{"id":1642,"date":"2009-12-12T09:48:57","date_gmt":"2009-12-12T16:48:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/xsml\/?p=1642"},"modified":"2009-12-12T09:48:57","modified_gmt":"2009-12-12T16:48:57","slug":"a-society-that-would-survive-a-1000-year-journey-on-a-spaceship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/2009\/12\/12\/a-society-that-would-survive-a-1000-year-journey-on-a-spaceship\/","title":{"rendered":"A society that would survive a 1,000 year journey on a spaceship."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Writer Charlie Stross <a href=\"http:\/\/www.antipope.org\/charlie\/blog-static\/2009\/11\/designing_society_for_posterit.html\">asks his readers<\/a> to design a society that could survive a thousand year journey across space. Many of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.metafilter.com\/87378\/If-you-wouldnt-like-living-that-way-in-the-lowest-status-slot-in-the-pecking-order-youre-doing-it-wrong\">the responses<\/a> are intriguing, especially those that are pregnant with possibilities. For example:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Chop it up into 5 or 10 distinct physically societies and do everything you can to make sure they don&#8217;t have the means to access one another. Have a computer controlled system allowing extremely unwieldy travel between adjacent areas once every ten years, e.g. a tunnel you have to crawl through which is open for 30 minutes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>How long before one or more of those societies makes it their primary objective to circumvent these artificial borders? And does that focus make the passage of time bearable? <\/p>\n<p>I mention this exchange here because it&#8217;s an exercise in political science fiction, the intellectual backbone of my life for the last 20 years. <\/p>\n<p>For what is Stross&#8217; question about a society that can withstand a thousand year journey through space but a novel rephrasing of the question that has defined us all for millennia? <\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/spaceship_earth-300x263.jpg\" alt=\"spaceship_earth\" title=\"spaceship_earth\" width=\"285\" height=\"251\" style=\"margin-bottom:5px;\" \/><br \/> <small>A spaceship in solar orbit, photographed from its satellite.<\/small><\/center><\/p>\n<p>How should we live? <\/p>\n<p>Ask Moses, Aristotle, Plato, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Confucius, St. Augustine, etc., etc., etc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Writer Charlie Stross asks his readers to design a society that could survive a thousand year journey across space. Many of the responses are intriguing, especially those that are pregnant with possibilities. For example: Chop it up into 5 or 10 distinct physically societies and do everything you can to make sure they don&#8217;t have&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1642"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1642\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}