Starship Culture as a Guiding Principle for Human Development by John G Hartley

Nice speculative essay about far-future colonization of the universe, though it is not clear what would be doing the colonizing, or why. The essay talks about challenges to humanity and proposes setting a goal of colonization in part as a way to motivate us to get our sh*t together. Isn't this a big part of what national and international space programs, starting with the 1960s, were supposed to be about? I note that the essay does not contain the string "star trek." Hopeful science fiction dreams can replace or supplement religion, nationalism, personal greed, etc. It's not clear how this solves immediate problems, but it's certainly better than the war of all against all.

John,

Thank you for your inspiring essay! I think that your concept of Starship Culture has a lot of promise. In my essay, "To Steer Well We Need to See Clearly: the Need for a Worldwide Futurocentric Education Initiative", I propose that we should work hard to put together a "futurocentric" curriculum aimed at schools but also at lifelong education, with the goal to raise the level of public interest and knowledge about the topics that are the most relevant to the future of humanity. But it takes strong MOTIVATION for us humans to stop focusing on the short term and make the effort to think about the long-term future. In this respect, I completely agree with you when you say that "survival for the sake of survival isn't sufficient and never has been". As you say, the ultimate goal of colonizing the Milky Way, although super-long term (compared to our usual way of thinking), adds a crucial element: the unknown. As I argue in my essay, a Futurocentric Education Initiative could be successful precisely because it leaves "a fundamental place for the unknown, the awe-inspiring, the mysterious". Point 7 of my rough draft for the futurocentric curriculum is called "Space exploration and settlement": your concept of Starship Culture meshes perfectly with what I have in mind.

You say that Starship Culture

"[...] is about creating a social mindset that knows we are going to the stars, promoting activities that support this long range goal while working to eliminate many of the harmful, collective behaviors that drain humanity from reaching its full potential. [It] is not a program, but a different way of thinking about the future. It's about thinking that we have a future."

I think that this is precisely the attitude that we must foster if we want humanity to be able to successfully steer the future. I also wholeheartedly agree with you when you say that we must propagate the meme that "(very) long term thinking can have near term payoffs".

Long live the Starship Culture! Permission to come aboard? ;)

Marc

I am the author of the previous post... (Does this board log you off automatically without telling you?)

You say it would be good if lots of people went around mumbling "sure would be great if we had starships someday." Your reasons are that this will make people not want to waste resources that could be used to make starships, and that this will make people not want civilization to be destroyed before starships are possible. It seems to me that these reasons make starship culture better than cultures where people mumble "everyone must die!", but they don't obviously make it better than lots of other possible cultures. What about cultures where people mumble "it would be great if lots of happy people were to exist" or "It would be great if we could understand everything eventually"?

I take it you want to maximize the number of happy people, and of understanding everything. So, I gather you would convert the available mass and energy of the universe into computronium, some optimal balance of which would be divided between simulated happy people and science AI. What would that optimal ratio be?

Dear John,

in your essay I appreciate the balance between detail and abstraction of discourse, which, I believe, yields a perfectly appropriate style for this type of Contest, and a very readable text, which I value quite a lot. Your message is clear - something that is not so easily found in the other essays. Talking about humanity moving to the stars, one runs the risk of being weak in terms of originality, but I believe that you have avoided this potential problem by insisting on the impact that the Starship Culture could have on the problems and behaviours of today, and by the original and effective idea of discussing the interrelations between Smalley,s 10 existential threats to humanity and the challenges of extablishing a Starship Culture. By the way, another essay that covers this topic in a rather original way is the one entitled The transformative value of liberating Mars (which is not mine :-)

Competing for limited resources has always been the basic trick for triggering evolutionary steps in the biosphere, and in a way one could expect that the step to the stars would be driven by the same mechanism, namely by the limited (and decreasing) resources on Earth as a whole. The Starship Culture could be seen as an attempt to mitigate (if not to avoid) the dramatic side effects that this mechanism comes with, in its original form; or, perhaps more appropriately, as an attempt of our species to take full control of this mechanism, to anticipate it in order to bypass as much as possible its bad consequences.

About the 10 points, I have a remark on Poverty. We need you, please join us. This sounds very generic. What would this concretely mean?. Solving basic, immediate needs (food, water, heating etc.) has obviously higher priority for people suffering from poverty. I am sorry, but I do not see a tight logical link between the two spheres here.

You mention, as a variant, sending to the stars a distilled cyber-essence of the builders. with its advantages in terms of travel logistics, so to speak. If we had time to discuss, I would be curious to speculate on the social-historical implications of this scenario. I guess it also would depend on what you mean by distilled cyber-essence of the builders. Are they avatars of real humans remaining on earth (re-used maybe across multiple generations)? Are these entities able to reproduce? How do they relate with the humans on Earth in the long run? Could we still talk about humanity, split into Earth and Space inhabitants, or would it be more appropriate to talk about different species?

Best regards

Tommaso

Mark,

Thanks for the comments. The omission of exactly what would be doing the colonization was deliberate. What our descendents will be when the capability to reach the stars is attained is difficult to say. Biological or cybernetic or some hybrid? The important point is that setting forth on that journey today has the real potential to improve our life now which partially addresses the "why". In formulating this essay, I assumed that survival is preferable to extinction and that growth is preferable to stasis. Extinction may be inevitable but the premise of the Starship Culture buys us time. Humanity can likely survive in some form for a very long time confined to the solar system. Perhaps we can develop a physically static but intellectually robust future capable of dealing with the existential threats that we face. Facing the future from the Starship Culture point of view does not preclude our descendents from remaining here if they so choose. In the meantime it sets a framework for tackling many of the same issues that need to be faced for long term survival.

The space programs of today are a subset of a Starship Culture. They speak to many of the early technical challenges but not to the societal ones. The vast majority of humanity sits on the sidelines of the space programs of today. In the broader context envisioned in this essay, you are participating whenever you work for peace, for protecting the environment, for better health, for gender equality... In this broader context, virtually no one sits on the sidelines.

Cheers,

John

Dear John,

As we are in favor of, "Take care of the small stuff and the big stuff will take care of itself", I think the Unification of the fundamental forces of nature is the core to be accomplished before we thinking of colonizing out of Earth. In relevant with this we consider the matters of universe in a string-matter continuum scenario, rather than in Corpuscularianism to resolve this fundamental constrain to improve Observational science.

With best wishes,

Jayakr

That was a wonderful and inspiring essay!

Just a few nit-picks (otherwise I would have given you a 10):

1. As another reader noted, you were sketchy on details. Yes, I know, we only had 9 pages. Given that it's already been 45 years since we first landed on the Moon, and that it was accomplished by a bunch of geeks whose average age was 26, building a Space-Faring civilization is not that difficult. Leveraging the economics is the difficult part -- how do we make humanity's expansion into Space financially self-supporting? Otherwise, like the Chinese with Zheng He and the Americans with Apollo, a few stupid politicians can cut the purse-strings and the exploration screeches to a halt.

2. You mentioned applying Moore's Law in electronics and biology, but you didn't think of applying it to material science and to nanomanufacturing--and advances in these latter areas will make possible much better and cheaper spacecraft.

3. You attributed terrorism to injustice. That is somewhat true, but there are some people (actually about a million of them on Earth) who will gladly kill you simply because you are a heretic. They believe that faith is much more important than reason, so you (and I) are hopelessly screwed if we think we can reason with them. I wish I was wrong about that. Hence we will be at war for a long time. Alas, this is a fallen world, and if we're not careful, I fear that maybe even the artificial minds we might build will suffer from similar flaws.

4. The New World was not settled by everyone in Europe. Only the risk-takers and desperate left their homes. They came because the opportunity outweighed the risks. I don't see how anyone living a comfortable life on Earth would want to risk death by leaving; in fact, many environmentalists oppose putting any resources into such a project. Space will be settled by the descendants of a small minority.

The way I see it, even if space is ultimately settled by the descendants of a small minority, or even by half-humans cyborgs or the fully post-biological "Mind Children" of humanity, the mindset of what John G. Hartley calls Starship Culture is a positive force for the future of humanity. It gives us a challenging long-term goal, and by working towards it, we will certainly discover new technologies and new modes of thinking that will benefit all of humanity, on Earth and throughout our expanding sphere of influence. By the way, this is pretty much the idea behind Mae Jemison's 100 Year Starship project (100yss.org).

Hello John, May I offer a short, but sincere critique of your essay? I would ask you to return the favour. Here's my policy on that. - Mike

My problem with a Starship culture is the rate at which technology evolves. What is the point of building a starship that travels at 1/25th the speed of light, if we are able to view the destination with a quantum camera before the starship arrives? Or succeeding versions of starships are built that arrive before the original starships.

There are extremely few resources between star systems, at least as we can presently detect.

Therefore, the focus would need to be on manipulating space-time to support a starship culture.

http://vixra.org/pdf/1205.0021v1.pdf

Is this along the lines of what you are proposing?

Dear Dr. Hartley,

Your hyper-imaginative essay was one of the most entertaining essays so far published at this site. I do hope you do not mind me expressing a minor quibble.

Based on my observation, I have concluded that all of the stars, all of the planets, all of the asteroids, all of the comets, all of the meteors, all of the specks of astral dust and all real things have one and only one thing in common. Each real thing has a material surface and an attached material sub-surface. A surface can be interior or exterior. All material surfaces must travel at a constant speed. All material sub-surfaces must travel at an inconsistent speed that has to be less than the constant speed the surface travels at.

If your abstract starship ever got a real surface, it would still only be able to travel at the constant speed that every other surface is already traveling at.

With regards,

Joe Fisher

John - I like the simple concept of starting a Starship Culture "movement". Coincidentally, I just returned from a vacation to Italy. Walking through the many fortified hilltop towns (all built by hand - some dating back 3,000 years) I was struck by the fact that these enterprises represented shared goals spanning across generations - with sufficient incentives to motivate the backbreaking and tedious physical labor that was involved. The motivator in that case was survive against marauding invaders (and perhaps beasts). How might we identify and communicate that level of incentivization for the Starship Culture?

Notably, every one of the towns had at least one (and sometimes several) remarkable cathedrals - again representing incredible commitment of labor, resources and creative/artistic passion spanning the generations. Beyond mere survival, the motivation here is more complex - participating in something greater than oneself, something that extends to infinity and to the hopes of a better life (in this case, the afterlife). Where do we look now to find that kind of model for Starship Culture?

Thanks - George Gantz (author: The Tip of the Spear)

P.S., I will use the following rating scale to rate the essays of authors who tell me that they have rated my essay:

10 - the essay is perfection and I learned a tremendous amount

9 - the essay was extremely good, and I learned a lot

8 - the essay was very good, and I learned something

7 - the essay was good, and it had some helpful suggestions

6 - slightly favorable indifference

5 - unfavorable indifference

4 - the essay was pretty shoddy and boring

3 - the essay was of poor quality and boring

2 - the essay was of very poor quality and boring

1 - the essay was of shockingly poor quality and extremely flawed

After all, that is essentially what the numbers mean.

The following is a general observation:

Is it not ironic that so many authors who have written about how we should improve our future as a species, to a certain extent, appear to be motivated by self-interest in their rating practices? (As evidence, I offer the observation that no article under 3 deserves such a rating, and nearly every article above 4 deserves a higher rating.)