Rural Americans couldn’t. But I don’t see anyone proposing we put high school dropouts and polio patients in space.
China, India and Japan managed to pass that test just fine. I imagine one of the former two will be the first to colonise deep space.
Still not sold though that the cohesion in an small, resource constrained, artificial community can hold over a few generations. Huge risks of it degrading into some cult/dictatorship.
This is not to say that generation ship societies are doomed to fail but chances are decent.
One of the primary causes of our cultural disfunction is our seemingly intrinsic compulsion to separate ourselves into groups of Us and Them, and have no limit to the amount of disparaging, scorn, and dehumanization we are willing to dump onto Them.
> Rural Americans > high school dropouts
Lol HN you really are too much sometimes.
Covid went really well in all the intellectual bastions of liberal democracy right? NYC, SF? California famously no downsides from their policy choices at all.
And then to top it off, you compare response to China - the government that lied through it's teeth about covid from the beginning, jailed journalists and destroyed evidence.
Unreal
New York is a bad example to call out since it was one of the first places to get hit, locked down hard after a delay, and yet came out with lower per-capita deaths and a stronger economy than most red states. (Speaking as someone who lives in one of the reddest states in the union.)
> jailed journalists and destroyed evidence
Not sure we can call anyone out on this anymore.
The question is "Could we create a cadre of 400 highly effective people that could sustain a colony on a spaceship.
I argue the answer to the first is "No" for any demographic but the answer to the second is a clear "Yes".
For a generational ship, the question becomes even more complex because you would have to build a culture of expertise that can sustain itself over multiple generations.
COVID didn't test for capacity to sacrifice for the common good. Sacrifice is voluntary. It tested for capacity to submit to authoritarian control for the common good.