The Sword and Laser discussion
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Aurora
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AUR: The Voting [Spoilers up Part 4]
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Your point is true, Rob, and possibly one of the best arguments for not staying: noone there had the opportunity to decide not to go in the first place.Do the parents have the right to make decisions that will define the life of their children in the future? But, then again, don't they do it all the time anyway, since even their personal choices will reflect on their descendants?
Paulo wrote: "I think I would want to STAY. Most likely the volunteers from 150 years ago knew this was a high-risk endeavour. Also, going back would mean to dissapoint all of those who backed up the expedition in hope to expand mankind beyond Sol."Why should you make life decisions based upon what other people -- people who've been dead for centuries in some cases -- wanted? If your parents told you you have to become a lawyer because that's what your great-great-great grandfather wanted, would you just shrug and go along with it, or would you say, "Screw that, I'm gonna do what I wanna do"? If somebody turned up a lost collection of letters from the Founding Fathers where they all agree, "Marriage must only be between one man and one woman," would you say, "Oh well, I guess we have to get rid of gay marriage"? Of course not. That'd be ridiculous. A mission to another star system is no different.
Frankly, the idea of binding subsequent generations to such a quixotic mission is morally reprehensible.
I would choose to go back I think. As others pointed out it wasn't their choice to go in the first place. As far as disappointing those who backed the mission on Earth, they're all dead too.I think this is a fairly common theme on generation ship stories where the group that arrives doesn't want to do what the original mission planners wanted because ship-life is all they've ever known.
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I wonder about a 3rd contingent. People who just want to live on the ship. That's the only life they knew. Those were the same people who didn't want to colonize Aurora in the first place. They probably favored going back to earth if for no other reason than to stay on the ship.
At the time it looked as those it would be the ancestors of the people on the ship who made it to earth, not the people themselves.
Phil wrote: "I think this is a fairly common theme on generation ship stories where the group that arrives doesn't want to do what the original mission planners wanted because ship-life is all they've ever known." Which other books have you read with this same dilemma, Phil? I'm curious about other author's perspectives on this.
@Sean: the problem is that the argument is valid both ways. Let's say you decided to go BACK, and 50 years later, your grandchildren curse you for your decision because in their view, they should have tried to settle in the planet. They feel miserable, their ship is falling apart, and they believe that the restrictions ship imposes on them just to keep them alive are unfair.One way or another, you'll lock your children in a destiny they might not agree with in the future.
Just to make it clear I'm not contesting your vote, just pointing out that both are poor choices - as the characters realized.
"Do the parents have the right to make decisions that will define the life of their children in the future? "Parents have actually done something very similar to what was done in this book. Virtually all of the US people reading this comment had a decision made for them generations ago when their ancestors moved to the US. We would not exist had they not made those decisions and that they did means that we grew up here rather than in (in my case) France or Germany or Africa.
Similarly, no one on the ship would have existed if the first generation had refused to go. They're on Tau Ceti because of decisions taken in the distant past.
HOWEVER, just as we're not bound to live in the US just because our ancestors emigrated, I don't think the colonists had a responsibility to stay on TC just because of a decision taken in the past. In fact, they owe it to themselves and especially to their future generations to take a decision that they felt is in the best interests of those generations.
I'd vote to return if I felt the odds were truly 1 in 1000. 1 in 2? A much harder call.
Rick wrote: "Parents have actually done something very similar to what was done in this book. Virtually all of the US people reading this comment had a decision made for them generations ago when their ancestors moved to the US. "Ah, but when Europeans arrived in the Americas, there'd been people here for thousands of years -- people who had already bred native plants into reliable crops, people who were still around to trade with and get tips about the local environment. And too, resupply from Europe was chancy but could be accomplished within a few months, and it was possible for anyone who got cold feet to return home on the supply ships.
And with the natives who were here when Europeans arrived, they hadn't come over in a single journey. It was always a case of, "Well, that area over there looks marginally better than where we're at, so let's go live there for a while" or "Well, this place sucks, let's try heading south to find something better."
Neither of those situations pertain to interstellar travel -- you can't go about it piecemeal, you can't rely upon resupply from home, and there probably isn't going to be anyone around who's done the hard work of cultivating local plants into something you can eat. In fact, it's quite likely that any plants you find will be completely inedible.
Science fiction has trained us to think of interstellar colonization as the Mayflower on a grand scale, but the metaphor breaks down under the slightest scrutiny. Which is Robinson's point with the book.
Sean wrote: "Ah, but when Europeans arrived in the Americas, there'd been people here for thousands of years -- people who had already bred native plants into reliable crops, people who were still around to trade with and get tips about the local environment. .."
All of that is true but not my point. The question is whether parents have the right to make decisions that alter the destiny of future generations and my point is that they do that all of the time. The early colonists didn't have reliable ships (by our standards) and didn't really know what was over here. Even later colonists were taking a trip that was mostly one-way and perilous.
Of course, you're right that it is fundamentally different in the sense that they knew the New World was still going to have soil like the soil in Europe, same for atmosphere, etc.
Rick wrote: " The question is whether parents have the right to make decisions that alter the destiny of future generations"No, the question is whether parents have the right to make momentous and irreversible decisions that will expose their descendants to extreme danger and hardship, potentially even dooming them to extinction, when there are other alternatives available.
You should read about the early colonists' lives. Extreme hardship and danger weren't foreign concepts to them. And of course there was an alternative - stay in Europe. Where I think the argument swings to the No side is the high chance that all of the hardship will still result in their extinction. It's one thing to suffer through a very difficult life when you feel you're building a better future for your kids. It's far different when that sacrifice is futile.
But I think we're going to disagree that parents don't make momentous and often irreversible decisions for their kids. History is littered with people making such decisions.
I still don't see how going back to Earth would be a better choice. As Rob pointed out, these people only knew the life within the ship - this is what they could call "home".The 3rd contingency suggested by Rob would have to be temporary at best. During part 4 there was already some heavy evidence that zoo devolution would eventually make human life impossible within the ship's confinement.
This was further explicited when (view spoiler)
One thing that had to be taken into account at the time of the voting is that, no matter what, the life they had before reaching Aurora was over. Going back to that life simply wasn't one of their options anymore.
Going back to Earth has one huge advantage - they know they can physically survive in that environment (the psychological adjustments is another issue).
Rick wrote: "Going back to Earth has one huge advantage - they know they can physically survive in that environment (the psychological adjustments is another issue)."End-book spoilery thought related to that that I intend to go into detail on on the end-book spoiler thread. (view spoiler)
I would have voted for staying, and asking for help to Mother Earth, they were calculating at least a few years of independence (view spoiler)
Joanna - yeah, thats what I was alluding to regarding the psych adjustments. though you could be right. My issue with that section is that he just skims over all of that as if the main characters were just shrugging it off as nothing they could do anything about. odd.
Here's my problem with the decision to go back to Earth - they already know the ship is falling apart. Maybe the ship can physically make it back, but the biomes in the ship were already falling apart decades before they even reached Tau Ceti.Devi and others were constantly complaining and going "why didn't the people who built the ship include enough X?" and all I can think is, "maybe because they intended this to be a one-way trip? And maybe the fact that you're only starting to run low near the end is impressive in itself?"
(view spoiler)
And in all honesty, I can't help but boil the entire reason for returning down to, "but that'll be haaaaaarrrrd." Gee, things didn't go 100% perfectly, so you're just going to give up and go home? What a bunch of spoiled brats.
(view spoiler)
I think I'd stay. Which is odd because at first when I heard the risks of staying I thought I would go back. But thinking about it more, the chances of getting back assumes there will be someone in another 170 years who will be able to send the laser to pull them back into the solar system. It's possible that won't happen because there's no one alive on earth who gets the message to point the laser, or earth is a nuclear wasteland, or they can't replenish or repair their ship on the way. I think I'd decide to be a part of building for future generations.
Mod
The laser, on the way back, is only needed to slow them down.
(view spoiler)
It isn't needed to get them to our Solar System. The fact that it can be used as a guide is just an added benefit and saves the computer or a navigator having to continually fine tune their course. Getting here is the "easy" part. Stopping is the hard part.
Arguing "We must go on, because we've already spent seven generations getting here" is committing the sunk cost fallacy.https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/t...
It's like in poker. It's poor logic to think "I've already put in half my money on this hand, I guess I have to stay in and keep throwing in more," when the odds have turned against you.
You have to make the best decision you can at that point, with the information you have. If they hadn't been traveling for generations, and somebody asked "One in a thousand chance to survive on a rock, or a long but proven-workable journey back to Earth," the latter is the obvious choice.
Except that argument ignores the fact that the ship was already falling long before they even reached Tau Ceti. Yes, the ship might be able to make it back, but there's no guarantee that anything living on it (like, say, the people) would survive.(view spoiler)
Edit: Also, you're ignoring the fact that plenty of people have and continue to use that same fallacy in the real world, i.e. "My family's lived here for [x] generations, so I'm not leaving."
KSR kind of painted himself into a corner with the issues that the ship was having maintaining a coherent, human survivable biosphere. His point is solid - biospheres are incredibly complex and we don't know how even a really well designed one would react to being in space for decades - but it made the voting issue much harder. When you have two choices both of which offer a low chance of survival, it comes down to ideals, principles and the like more than which offers a better chance. In that light, the suspended animation stuff feels a little like a deus ex machina move - oh look, they'd all die except just in the nick of time... we have a fix! IF he'd spent some time earlier talking about how Earth has been working on it, if Earth updates had included progress on suspended animation (perhaps with scenes on the outgoing trip of the character thinking about lessening the environmental load by using suspended animation if it became viable), then it would have worked better.
Humans choose for their descendants all the time; my ancestors made all sorts of choices for me; like when they left the savannah, when they headed east and crossed the land bridge from Asia or headed west to Europe (depending upon which of my ancestors we are talking about) and then when they emigrated from the US, England, Ireland, Germany, and Holland to Canada. I think it's weird to so harshly judge your great great great great grandparents based upon their life choices that didn't work out for you; especially if they thought they were setting you up to be humanities great hope in the new world.I didn't really like this whole attitude that some how going "out there" was wrong and arrogant and borderline evil. The same could have been said for the first tribe who left Africa and headed into Europe/Asia.
[edit: added more greats and a word :-)]
Rick wrote: "In that light, the suspended animation stuff feels a little like a deus ex machina move - oh look, they'd all die except just in the nick of time... we have a fix!."This is exactly the point where the book went off the rails for me. Before this point the book was great. I really enjoyed the way the AI's narrative became better and better. It was so solid.
(view spoiler)
Tassie Dave wrote: "Tina wrote: "who will be able to send the laser to pull them back into the solar system."The laser, on the way back, is only needed to slow them down.
[spoilers removed]
It isn't needed to get ..."
Thanks for clarifying, at first I didn't understand this but after I got farther into the book it became more clear.
I really didn't understand a lot of the science. Although, I wish there had been more about (view spoiler)
Well, the Mars thing is, of course, KSR's interpretation. We simply don't KNOW. I think his overall point is valid and definitely good to ponder, but I worry that it's too negative. On the one hand the "hey, no worries about Earth, we'll just move out and colonize the solar system and then the stars" attitude is simplistic and enables people to gloss over issues like climate change and the impact it and similar things can have on our continued survival.
On the other hand, the "We'll never be able to live anywhere else, Earth is it forever" feel I get from this book can easily enable the "why explore, we can't live out there, let's not bother with space" faction.
I think (perhaps I should say hope) that the truth is somewhere in between. Living elsewhere is likely to be MUCH harder than we think. It's unlikely to be so hard that we're forever limited to just Earth. One of the annoying aspects of much SF of the last 10-15 years is that authors seem to have lost the ability to consider truly long timescales. Consider where humanity was 1000 years ago. 5000 years. Heck, 10,000 years ago we were just moving from the hunter gatherer phase to learning agriculture. If we don't have a massive disaster of the world ending variety, where will we be in another 10,000 years? or even another 2000?
Rick wrote: "One of the annoying aspects of much SF of the last 10-15 years is that authors seem to have lost the ability to consider truly long timescales. Consider where humanity was 1000 years ago. 5000 years."Or address the increase in rate of change. My grandfather grew up with horse and buggy and coal oil lamps and a winchester 94. He lived to see the moon landing and his grand children using iPhones. But *his* grandfather had horse and buggy and coal oil lanterns but was stuck with a breech loading carbine.
Where will we be in 20 years is difficult to foresee. What changes will happen over the next 400?
Robert said: Or address the increase in rate of change.But consider something KSR raises in this book: the S-curve that you see in lots of increasing systems in nature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid...
It's possible that during the 20th century, we got a revolution in physics and chemistry and quantum physics and loads of new technology to go with it, but that all those advances were the steep the part of the S-curve. It's possible that for the 21st century, we're getting to a plateau, where we're going to develop... slightly better smartphones. :P
I actually think that's part of the argument that KSR is making here -- what will the future look like without magic revolutionary technology?
Or we might see a revolution in biology (several things seem to be finally bearing fruit) and AI. If the 20th century taught us anything, it's that predicting the future is hard. While you're right that KSR seems to be taking the route of things slowing I still don't think the book reflects 400 years of change very well.
Rick wrote: "Or we might see a revolution in biology (several things seem to be finally bearing fruit) and AI."Definitely AI and Biology (Crispr!). But also Robotics, Nano Tech, Automated Transport, Clean Energy. There are also the combined improvements such as bio-printing (Biology, Robotics, NanoTech) that are really hard to predict. I don't think we are close to flat part of the 'S' yet.
Or, as I've start to think of it, there might be overlapping curves where in some ways we're flattening, in others we're at the start. I remember people arguing that you could measure use travel speed as a proxy for technological progress - for millennia we walked, then we domesticated horses and rode... which opened new opportunities. We invented the car, then train, then plane and travel was all faster and faster. Then the supersonic plane and then the rocket.... But in practical terms, advancement in speed of transport has flattened. We're not that much faster than 50 years ago - we fly about 500 miles per hour still and much of our economy still moves good over roads and rail build decades ago at relatively similar speeds. If course, with tele-communications, etc we no longer have the need to move actual people and things in order to accomplish some tasks... and with the rise of VR, we might see this need lessen ever more.
Rick wrote: "But in practical terms, advancement in speed of transport has flattened. We're not that much faster than 50 years ago - we fly about 500 miles per hour still and much of our economy still moves good over roads and rail build decades ago at relatively similar speeds."An interesting analogy for space travel :-)
I think transport is in for some serious upheaval. Automated cars will increase the maximum speed of vehicle traffic. Hyperloop is an opportunity to seriously increase the pragmatic speed of coast to coast travel (no silly 2 hour security check added to the mix).
The airline industry is currently stalled due to a number of reasons, but Space X might drastically reduce the across the globe flight times, at least for the super rich.
Next up on this scale of travel speed: 0.1c!See, what do you mean Aurora isn't optimistic enough about future tech?
I'd be a Stayer, as my goal would be to try to create knowledge that would help the next ship getting sent to Tau Ceti. Personally, I wanted more on the Stayers....
Fresno Bob wrote: "I'd be a Stayer, as my goal would be to try to create knowledge that would help the next ship getting sent to Tau Ceti. Personally, I wanted more on the Stayers...."(view spoiler)
I'd have voted to stay. For me as an individual, life was going to be hard and uncertain either way, but staying gave the hope of working on a grand project and trying to achieve something amazing. I'd have had no reason to expect I might reach Earth by leaving, and no way of knowing what future generations would want, so no way of making the decisions based on that.
I would have opted to stay, because staying has a long list of known problems, but returning has a whole heap on unknowns. They don't know what has been going on on Earth while they have been away, and they do not know what they will find if and when they get back. Will the planet have room for them? Will the people be friendly? Will they be given what they need to survive even supposing they are allowed to land? Will the people on Earth be willing or able to use the laser to slow them down? Too many questions, and too much reliance on uncertainties beyond their control for survival. By staying, you know exactly what issues you are faced with, and can begin to tackle them. Maybe it will work. Maybe it won't, but that's better than gambling on a complete unknown.
The voting to decide if they should stay on Tau Ceti or return to Sol was very intense. Despite all the violence and lack of dialog that came after it, I was curious about how people would choose.
Would you STAY in Tau Ceti and try to create a permanent settlement anyway? Even knowing that the chances of success were something around 1:1000?
Or would you go BACK to Sol, therefore giving up on a mission that was the main life purpose for the 6 or 7 generations that came before you?
At the moment of the vote, it was also clear that this decision (although a life or death one) would not mean immediate death for you. Most likely you'd live the rest of your days either on a doomed colony, or in a battered ship moving home. This would a vote on the fate of your progeny.
I think I would want to STAY. Most likely the volunteers from 150 years ago knew this was a high-risk endeavour. Also, going back would mean to dissapoint all of those who backed up the expedition in hope to expand mankind beyond Sol. As a recent video by Kurzgesagt mentioned, even if we are the only single intelligent species in the Universe, we should try to expand. "The universe is too beautiful not to be experienced by someone"
How would you vote?