ship. Sure, some concepts wouldn't be understood over time, but with proximity and a spoken/video record, and stable technology, I don't believe that drift would be anywhere near as large as some of you seem to think.

 

[Hussar]

But the thing is, even with video records, you have to actually watch them. Why would I watch a nature documentary, say, about things that have absolutely no context for me?

Imagine trying to understand about a whale when you’ve never seen a body of water larger than a puddle. And that paucity of environment would have huge implications on language.

For the same reason that most people couldn’t tell you anything about the Crusades. None of that has any real context to most people.

Give you an easy example because it’s coming up in a month or so. What does the Shrove in Shrove Tuesday mean?

 

[Ryujin]

But the thing is, even with video records, you have to actually watch them. Why would I watch a nature documentary, say, about things that have absolutely no context for me?

Imagine trying to understand about a whale when you’ve never seen a body of water larger than a puddle. And that paucity of environment would have huge implications on language.

For the same reason that most people couldn’t tell you anything about the Crusades. None of that has any real context to most people.

Give you an easy example because it’s coming up in a month or so. What does the Shrove in Shrove Tuesday mean?

Not all that relevant. Virtually everyone would must needs have some function on ship. Even children. As a result they would maintain the language that they do use. I wouldn't call the dropping of unused terms drift. I'd call it a lack of vocabulary. The words, however, still exist and are accessible in a very real way.

As far as Shrove, I'm going to absolve myself of stating a defintion

 

[Hussar]

Actually, on a generation ship, so much of the ship's functions would be automated anyway that most of the human crew would be nothing but passengers. Why would you want to trust maintenance to humans?

Something along the lines of Wall-E would be pretty plausible.