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

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.)

Dr hartleby

A very imaginative piece.one in a milion.We should come to the reality that our planet is a spaceship,whose immense capabilities we ignore as i put in the essay LIVING IN THE SHADOWS OF THE SUN: REALITIES, PERILS ESCAPADES MAN, PLANET AND KARDASHEV SCALE.MAKING THE GREAT TRANSITION by Michael muteru here, http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2101.to rate/review.Thanks All the best

John,

Great essay, a pleasant and inspiring read. Underrated, but a little less so in a moment. Thank you and well done.

However I feel Oscar Wilde may well have referred the the theoretical 'rut' as much as the 'gutter' we're in. If we're ever to escape Earth I've suggested we need to escape Earth-bound thinking. I hope you'll like my own essay showing the way to achieve that and your own vision; convergence of disparate and incoherent physics.

Best wishes.

Peter

John,

You have an idea, a rather complete plan, and a catchy phrase to hang on it -- Starship Culture. These are ingredients for success in our culture.

I like your germ of starship development and then the culture to sustain it, while you pose the difficulties of sustained space travel. Your cheerleading for the idea at the end is also the championing we need, much like Kennedy's pledge to get us to the Moon.

High marks for your plan and your challenge to get us in the right direction.

My essay speaks of "Looking beyond" scientific orthodoxy and "within" the mind, which Einstein compares to the universe. I call it the neural universe.

Jim

Dear Mr John Hartley

Earth is overpopulated and in the course of time we should go also to the universe. The problem is that our population growth so fast that it is a question if the migration into the space will happen fast enough.

Preparation for space migration demands also preparation for space problems also on earth. For instance, it can be built up one self-sustained building inside of desert or even below the water. The energy for such a building should came from the sun or from other alternative sources of energy. Sun power stations are progressing too slowly. We need a robots for such self-sustainability and they are also progressing too slowly. Additionally, the first pioneers in the space should be robots. The should build up buildings and all equipment. They should also extract metals from soil of planets or from comets.

This should be also a huge project, so we should to sustain clean earth as long as possible that travel in to space can wait a little. One condition for clean earth as long as possible are also electric cars. Their fast introduction can be also one exercise for space travel.

For solutions of space travel we will need also strong artificial intelligence, much stronger than human brains. For introduction of it we need also know, what consciousness is and whether it is a quantum phenomenon. In the last year it was firmly confirmed that photosynthesis is a quantum phenomenon. If one biological phenomenon is quantum one, it is possible that all biological phenomena are quantum ones. If we want to know, what is consciousness, we need to know what matter is in its essence. Thus we need also theory of everything (TOE), before strong artificial intelligence will be developed. TOE will maybe tell us about sense of our existence. Besides, maybe TOE will help to solve some technical problems.

My essay

Best regards

Janko Kokosar