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Comment by mikepurvis | Hacker News Reader

This conundrum comes up sometimes in the context of generational starships, about intermediate generations being born into bondage board, committed by their ancestors to a shitty life in a metal tube, with their only purpose being a preordained duty to keep a few systems operational and produce the next generation of slaves just so that eventually someone can birth the arrival generation.

Alastair Reynolds' book Chasm City touches on a bunch of this, in particular the class warfare angle of some wealthy travelers getting to enjoy the journey in peaceful cryosleep while the poor ones pay for their passage in servitude.

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> being born into bondage board, committed by their ancestors to a shitty life in a metal tube, with their only purpose being a preordained duty to keep a few systems operational and produce the next generation of slaves just so that eventually someone can birth the arrival generation.

This isn't really so different from being born on Earth, except that we take being born on Earth for granted, and the population is really really big.

We're all living in the world created by our ancestors. All their short sighted fuckups (lead poisoning, climate change) or triumphs (tech, art) is ours to bear.

Life is conditioned and unfree get used to it.

Ehhh I see where you're coming from but I don't think it's quite the same. Here on Earth is the default, and while each individual's opportunities are greatly affected by the circumstances of their birth and parentage, with effort and luck there's a fair chance to change one's stars.

Opting into an interstellar voyage is a significant reduction in opportunity for almost anyone.

And yes, the same could be said for a European colonist crossing the Atlantic to the Americas in the 16th century, and many of them did face starvation, exposure, etc, but it's different when you're largely committing yourself and your immediate family to those hardships, under the belief that the timeframe for "a better life" is the next generation. Committing intermediate generations is a different beast.

You're assuming life after the journey was guaranteed to be better, but not all colonists and immigrants happened to head to the world's future superpower.

Every decision is potentially committing descendants to the consequences of that choice (and to wit: life aboard a generation ship hardly need be a miserable or undesirable one, at the size of say, a large town and surrounding hinterland you have as much or more opportunity as anyone else at most times in history - I think generation ships force us to confront uncomfortable questions about what is the meaning of life on Earth which we try to sweep aside by deciding they're an impossible moral burden).

I spend too much time thinking about all the stuff that can go wrong on generation ships.

You take off for your destination, but when you get there you find out that humans back on earth made a faster ship 100 years after you left and beat you to the destination.

You spent generations expecting to be bold explorers pushing the frontier and getting to claim nice territory, and you show up to find you’re in second place.

I won't spoil it here, but you might really enjoy Chasm City; I recommend giving it a read. :)

And that the highly-refined citizens of that future era think that your BO and deodorant are incredibly overpowering.

(as described in Vogt's "Far_Centaurus" short story.

incessant obsolescence

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12354195

> You take off for your destination, but when you get there you find out that humans back on earth made a faster ship 100 years after you left and beat you to the destination.

A theme that turns up in Starfield as well...

Heinlein also tackled some of these problems with generation ships in Orphans of the Sky[1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphans_of_the_Sky

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