Zompist Bboard Again

It seems I've fallen into the habit of periodically asking random SF settings questions. I hope you don't mind these too much. But the answers have always been immensely helpful...

I need help fleshing out a political system for an SF novel I'm writing on -- it has nothing to do with other questions I've asked. So, no interstellar dystopias!

The setting is inspired by Gerard O'Neill's the High Frontier -- or Jeff Bezos' plans for space colonies. It's an orbital colony; basically a huge tin can, rotating for gravity, in a convenient orbit not too far from Earth. If you like, it's exactly like the cylinder from Rendez-vous with Rama, except smaller. There are around 1 million people in it, and a mostly self-sufficient biosphere.

It should look something like this: https://www.google.com/search?biw=1920& ... bzhXkHUKqM if you need some visual reference.

Economically, it's mostly self-sufficient but exports industrial products, chemicals refined from asteroid mining, and expertise in AI or genetic engineering.
There are several of these colonies, and building new ones is an important economical sector. There have been earlier, small, prototype versions of these habitats -- people didn't start building huge kilometer-long stations from scratch: there have been prototype stations.

And these people need a government of some kind -- and that's where I need some input: I don't know that much about political science.

An interesting point I see is that their government should basically handle two things:

• Government functions we're familiar with: keeping order. Mediating disputes. Welfare. Lawmaking. Foreign policy.
• More technical functions, aiming at running the colony itself: managing life-support; handling necessary maintenance.

These two overlap somehow of course; you don't want people messing around with the heat radiators or the power plant, for instance, and in those cases it's both proper habitat maintenance and police works.

SF governments are usually projections of the author's own political views. Heinlein famously has libertarians in space; Iain M. Banks has a communist utopia; Orson Scott Card has western-style democracy with some theocracy on the side.
But what I would like to explore the opposite approach: that is, having the political system deriving more or less naturally from the constrainsts of living in space.

A few ideas I've had, none of them really satisfying:

1) For the novel, I went tentatively with modelling their government under space agency governance, or a "mission control" model, but I'm not altogether comfortable with that choice. NASA doesn't need to handle drunk brawls, or property disputes or welfare. But modelling the government on present-day, terrestrial governments doesn't work either. (Our own governments would be terrible at handling life support, I'm afraid).

2) Often people mention that only a dictatorial government would work; I see the point, but if anything it'd be a very weird form of dictatorship -- one that is really concerned on what vegetables you grow and whether you start a fire but would have very little interest in anything else...

3) How do you select competent people? Ideally you want an expert in solar power running the power plant, and a biology expert running the life support. And how do you get rid of the expert if he/she starts making wrong decisions?

4) Does that apply to ordinary government function? You can live with an incompetent secretary of state for defense; you're in trouble if the secretary of state for structural integrity is an idiot.

5) Or maybe they should have, really, two separate "governements": one handling life support, the other handling ordinary government functions?

Ars Lande wrote: ↑Thu Jul 04, 2019 10:47 am SF governments are usually projections of the author's own political views. Heinlein famously has libertarians in space; Iain M. Banks has a communist utopia; Orson Scott Card has western-style democracy with some theocracy on the side.
But what I would like to explore the opposite approach: that is, having the political system deriving more or less naturally from the constrainsts of living in space.

That's generally a good approach, but I suspect that at least in the early years of the colony, the political views that the leading colonists brought with them from home will be a more important factor than the constraints of life in space. A colony built by Mainland China is likely to have a different form of government, at least at first, than a colony built by Canada.

2) Often people mention that only a dictatorial government would work; I see the point, but if anything it'd be a very weird form of dictatorship -- one that is really concerned on what vegetables you grow and whether you start a fire but would have very little interest in anything else...

One problem that might arise in that case is this: your colony would depend very heavily on specialists of various types - scientists, engineers, technicians, etc. And I suspect that in a highly authoritarian system, any highly trained specialist is in an inherently difficult position. Why? Well, if you're a highly trained specialist, you almost certainly know more about your field of specialization than the leader of the authoritarian system you live under. And in a sufficiently authoritarian system, the very idea of anyone knowing more about anything than the Glorious Leader is probably inherently suspect.

For instance, whenever the attention of the current would-be dictator of the most powerful country in the world is drawn to a particular topic, he likes to assert that no one knows more about the topic in question than him. Now, if that kind of attitude meets a specialist who actually knows a lot more about their field than the Leader, then, depending on the level of authoritarianism, that might create a potentially career-ending or even life-threatening situation for the specialist.

Here’s one thought for you: how about specialist clans or castes with little to no favouritism and reasonable mobility? The castes would specialize in a particular area (say, life support) then a smaller sub-group (say, oxygen extraction), with everyone given basic knowledge of all functioning parts of the ship and then gaining more and more specialization (in the meantime rising in the ranks of their chosen caste). Those born to a family are trained for that family’s (or moiety’s) work, giving them a head start educationally and possibly genetically; if they find themselves better suited otherwise then they can make a transfer to another section of the ship. The castes might have examinations of their practices and members, and those who don’t make the cut (or make too many mistakes) may be transferred to less dangerous professions. The leadership may comprise specialized personnel from all castes with a) a good overall view of the ship’s necessary functions, and b) good diplomatic abilities to deal with the other caste representatives. Overseeing everything is a computer network, backed up as many times as is possible and equipped with planning software to test out changes to the overall existing structure of the colony not within caste rules.
(I use a similar system on my own space habitats, and on my version of Venus.)

This is the occasion to post a thought I have been maintaining on this matter for quite a long time:

Essentially, a space colony is a country whose habitability depends on the proper maintenance of large-scale public works. Clearly, this requires a strong government (so libertarianism goes out of the window), but I am not sure whether such a government needs to be oppressive. In fact, there is a country on Earth whose habitability depends on the proper maintenance of large-scale public works because otherwise, much of it would be gulped up by the sea: That is the Netherlands. And the Netherlands indeed have a strong government which, in addition to the usual government functions, maintains those public works. But is this government oppressive? Nope. In fact, the Netherlands are one of the freest societies of the planet, because the government follows Spinoza's maxim Het doel van de staat is de vrijheid - the purpose of the state is freedom. So I see not much of a problem with a democratically self-governing O'Nell cylinder.

In fact, of course, all free societies have strong governments. Let's round up a few countries with weak governments: Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Colombia. What thrives there is not freedom but violence. If that happened in an O'Neill cylinder, the thing would soon be degraded to space debris.

Unrelated to my own earlier points, or to Pedant's or WeepingElf's points, or even to most of Ars Lande's points:

A while ago, I had a few very rudimentary ideas about government in an SF project of my own that never got anywhere. At the core of it was a Council. I imagined it to be elected, either by the people or by some kind of legislature, but if you want a more authoritarian system, you can have it formed in a more authoritarian way, too.

Anyway, what was special about the Council was that it didn't have a single head or chief or chair or anything. Instead, Council members would take turns at being Councillors-on-duty. A shift as Councillor-on-duty might take 8 hours if you're generous to the Councillors, or 12 hours if you're less generous, though of course in a space habitat, the number of hours in a day might be different. The Councillor-on-duty would be obliged to stay awake and fully alert for their whole shift, and would spend the time in some kind of command center somewhere, waiting for things to happen. They would be expected to defer anything that's not too urgent to the next Council meeting, but would be authorized to make decisions on behalf of the whole Council in an emergency. Mainly, Councillors would appear in the story whenever the main characters would encounter a crisis that might potentially affect their whole political entity, in which case the main characters would contact headquarters and get more or less helpful instructions on what to do from the Councillor-on-duty.

The main advantage of this system over the way most countries currently do things in real life would be that, if an important decision would need to be made in a real hurry, there would never be any need to wake anyone up first.

Ars Lande wrote: ↑Thu Jul 04, 2019 10:47 am no interstellar dystopias!
[...]
It's an orbital colony; basically a huge tin can

You seem to have contradicted yourself there...


First off, a few general thoughts...


- you're thinking on the wrong scale, I think. You say 'a kilometre long'. If you have a cylinder 1,000 long, and, say, 200 in diameter (generous, if you want it to look like those pictures, which seem rather less 'fat'), and you cover the inner surface purely in living space, and you give everybody a living space 3m long by 3m wide (i.e. about average for the less-privileged parts of Earth), then you can have 63,000 inhabitants. Now, sure, you can stack a few rooms on top of each other to multiply that, but remember that in a relatively narrow cylinder you'll experience a noticeable alteration in gravity if you build 'in' very far. And note that it's unrealistic to have all your space be living space anyway - there'll have to be extensive ducting for air, water and sewage at least, and probably extensive transportation routes, and probably common areas, etc etc. I won't say you CAN'T fit a million people into a cylinder 1km long, but it wouldn't be easy at all.

- again, I find it hard to imagine succesfully dispersing all that heat into space - the heat of a million people, all the machinery to keep them alive, and, if you want "self-sufficiency", presumably some really intensive energy use in your yeast/algae farm. I mean, that's 100 MJ per second to deal with just from the human flesh.

- and don't forget the nightmare of radiation shielding. If it's a colony in space, you need to have enough shielding to keep the radiation from the largest solar flare (which is a lot!) below the level that would cause mutation in foetuses (which is not a lot!). You can ameliorate this by moving further out into space, but that also seriously increases your power-generation requirements (and therefore probably your heat-sink requirements).

- fwiw, I've always been skeptical of that sort of gigantic, broad cylinder anyway. I suspect a more probable structure would be a much longer, narrower cylinder. That's because it's hard to expand your cylinder outward, but easy to expand it lengthways, so a "spindrel" design lets you gradually develop from scratch in cumulative cross-sections as your population increases, rather than having to build an entire empty million-person structure right in one go. [of course, it would also make more sense to anchor it to a solid mass, and then it would make even more sense to wholly or partially insert it INTO the solid mass - this lets you deal with the problems of stability, shielding, and possibly heatsinking all at one go, and also lets you a more elegant maglev design instead of a bunch of rockets stuck to the edges... but now we're into my SF setting and not yours, so...]

- you really need to develop some sort of timeline. It matters both how far in the future this is, and also how long the structure has been in space (the longer, the more divorced its structures may become from those of settlement).

- and you need to know who built it, and why. For instance, is it built by a democracy, or by a dictatorship, or is it built as a commercial endeavour by a corporation, or as a crowdfunded ideological project?


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All that said, you needn't overthink it. A city is space is not fundamentally different from a city on the ground (cities on the ground also have to worry about 'life support', and in a big enough city all systems are effectively life support systems... albeit that some of them are more urgent than others!).

People think, not unreasonably, that space stations would be dystopias. That's because of two ways in which we assume space colonies will be extreme sorts of city:

a) we assume that they will have extremely strong borders. It will be relatively difficult to immigrate, relatively difficult to emigrate, and relatively difficult to conduct communications with the outside world. These all encourage the development of societies with greater social capital - more trust, more consensus, and more knowledge of one another. That might lead to a wonderful utopia (or "terrifying cult", as outsiders call such things) where few overt control structures are required because everybody thinks the same way anyway... or it might lead to an overtly authoritarian state (but probably not a brutal one - it won't have to be). But generally, these self-contained societies tend to develop in more "orderly" directions.

b) we assume that they will be physically fragile and vulnerable to either attack or negligence. One bomb might leave everyone floating in space; one poison vial in the air ducts might kill the whole station in hours. This fragility will tend to encourage the development of societies willing to sacrifice greatly for the sake of security, and infused with a strong civic republicanism - the ethos in which each individual has a personal duty to do their part for society.


These assumptions are very plausible, especially for a near-future scenario. But they're not unavoidable, and they're also not binary - by changing your technology (etc) you can move your society up and down these continua.


Beyond that, I guess it depends in general on what sort of politics you expect to develop in the far future in any case.

I ran into this when working on Hanying. A colony doesn't look anything like a nation; it looks a lot more like an enterprise, like a university or an oil rig or a physics lab. There's very little room for a market— you don't want competing life support systems; you need basic goods distributed universally; you can't just say "oh people can build a factory or a farm or a supermarket anywhere." (Why? Among other reasons, each of these has different infrastructure requirements, and you have to think hard about their inputs and their waste stream. You absolutely cannot have the attitude that waste can simply be released into the (tiny) environment.)

You have to design your society from the ground up for equality and non-violence. A vengeful mob, or even a serial killer, can't just cause property damage and a few deaths; they can literally murder every person on the colony. There is probably a no-guns policy (including for the police), and a no-unemployment policy, and really good mental health services. And the life support inspector can and will go right into your home and look at the state of your walls and pipes. These tin cans probably also have very strict rules on what outside spaceships can even approach them.

So I'd suggest looking into how such institutions are run. You might think that corporations would impose top-down hierarchies, but academics and technicians don't do well with that— note that the highly successful AT&T Labs had a flattened hierarchy, with everyone titled simply "Member of the Technical Staff". Universities and huge labs generally have something like member-run assemblies for handling everyday-life issues and offering input on everything else.

If these are intended to be lived on for generations, new problems come up— I wouldn't expect the children of astronauts to all be good astronaut material. So there might be a strong program of attracting employees/residents, and an equally strong program of encouraging misfits to leave.

Just saw Sal's reply. His point (b) is similar to mine, but he suggests that far-future technology might change things. And a million years out, he's right! Past a certain point it's all fantasy.

But for the next few thousand years, I don't think technology can reduce the fragility much. There's not going to be a point where your 10-km space cylinder freely allows people to have bombs, carry guns into the AI server room, or dump your factory effluent into the water reservoir. Things you can do on a planet just don't freely apply to space. (One book I read mentioned that frying an egg creates toxins. On earth, no problem— if you even notice, you open a window. On a spaceship, it's a problem.)

Plus, technology generally brings in new problems and fragilities. E.g., suppose we discover MagicTech™ energy screens that are impermeable to bombs and projectile weapons. Great, we build the station with them, and also surround areas that need it (which is almost all of them). Only, um, how did we shape the MagicTech screens and make doors in them and such? Those tools are now the colony-killers and have to be fiercely guarded.

High tech also tends to be forbiddingly complex. In the early 20C any schmo could take their car apart and put it back together. Same with a radio. You can't really build a 2019 car out in your back alley any more. Is a 2219 vehicle going to be any easier? (Perhaps that becomes a design goal! Could make an interesting wrinkle on a society.)

zompist wrote: ↑Thu Jul 04, 2019 5:00 pm Just saw Sal's reply. His point (b) is similar to mine, but he suggests that far-future technology might change things. And a million years out, he's right! Past a certain point it's all fantasy.

But for the next few thousand years, I don't think technology can reduce the fragility much. There's not going to be a point where your 10-km space cylinder freely allows people to have bombs, carry guns into the AI server room, or dump your factory effluent into the water reservoir. Things you can do on a planet just don't freely apply to space. (One book I read mentioned that frying an egg creates toxins. On earth, no problem— if you even notice, you open a window. On a spaceship, it's a problem.)

Plus, technology generally brings in new problems and fragilities. E.g., suppose we discover MagicTech™ energy screens that are impermeable to bombs and projectile weapons. Great, we build the station with them, and also surround areas that need it (which is almost all of them). Only, um, how did we shape the MagicTech screens and make doors in them and such? Those tools are now the colony-killers and have to be fiercely guarded.

Then there's the other Possible Future MagicTech - horribly dystopian mind control stuff that's intended to minimize the risk of any one person becoming the one person who destroys the habitat and kills everyone in it.

NASA doesn't need to handle drunk brawls, or property disputes or welfare.

I dont have much to add here, except that i wouldnt be surprised if our first space colony takes exactly that path. The colony might be mostly self-sufficient, yes, but probably not entirely so, and if they depend on NASA (or its future equivalent) for anything crucial, that might lead to NASA taking full control of the colony's internal functions in a way that the colonists could really do without. (And the colonists couldn't just defend themselves with weapons if what they need from Earth cannot be found anywhere else.)

zompist wrote: ↑Thu Jul 04, 2019 5:00 pm Just saw Sal's reply. His point (b) is similar to mine, but he suggests that far-future technology might change things. And a million years out, he's right! Past a certain point it's all fantasy.

But for the next few thousand years, I don't think technology can reduce the fragility much. There's not going to be a point where your 10-km space cylinder freely allows people to have bombs, carry guns into the AI server room, or dump your factory effluent into the water reservoir. Things you can do on a planet just don't freely apply to space. (One book I read mentioned that frying an egg creates toxins. On earth, no problem— if you even notice, you open a window. On a spaceship, it's a problem.)

Well, it's not like you can just carry a gun or dump effluent on Earth today (unless you live in America or something), and we don't have a dystopian totalitarian state.

Making it safe to carry a gun into the AI server room is easy enough (as safe as carrying a gun anywhere) - bulletproof materials probably won't require a million years of research. Materials that can, more or less, contain bomb blasts already exist, and will no doubt improve (and you can always just add more mass to your walls...) At least, bombs of the 'cobble together yourself' kind - sure, a nuclear bomb is different, but it takes more than just a dissident to make one of those. And it's worth bearing in mind that it's easier to keep track of people making bombs when you're in a closed ecosystem (even before you get to surveillance and the like).

Similarly, improved filtration systems to deal with pollutants in the water stream are not a million-year problem.

Likewise, many of these issues can be at least partially addressed through station design - bulkheads, segmented water and air networks, etc.

High tech also tends to be forbiddingly complex. In the early 20C any schmo could take their car apart and put it back together. Same with a radio. You can't really build a 2019 car out in your back alley any more. Is a 2219 vehicle going to be any easier? (Perhaps that becomes a design goal! Could make an interesting wrinkle on a society.)

But this is a good thing for security - the less able the random person is to operate, build and modify technology, the less the government has to be afraid of them.

https://amp.businessinsider.com/nasa-wa ... rs-2015-12

A company could patent the GMO strain of a crop that grows in outer space, and then add royalties into the prices of everything shipped to the colony. Best chance if the GMO was in collaboration with the gov't all along.

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Thu Jul 04, 2019 6:37 pm

zompist wrote: ↑Thu Jul 04, 2019 5:00 pmThere's not going to be a point where your 10-km space cylinder freely allows people to have bombs, carry guns into the AI server room, or dump your factory effluent into the water reservoir. Things you can do on a planet just don't freely apply to space. (One book I read mentioned that frying an egg creates toxins. On earth, no problem— if you even notice, you open a window. On a spaceship, it's a problem.)

Well, it's not like you can just carry a gun or dump effluent on Earth today (unless you live in America or something), and we don't have a dystopian totalitarian state.

You could dump your sewage up till a few decades ago; as for today, would you like to take a swim in the Ganges? The thing is, things that are still absolutely reasonable on Earth would be a big problem in a space station. I don't know where "dystopian totalitarian" comes from, unless you think dumping effluent is a natural human right.

Materials that can, more or less, contain bomb blasts already exist, and will no doubt improve (and you can always just add more mass to your walls...)

One, adding tons of mass to a space station is itself a big problem. Two, you're still thinking in Earth terms. A bomb blast in a city is scary and destructive-- but it doesn't destroy the atmosphere, or the facilities you need to make food or maintain human-liveable heat.

And it's worth bearing in mind that it's easier to keep track of people making bombs when you're in a closed ecosystem (even before you get to surveillance and the like).

Wasn't your system supposed to be not dystopian and totalitarian? Anyway, even if you carefully watch every single citizen, you don't need a weapon to cause havoc. A city of a million people will need construction tools and various dangerous chemicals. Plus, look at every security state ever: creating an intrusive security apparatus is also creating a body that can overthrow you.

High tech also tends to be forbiddingly complex. In the early 20C any schmo could take their car apart and put it back together. Same with a radio. You can't really build a 2019 car out in your back alley any more. Is a 2219 vehicle going to be any easier? (Perhaps that becomes a design goal! Could make an interesting wrinkle on a society.)

But this is a good thing for security - the less able the random person is to operate, build and modify technology, the less the government has to be afraid of them.

Really? You've never heard of terrorism or hacking? To say nothing of far more routine industrial accidents? High tech makes things harder to make, but also easier to destroy.

Note, I'm not saying that a space station would be some sort of horrible nightmare... any more than the ISS is one right now. But we already have, in First World nations, a certain amount of sociopathic violence, and a larger amount of accidents. Yes, even in staid, totally-not-America Britain. What if the same people built the space station who built Grenfell Tower?

Thanks everyone for the answers... There was a lot to reply to, so my apologies if I accidentally misquoted you...

Raphael wrote: ↑Thu Jul 04, 2019 11:37 am For instance, whenever the attention of the current would-be dictator of the most powerful country in the world is drawn to a particular topic, he likes to assert that no one knows more about the topic in question than him. Now, if that kind of attitude meets a specialist who actually knows a lot more about their field than the Leader, then, depending on the level of authoritarianism, that might create a potentially career-ending or even life-threatening situation for the specialist.

It's even worse than that -- the Glorious Leader would actually put everyone aboard in danger. High-tech and an authoritarian approach don't mix. See Chernobyl, for instance. Or even the Challenger and Columbia disaster, which suggests that even ordinary corporate hierarchy could be a problem...

On a more meta level, the novel just doesn't work if the government is authoritarian. So it's a good thing there are good arguments against it...

Pedant wrote: ↑Thu Jul 04, 2019 12:26 pm Here’s one thought for you: how about specialist clans or castes with little to no favouritism and reasonable mobility? [...] Those born to a family are trained for that family’s (or moiety’s) work, giving them a head start educationally and possibly genetically; if they find themselves better suited otherwise then they can make a transfer to another section of the ship. The castes might have examinations of their practices and members, and those who don’t make the cut (or make too many mistakes) may be transferred to less dangerous professions. The leadership may comprise specialized personnel from all castes [...]

Hey, that's a great idea! There's sort of a "medieval city" feel to it -- basically, it's a guilds-and-aldermen system!

Raphael wrote: ↑Thu Jul 04, 2019 4:03 pm Councillor-on-duty system. [...]

Another great idea. *takes notes*
This actually exists in real life. In places where people work over the week-end or at night (public services, power plants, the industry) you've always got a top executive on call with full authority to make decisions. It's not entirely like your system in that they have a chairman or a director to report to, but still;.

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Thu Jul 04, 2019 4:20 pm - you're thinking on the wrong scale, I think.

Sorry. I meant kilometerS, plural. I've actually been thinking quite a bit on design and shape, and I agree that a modular, spindly cylinder looks best. (I could've done without the phallic imagery, but I'll deal with that). As we say in IT, the colonies scale both horizontally (you build another colony) and vertically, to some extent (you can add additional sections).

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Thu Jul 04, 2019 4:20 pm - again, I find it hard to imagine succesfully dispersing all that heat into space - the heat of a million people, all the machinery to keep them alive, and, if you want "self-sufficiency", presumably some really intensive energy use in your yeast/algae farm. I mean, that's 100 MJ per second to deal with just from the human flesh.

I think you meant joules, not megajoules, but yes, getting rid of waste heat is a huge technical problem. The good thing is about this setting is that there's enough interest in orbital colonies for people to try and provide solutions. (Here, for instance:
https://space.nss.org/media/NSS-JOURNAL ... nsport.pdf)

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Thu Jul 04, 2019 4:20 pm - and don't forget the nightmare of radiation shielding.

Yep. It's interesting to look at this table https://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/75Summe ... re5.18.gif and compare the mass of radiation shielding compared to structural mass...

[of course, it would also make more sense to anchor it to a solid mass, and then it would make even more sense to wholly or partially insert it INTO the solid mass - this lets you deal with the problems of stability, shielding, and possibly heatsinking all at one go, and also lets you a more elegant maglev design instead of a bunch of rockets stuck to the edges... but now we're into my SF setting and not yours, so...]

I've considered having the colonies inside asteroids... But asteroids are relatively easy to get to (in technical terms, the delta-V is low, so not too much fuel is needed) but with months-long travel times. On the whole it makes more sense to bring asteroid material to a more convenient orbit and build the colony there. Essentially, radiation shielding is your solid mass.
I'm not sure what you mean about rockets. Once you have the colony rotating, there's really nothing to do to maintain rotation: we're in a vacuum.
Same thing about anchoring: there's no need for it. The colony is truly massive; you're not going to move a hundred megatons by accident... (There are issues with keeping the orientations and precession though).

- you really need to develop some sort of timeline. It matters both how far in the future this is, and also how long the structure has been in space (the longer, the more divorced its structures may become from those of settlement).

Oh, sure. The first prototypes are built around 2100; the large colony we're talking about is built in the 2130s; the novel takes place around 2200.

- and you need to know who built it, and why. For instance, is it built by a democracy, or by a dictatorship, or is it built as a commercial endeavour by a corporation, or as a crowdfunded ideological project?

All of the above. Basically, it's an ideological project, pushed by people with an utopian bent that manages to attract the interest of government and corporations.

All that said, you needn't overthink it. A city is space is not fundamentally different from a city on the ground (cities on the ground also have to worry about 'life support', and in a big enough city all systems are effectively life support systems... albeit that some of them are more urgent than others!).

Very good point.

People think, not unreasonably, that space stations would be dystopias. That's because of two ways in which we assume space colonies will be extreme sorts of city:

That might lead to a wonderful utopia (or "terrifying cult", as outsiders call such things) where few overt control structures are required because everybody thinks the same way anyway...

That looks like the more likely option.

zompist wrote: ↑Thu Jul 04, 2019 4:44 pm There's very little room for a market— you don't want competing life support systems; you need basic goods distributed universally; you can't just say "oh people can build a factory or a farm or a supermarket anywhere." (Why? Among other reasons, each of these has different infrastructure requirements, and you have to think hard about their inputs and their waste stream. You absolutely cannot have the attitude that waste can simply be released into the (tiny) environment.)

I'm wary about getting rid of the market. It's an old invention; and planned economies or command economies have demonstrably been less efficient. It sure is annoying, but it seems to serve an useful function.

An interesting question: the setting calls for a somehow socialist/communitarian economy, yet you'd expect a disproportionate number of libertarians would sign up. Presumably they just have a socialist government anyway (cognitive dissonance goes a long way!) but how would they call it? What would be a good word for 'totally not a government, honest', 'totally not a zoning board, honest' and 'totally not welfare, honest'?

If these are intended to be lived on for generations, new problems come up— I wouldn't expect the children of astronauts to all be good astronaut material. So there might be a strong program of attracting employees/residents, and an equally strong program of encouraging misfits to leave.

There are, I think, two solutions to that problem: a) requiring everyone to do some basic service, sort of like military services, except you go clean the air ducts or something. b) It's a pretty big place. Only a fraction of the million people will be involved in life support maintenance or construction. The rest would have pretty ordinary lives, considering. You don't have to be an astronaut; you can be a scholar, a bartender, a doctor or a hairdresser...

Pabappa wrote: ↑Thu Jul 04, 2019 6:24 pm

NASA doesn't need to handle drunk brawls, or property disputes or welfare.

I dont have much to add here, except that i wouldnt be surprised if our first space colony takes exactly that path. The colony might be mostly self-sufficient, yes, but probably not entirely so, and if they depend on NASA (or its future equivalent) for anything crucial, that might lead to NASA taking full control of the colony's internal functions in a way that the colonists could really do without. (And the colonists couldn't just defend themselves with weapons if what they need from Earth cannot be found anywhere else.)

Yes, something like that happens in the history of the colonies. Sort of like the Skylab astronaut 'strike'.

****
Re: various points by zompist and Salmoneus.

Ultimately, you're both right. It's going to be a fragile environment; but not that fragile. There's only so much damage a single person can do. A poison vial isn't going to do much; the atmosphere is pretty big. A single person can't puncture the hull, because the 'hull' is several meters of rock (you need that radiation shielding). Even assuming you manage to make a hole, it would take days to make a significant different to the atmosphere. (You'd have strong winds for a few hours until the maintenance are done).
But... They are still extremely fragile, compared to Earth, and besides attitudes will have been forged in earlier days, in tiny stations where a single person could do a lot of damage...

(The novel is actually in part about terrorism and how it affects the society that's being targetted)

Re: the dumping dangerous waste part: the colonies actually have an economic advantage about Earth is that they separate industrial sections from the habitat sections. They have a comparative advantage in polluting industries in that they can just dump the waste in the vacuum.

On the whole, the colonists find Earth nasty and dirty. There are dangerous vehicles on ground level, everything looks dirty, people eat meat, everyone is rude and the weather's horrible.

zompist wrote: ↑Thu Jul 04, 2019 5:00 pm High tech also tends to be forbiddingly complex. In the early 20C any schmo could take their car apart and put it back together. Same with a radio. You can't really build a 2019 car out in your back alley any more. Is a 2219 vehicle going to be any easier? (Perhaps that becomes a design goal! Could make an interesting wrinkle on a society.)

An interesting point. Car manufacturers don't have much interest in allowing you to maintain your own car; but the incentives for space habitats are different. Presumably they'd try to keep things simple; besides, the simpler the design, the less likely it is that something breaks.

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Thu Jul 04, 2019 6:37 pm But this is a good thing for security - the less able the random person is to operate, build and modify technology, the less the government has to be afraid of them.

No, security through obscurity is a bad practice. A good model might be IT security. The designs are "open source" so people can't point out that the thermal exhaust port is a single point of failure; but the keys to the maintenance shaft (and possibly the location of the access door) are well-guarded.

The more I think about it, the more I like about the idea of structuring society around the idea of guilds, or professional orders (Livery Companies?)

You'd have twenty 'orders' or so, Energy Production Specialists, Security, er, Chemical Engineers, Biology Specialists, Heat-Removal Specialists, Builders... (I'd have to come up with better names), each in charge of their own department. *
This takes care of the expertise problem (people get trained by their own guild/order and you rise through the ranks ideally through recognized expertise) and the capitalism vs. socialism problem: you can set up a farm and sell your products on the free-markets, but you have to abide by the rules of your professional order.

I'm sort of torn between 'hey! this makes sense!' and 'come on. that's just Medieval Guilds in Space. That's obviously silly'. What do you think? Would that work?

Ars Lande wrote: ↑Fri Jul 05, 2019 5:25 am
An interesting question: the setting calls for a somehow socialist/communitarian economy, yet you'd expect a disproportionate number of libertarians would sign up. Presumably they just have a socialist government anyway (cognitive dissonance goes a long way!) but how would they call it? What would be a good word for 'totally not a government, honest', 'totally not a zoning board, honest'

Oh, that's simple enough: have it all run by one big nominally private corporation, with the legal framework making it clear that people are always free to simply not do business with the corporation (and if they get thrown out of an airlock as trespassers afterwards, that's simply their choice).

and 'totally not welfare, honest'?

That's trickier. Since we're talking about libertarians, I wouldn't put it past them to simply throw people out of an airlock if they can't pay the bills for food, rent, water, oxygen etc. If you don't want things to be quite that bad, you can always have the MegaCorp that runs the colony voluntarily choose to spend some of its money on voluntary charity projects.

I'm pretty sure libertarians competent enough to make the colony work will not push out potentially valuable people of the airlock.
Also, libertarian does not necessarily mean minarchist, Objectivist or anarcho-capitalist.

mèþru wrote: ↑Fri Jul 05, 2019 4:58 pm I'm pretty sure libertarians competent enough to make the colony work will not push out potentially valuable people of the airlock.
Also, libertarian does not necessarily mean minarchist, Objectivist or anarcho-capitalist.

Er, that's pretty much sums up the currents within libertarianism?
I don't really mind the libertarians that much. I actually admire the anarcho-capitalism for actually working out the details how their suggested utopia would work after they get rid of the state (though of course it's never going to work...)
The really disturbing thing is how quickly they turn to conservatism and then fascism once they get disillusioned with libertarianism...


Re what Raphael said, yes, I believe having things run as a MegaCorp (at least in name) would probably make the most sense. I doubt they'd push people out of the airlock -- if only for PR reasons!

I think most libertarians aren't so philosophical and are more moderate than the writers of the movement

mèþru wrote: ↑Mon Jul 08, 2019 1:27 pm I think most libertarians aren't so philosophical and are more moderate than the writers of the movement

It is kinda weird how people use "economically right-leaning, culturally left-leaning" and "in favor of abolishing or almost abolishing the government" interchangeably.