Will people still care about “the mission” 5 generations and billions of kilometers from earth? Will the goal we set even be relevant or make sense at all?
Would you still follow through on a mission Ferdinand II of Aragon sent your grand grand grand grand grand grandfather on in 1498? I probably wouldn’t. These goal would likely not even make much sense to me anymore, or be completely irrelevant in today’s world.
If you're in the middle of a long, slow interstellar journey, there's no chance of a survivable exit from the ship, so reversing course doesn't help you, although it may or may not help your successors. I expect most first wave journeys wouldn't have sufficient fuel to reverse course anyway, so trying to would probably be certain doom for your successors instead of meerly probable doom.
Anybody planning a mission on the timescale of interstellar journies is going to have to accept that they won't have much control of the result. You can pick the destination, and you can provide the initial conditions, and whatever happens, happens. The colony would have to be independent and self-sufficient by necessity, there can't be an expectation of sending spoils of colonization back home.
Even if we got up to 10% of the speed of light, transit time is too long for close coordination.
That's an interesting point. I have noticed that often ideologically motivated parents don't always produce the same ideologically motivated offspring. They'll have to have very strict rules and some kind of brutal indoctrination to ensure the next generation follows the same path. But the more brutal and severe it is, the more likely it will cause rebellions.
I can already see a tragi-comedic scenario: the new generation overthrows the old guard, slams on the brakes, ship takes years to slow down from almost light speed. Decades later they are finally going back to earth at full speed. Now the next generation looks back at the mess their parents made, rebel, overthrow the old guard, slam on the brakes, decades later they are back flying to the original destination. But not until the next generation decides to bring back the fire of the revolution and turn things around... It all ends with them running out of fuel.
The pessimistic view is that we'll just have to let ChatGPT drive the ship and knock everyone out in cryosleep so they don't mess with the ship.
Once you're on a starship with just enough fuel to reach the destination, the only real question is what the political organization will be at the end.
Not if those are the only two known destinations known to support life! Then the choice is binary really - go to destination or go back.
> And the first generation of people born in the starship won't exactly be yearning for an Earth they've never known.
I think they would. I've seen this in second generation immigrants. One would expect they'd completely embrace the new country, culture, environment, but I often see them idealizing or yearning for some mythical version of their old country, even if the parents have already adapted and moved on in the current culture. There are two mechanisms at work there, I think, one is rebellion against the old generation, and also if things are not going perfectly well, yearning for an alternative ("the grass is always greener on the other planet" principle).
> I often see them idealizing or yearning for some mythical version of their old country, even if the parents have already adapted and moved on in the current culture.
New cultures: US and Western Europe. Old cultures/countries: Middle East, Eastern Europe.
"Ah! It's good to be awake, Chat! Turn on the outside view so I can see where we are!"
display turns on.. nothing but space to be seen
"Uh, Chat, we seem to be in the wrong place. I can't see the planet we were traveling to!"
....
ChatGPT: "You're absolutely right!"
Absolutely worth your time — my only frustration was that I was done reading them so quickly.
Only slightly joking. The best way to do this is to either ensure you have a scientific culture that can dedicate itself to a very distant goal, or you make it a religion and keep the intermediate generations complacent.
Also we do have plenty of institutions which have to some degree or another stuck to the mission many lifetimes after their founding. Religious institutions like the catholic church come to mind - obviously much has changed and plenty would argue about how well current behavior matches the founders' intent, but thousands of years later there is still an organization of people working towards a broadly similar goal. Less controversial examples include some construction projects which took centuries, like the Cologne Cathedral.
It should be noted that while none of the original crew would survive the journey, there would be an unbroken chain of people raising new crew members, educating them to the mission, and their adoption of the existing crew's values as their own, and propagating them forward, would be necessary for both their own well being and the group's. There would be little if any outside influence to cause the group to diverge from its mission, and no realistic alternative they would be able to pursue even if they wanted to. There might be ideological drift, but it would probably be a lot less than people who have been free to do whatever they want for the same period of time.
Do you resent them?
We’d like to think of our military as volunteer service-people, but the reality is that it’s a pathway out of poverty for many. So how much “choice” to believe in the mission is there?
I agree with your sentiment, but military service - around the world - is more of an alternative to povery vs. a path out. And we can't build a corporation with a goal more than two quarters out, or a government more than the next midterm election; what are the odds we find 5+ generations of commanders who can stay aligned?
Yet that is what all the corporations at the top of the market cap lists have done over the previous 30 years. You think Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, TSMC, and a multitude of others only have goals 2 quarters out?
Pharmaceutical businesses where the trials take 5 and 10+ years to bring a medicine to market don't have long term goals? Oil businesses that need a decade to build and cultivate an offshore field. There are so many other examples.
(Does the ship have a class system? Is the ship structured as a commune? Do people "own" bits of it, or is it more of a feudal tenure system? Can you maintain a multigenerational society on a military command structure when there is no external enemy other than the vastness of space? Would you want to?)
Plus, thinking you need to live near a star, on a planet, is merely a bias for "free" fusion power and gravity that you don't need to maintain.
I'm sure once we get artificial fusion working, the options for living in a community in a big, multi-story, 2 gigatonne, 500k population O'Neil cylinder tethered to a Kuiper belt iceball will look like "a big town with a nightlife, farmland, and a stable climate, with cheap trade and transit options for 'nearby' cylinders"
At which point you can colonize any frozen rock bigger than Rhode Island between here and Wolf 359 'easily' (slowly) whenever you want to move your O'Neill cylinder.
I don't think I regarded my kind, wise, and friendly grandmother as a 'non-reproducing adult resource drain'... Seems like a cruel way to describe one's golden years.
I think the best way for these 100 or 10000 generation voyages is just to bake the motive into something boring like procreation or farming or religion or something.
I think there’s some sci-fi books where humans are doing one of these voyages and our dna is just aliens parking some bitcoin 4 billion years ago.
I.e. some 'Lord of the Flies' bottleneck where there are no wise adults to convey culture etc on the ship.
Of course, for most people most of the time, you are where you are and you just adjust and live.
If you are on a ship in the middle of an endless ocean, or interstellar space, with many decades or centuries before reaching somewhere safe then truly what choice do you have?
A single generation ship might leave for Alpha Centauri and arrive six thousand years later as a cloud of ships comprising a new nomadic civilization.
They won't have a choice in destination. The challenge will be maintaining an orderly society on the ship. If that life is all they have then they'll have to deal with it. If they have books, video, or VR of like on a planet they might have any number of reactions...
I don’t think we can do it without ansibles, or cryosleep. Or very, very advanced AI who still want to hang around with humans.
That said, there are multi-generational jobs and have been for a long time. So its not exactly uncommon for generations of people working in the same direction.
They're not consciously thinking about "the mission", just following their instincts.
Believing in the mission will be akin to people's belief in God/religion these days. You will have "atheists" who will say "You really think there was an Earth?"
We did it. It took almost two millennia, but we kept our goals and we kept our customs and we kept our values.
Perhaps a similar social structure will help humans inhabit other star systems on generational ships.
How could you not? At whatever point a crew member become disillusioned, it'll likely be too late to turnaround. There'll be a high incidences of interplanetary depression/psychosis as people struggle to deal with leaving the Blue Dot behind, esp. when they see footage from the earth, rainforests, etc. But, nothing counselling won't be able to take care of.
Right now, state propaganda is powerful enough to make young people line up to kill and be killed. So, a little interplanetary panic can be taken care of. In extreme cases, you can have protocols for any crew members who attempts to munity to euthanatized to guarantee the success of the mission.
My .02.
5 generations on, the people on the ship didn't leave anything behind. They were born and will die on the ship, and that will be their baseline. Even in places where life is the hardest here on Earth, in the middle of scorching or freezing deserts, people don't get depressed en-masse seeing nice pictures from elsewhere.
It also features something like "state propaganda" in the form of the ship's AI which is also programmed to carry out the mission, but it needs the help of the crew. I won't spoil more, but it's one of my favorites!
[1]: http://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Hotshot.pdf
[2]: https://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_TheIsland.pdf
Every time you wake up the language is different. Could you consume enough media to stay centered, but sleep enough to get there? Think how dire the end of Interstellar would be if Murphy had no kids. He doesn’t know anybody. He isn’t even related to anybody anymore. What’s the point?
I almost think if you sent people to another solar system, you’d have to send biologists, botanists, and gardeners. The link to earth isn’t human generations, it’s plant generations. You love oaks? Earthlings love oaks. We can bond over the slice we brought with us. And the ones we didn’t. What else can we really share?