Hm, i am not really seeing how "immortality" is going to happen for anything other than the tiniest fraction of super-wealthy people, even assuming it can happen at all. So it is a bit naive to ask from the rest of society to help bring about something which won't help them in the slightest.
Moreover, i am not seeing how "immortality" has to exist in the end of a "prolongue life" medical series of breakthroughs. Infact i intuitively doubt it can exist, and even if it can it surely won't be something achievable at some moment as if it is a cure for a disease. It will require constant monitoring for side-effects, cause all life has a circle, and will die. Death is not a disease at all.
You can re-read my other posts on this subject. I think you're wrong and constructed a decent argument and theoretical framework for how this could play out. All you've done is said 'I suspect your wrong' without anything to back it up. Forgive me if I take a hard pass.
Would it be a good guess that you've read Cities in Flight, by James Blish?
I have not heard of that book. I actually have only read one book that was about anything resembling a generation ship and even that was a weird, soft-sci fi military adventure book divorced from reality.
Surely my thinking is heavily influenced by science fiction but it's also heavily influenced by my own grounding in the subject. I can't tell you how to build a generation ship but I can tell you what they would have to look like to work and provide some insight into the industrial capacity and advancement that will be required to make such a thing.
Why do kids get bored in a roomful of toys and a playground across the street? There are some nights when I sit here in front of my computer, Wikipedia just a couple of clicks away, I'm surrounded by books, fanzines, and DVDs, I have Netflix, and I just feel so bored that the only thing I can think of to do is either to read an Archie comic or go to bed. I've got over a thousand books in my personal library that I've never read, yet what I'm reading right now is a book I've read a dozen times already.
Yeah so why again is this a problem unique to a generation ship? One that will by definition have more advanced entertainment features than what we currently possess and will be a large, self contained ecosystem and major city. To be completely honest, boredom is simply not a problem a generation ship would face.
I'll admit that part of the problem is that I've had issues with clinical depression for many years. When it's really bad, I can barely muster interest in anything. If it weren't for the cats needing food, water, and litter box cleaning, there are some days that I wouldn't bother getting up. So there could be all of my favorite entertainments and activities right at my fingertips, and none of it would matter. I should think that anyone living on the ships or colonies you're imagining would have to be fully screened for such things as depression and other forms of mental illness. Hopefully by then a cure would be found for these things. Right now I wouldn't want an eternity of the sort of life as it is.
Why would anyone bother with mental health screenings more than a cursory check of sanity? We can't stop mental illness from spontaneously manifesting itself in anyone - much less in a population the size of a city. Of course they'd stop the completely mentally incompetent from boarding a ship in the first place but they wouldn't be able or even required to prevent people with all mental illnesses from boarding. A generational colony ship will (again by definition) have ample capacity to deal with mental illness.
So with your moneyless society and infinite availability of stuff, how would the economy work?
I don't know, I'm sorry I can't predict that. But I can look at the overwhelming, long-standing trends in human capacity for resource generation and utilization and confidently predict that one day soon our current economic models won't make any sense. I don't think serfs on farms in the middle ages could have predicted our modern economic system either but it changed nonetheless. The fundamental difference between us and them however is that they were too ignorant of how the world functioned to have even been able to ask the question in the first place.
So how would unlimited stuff and infinite possibilities for activities work in a city-sized spaceship? Severely limiting population growth, or zero-growth, as in Bova's Saturn/Titan novels? If it's limited growth, you'd have people applying to have children, and who gets to decide if they're allowed, and what would the criteria be? For that matter, if everyone is immortal, why even bother having children? (interesting side note: in the TV series Highlander and Highlander: The Raven, the Immortals are all sterile, even before becoming immortal; none of them can father or bear children)
I think population growth will naturally slow to a trickle over time. Kids are hard to raise and people choose to do it much less when given the option as we've seen all across the world. I think that trend will accelerate and we may come to a point where the only way to keep populations from crashing is to continually extend life spans. I don't think that's a particularly likely outcome however.
And then there's the possibility of extending or even creating life through human machine interfaces and AI. Hell there may even be a slow, natural progression of our entire species into artificial forms that won't require a
Matrix style apocalypse.
But this is all way off topic.
And we're confusing two issues here. I don't think someone on a ship will have infinite possibilities - for that statement I was referring to Earth bound humans. Leaving on a generational ship will limit what you can do unless we invent a way to create large amounts of mass from pure energy and also have effectively limitless amounts of energy to do it. I don't know if that would ever happen but hell if you life billions of years who knows?
But for those of us who stay in the solar system (with effectively infinite mass) we'll eventually be able to do just about anything.
Assuming people would want to go to NYC in the first place... I assume there would have been an immense change in society to eliminate crime, or you'd have street gangs and organized crime out in space. And please don't say that in a post-scarcity society there won't be any crime because people will have everything they could possibly need or want. It's human nature to test the rules and break them. Do it out in space and the result could mean a very nasty death for everyone.
You're missing my point here and simultaneously looking over the self-selection inherent to getting on a generational ship.
And again I will say that it is not easy, by definition, of taking down an entire generational colony ship any more than a street gang could take out NYC.
Time lag... have a long enough time lag and you get problems. Who is in charge of these space cities? Are they completely autonomous, or just part of a central government? If the latter, I would say that C.J. Cherryh had it pegged when she said that the farther from Earth a colony or space station was, the less relevance Earth had in issuing orders and setting rules. That's a recipe for eventual rebellion and war.
Why would time lag cause problems? What problems would happen?
Why do you assume a generational ship would be subservient to anyone but its own occupants to begin with? Why does it require external control?
Elderly people aren't part of a hive mind any more than any other age group. Take my grandmother and great-aunt, for instance. You know the phrase "raining like cats and dogs"? The rest of that saying is disgustingly racist by modern standards. Back in the '80s I explained to her that if she said that in public, people would be shocked and disgusted, and call her a racist. She didn't understand at first, but finally was able to eliminate that part of the saying from her vocabulary. I never heard my great-aunt say anything racist, ever. She was more old-fashioned than my grandmother in domestic matters, but she was also more enthusiastic at first about my then-new interest in science fiction. She gave me a Star Wars blanket and an astronaut-themed binder "for your outer space stories." (I still have those)
I'm not making generalization about old people really and if I came across that way then I misrepresented my own point. I'm making a generalization about people, period. People do adapt and change over time. That not all people make big attitude changes on big topics is as much of a function of their inevitable death than their resistance to change. More so, in fact because people change and shift biases without even realizing it all the time.
I do take my hat off to your optimism. Optimism is necessary for humans to survive and get off this planet. But human nature would have to undergo quite a change to make this scenario of yours possible.
Thank you and I agree with you.
What restrictions do they have on physician-assisted suicide that you find excessive?
FWIW, palliative care and hospice care is pretty good for most cancers, even when there isn't . My mother died of cancer in 2014, and she got all the opioids she needed at any dose including ones that would be considered dangerous for a non-terminal patient. It was able to control her pain all the way up until the last 36 hours when she stopped being lucid.
Although medical professionals are technically not allowed to assist your death in Illinois or most other US states, hospice care does provide the patient with more than enough strong opioids that they can decide to overdose themselves if they wish and are physically capable of it, providing a very peaceful end. My mother didn't choose that, but it's an option that is available to anyone in hospice care who have made that decision and are still capable of doing it themselves.
I think that assisted suicide needs a legal framework so it can come out of the legal grey area. Yes, doctors can and routinely do enable terminally ill patients to die but that doesn't mean they don't take risks to do so.
^How does it work to say that you only want immortalism cause you want your parents to stay alive? How is that even a political argument?
That's a childish interpretation of what he argued.
