We can dare to dream of the stars again, if only we can achieve this small thing.

[Jaysyn]

I saw that movie....the Hal 9000 killed everybody.

Moral of the story? Making AI keep secrets drives them insane.

[Anomalocaris]

I had an idea as I was tumbling out of bed this morning. Instead of populating a generation ship with live humans, populate it with either robots, engineered "slave species", cybernetic slave species, or some combination. Then simply put the necessary biological seed material in long term storage. This way, you could simply omit the pesky human psychological element, and the robots and other non-human bio-forms could work in environments that are hazardous to humans both in transit and upon arrival. Once these servant life units created the proper bio-environment, it could be populated with the stored biological materials.

You could say our species does not actually need to physically migrate to another world to survive the death of our world at all.

All that is needed is to establish the capacity to reconstitute our species at another planet.

Build a factory ship to manufacture biological humans through an industrial process, and a database of DNAs, and send the ship somewhere where the manufactured humans can survive and prosper, and it would achieve the same purpose, at much less cost, as any generation ships laboriously moving live humans about the interstellar system.

Our advancements in science necessarily require us to revisit the old concept about what it is to be human and what it is to sire offsprings that were dictated only by the contingent limitations in our understandings of the underlying processes.

I would prefer it if I can personally survive the eventual end of eath's habitability. If I can't, but my direct descendents do, or people possessing considerable genetic similarities do, that would serve.

On the other hand, if my line and the line of everyone alive today were to become extinct as our planet becomes uninhabitable, but we preserve accurate record of our DNA, and use industrial methods to recreate a new population somewhere else with reproductions of these DNA, that really is just as good.

[Annik]

This is the first I've ever heard of this and it's an interesting concept. We do need better forms of space propulsion but we should at least test the waters in our own solar system, so to speak. It's been 43 years since we landed on the moon and we haven't done jack shit since then. It's almost as if we need the threat of a nuclear war to get anything done. Pathetic.

We're, of course, talking in hypotheticals about the future.

The deepest purpose of ethics is species survival. So whether act essential to species survival can be smoothly undertaken within the ethics system is the measure of the ethical system. The ethical system is not the measure of whether this act should be undertaken. That a act essential to species survival might seem unethical shows the system of ethics is deeply, perhaps fatally, flawed. It means when the foreplay is over, and the chips are down, the system of ethics is found to hinder rather than further its own most fundamental reason for existence.

Generation ships are not only for survival, but for exploration. It would be a totally different situation if we had no planet to return to. If we do, generation ships are insanely unethical. What are we if not the sum of our choices? Being born on a ship to continue a mission, just as Hovik said, is a vast limitation of personal choice, which is why it's unethical.

[Anomalocaris]

Generation ships are not only for survival, but for exploration. It would be a totally different situation if we had no planet to return to. If we do, generation ships are insanely unethical. What are we if not the sum of our choices? Being born on a ship to continue a mission, just as Hovik said, is a vast limitation of personal choice, which is why it's unethical.

I don't think it unethical at all. We do all sorts of things everyday to limit the personal choices of our descendants. For example, your choice of whom to marry, where to live, how many offspring to sire, what career to pursue, all have serious implications on the range of choices available to your descendants. We simply make a caprious choice to allow ourselfs the right to limit the choices of offspring in ways that we've by historic contingency become comfortable with, and troop out the spurious argument about the ethics when essentially the same thing appear in a different format that again, by historic contingence, we have not yet become comfortable with.

To add to this, the distinction between survival and exploration is again a complete arbitrary one. Survival through generation ships require prior exploration and experimentation. If there were no sound prior exploraiton, the chance of success through generation ships is corresponsiding greatly reduced. So if generation ship is ethical when survival is at stake, then generation ship is ethical when exploration contributing to the later success of generation ships is at stake.

[fuckass365]

While it can be perceived as unethical from our stand point, it most likely wouldn't be the case for those born in the ship. They will have been born with an absolute purpose and have no knowledge of what "normal" human life was like. The ship could have everything a person could want, like a cruise ship for example. The descendants on board would live pretty happy lives.

[Anomalocaris]

If humanity's survival really depends on a few people making major sacraifices, It would be utterly insane to tolerate the arguement "we have no right to force them to sacrafice if they don't choose to sacrifice of their own free will". At this point, all other ethical quibbles is overridden by the ethics of "the good of many outweigh the good of the the few".

[Hovik]

If humanity's survival really depends on a few people making major sacraifices, It would be utterly insane to tolerate the arguement "we have no right to force them to sacrafice if they don't choose to sacrifice of their own free will". At this point, all other ethical quibbles is overridden by the ethics of "the good of many outweigh the good of the the few".

I don't agree with this. The view that the good of the many outweigh the few does not supersede an individual's right to self-determination and choice.

[Anomalocaris]

If humanity's survival really depends on a few people making major sacraifices, It would be utterly insane to tolerate the arguement "we have no right to force them to sacrafice if they don't choose to sacrifice of their own free will". At this point, all other ethical quibbles is overridden by the ethics of "the good of many outweigh the good of the the few".

I don't agree with this. The view that the good of the many outweigh the few does not supersede an individual's right to self-determination and choice.

There is no such thing as individual right's right. There is only courtesies granted by the society based on a heuristic that says "greater good to the society generally come from respecting certain pre-define freedoms of action by the individuals within it".

If it appears this heuristic is overwhelmingly unlikely to be true in the most important case it could possibly be applied to, that greater good could not come from respecting individual rights wherethe specie's survival is at stake, it is sheer lunacy, and menifestly suicidal to the society, to even give the concept of individual rights a second glance.

A ethics that, in the final analysis, allows the survival of many to be held hostage mere to keep up courtesy to a few, is the ethics of ultimate barbarism and nullistic self destruction, fully as barbarous any ethics that allows one to kill for Allah or Jesus.

[fuckass365]

As I said before, these people would be born with a very grand purpose: the survival of our species. Those born on the ship wouldn't know any better and wouldn't give a shit.

[Angrboda]

If humanity's survival really depends on a few people making major sacraifices, It would be utterly insane to tolerate the arguement "we have no right to force them to sacrafice if they don't choose to sacrifice of their own free will". At this point, all other ethical quibbles is overridden by the ethics of "the good of many outweigh the good of the the few".

I don't agree with this. The view that the good of the many outweigh the few does not supersede an individual's right to self-determination and choice.

We as a society are already quite comfortable with this, as reflected in progressive tax codes in which the freedom of the wealthy is constrained more than the economic freedom of the rest for the benefit of the larger class. This is essentially vampirism of the rich by those not so fortunate. As with most practical ethical questions, at bottom is the law of might makes right, and the lower classes have the political might to impose this asymmetrical solution upon the rich. Practical ethics, in my experience, is usually a lot uglier and dirtier than rarified sentiments.