@maxthefox @sudnadja @nyrath Are you aware of Joan Vinge's "Heaven Chronicles" ?
@michael_w_busch @maxthefox @sudnadja
Joan Vinge's Heaven Chronicles are classics.
They illustrate perils of tech decline in a system with no habitable planets but lots of rich asteroids
If a planetary colony falls into barbarism, everybody reverts to a non-technological agrarian society.
If an asteroid civilization falls into barbarism, Everybody Dies.
https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/techlevel.php#decline
@nyrath @michael_w_busch @sudnadja I didn't yet but I'll probably check them out for inspiration!
But yea the thing I have with spaceborne societies (aside from the largest of habs) is that they either have strict social control (if human) or have mindsets either natural (alien) or engineered (transhuman) to be able to properly maintain small habitats and asteroid colonies over generations.
With baseline humans, asteroid mines are at least partially dependent on the in-system inhabited worlds.
@maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja
"...spaceborne societies either have strict social control or ..."
Obligatory Atomic Rockets reference:
https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacecolony.php#id--Space_Colony--Space_Colony_Problems--Society_Rules
@nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja@vivaldi.net
Being who I am, I’m increasingly inclined to write the IES article on social failure modes of space habitats: to wit, that the meme which states they require tight social control to function basically makes them catnip for all the authoritarian personality types in the area.
@nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja@vivaldi.net
Apart from the, ah, joyful societies authoritarian leaders usually create, of course, the *real* social failure mode is when the guy in charge of the strict social control comes up with the space version of the Four Pests Campaign or making steel in backyard furnaces and the population are unable to tell him he's full of crap before everyone's dead.
("Complaining about the smell of the air is unmutual, citizen!")
@isaackuo @nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja@vivaldi.net
Well, then, just to grind my axe in a less expected direction, let me take a moment to point out that we can see exactly the same failure modes in corporations with the equivalent strict "social" control, too.
(In this particular area my politics is that "any system isomorphic to sticking your hands over your eyes and fingers in your ears when confronted with feedback is a very bad system indeed" 😊.)
@cerebrate @nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja Most people can't really wrap their heads around what it means for AIR to not be a taken for granted background feature of life.
I sometimes imagine that space-based civilization won't really be viable until they come up with something like an isotope-powered personal rebreather that guarantees that no matter what else you will always have oxygen.
@60sRefugee @nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja@vivaldi.net
Once in a much earlier iteration of this topic, I opined that the problem was the assumption of single-provider life support such that any violation of strict discipline could theoretically take it out - which is not only bad social design, but really terrible *engineering* design.
@60sRefugee @nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja@vivaldi.net
Say what you will about anarchic space cossacks, but it's really hard to screw up the air terminally in a space city with three to five commercial life support companies and dozens if not hundreds of belter rednecks with their own algae banks gurgling away.
@sudnadja @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @60sRefugee @nyrath @cerebrate “Anarchic Space Cossacks” is going on the band names list.
@cerebrate @60sRefugee @nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja
With three to five major suppliers in a market, it's far too easy for someone to combine 1 & 2, use that to force #5 out of the market, and then you're back to hydraulic despotism.
If you've got a market in life support, it needs to be proactively regulated with an iron fist.
@dashdsrdash @60sRefugee @nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja@vivaldi.net
"So, what you're saying is that in order to avoid the risk of the market collapsing into a hydraulic despotism, we need to preemptively institute a hydraulic despotism?"
@cerebrate @60sRefugee @nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja
It's a conundrum, isn't it.
@dashdsrdash @60sRefugee @nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja@vivaldi.net
While I don't pretend to have a perfect general solution to the problem, I do note that we're awfully good at implementing solutions to potential risks which turn out to be pretty terrible in their own right.
So I have a fairly strong preference for not doing that.
@dashdsrdash @cerebrate @60sRefugee @nyrath @maxthefox
There are many other ways one might structure a society on a space habitat, all with their own consequences.
(e.g. variations on "Mennonites in space", which seem to have been particularly popular proposals lately.)
But all of this is very far afield from @sudnadja 's original post.
@dashdsrdash @cerebrate @60sRefugee @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja
Cerebrate wrote an illustration of this:
@nyrath @dashdsrdash @60sRefugee @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja@vivaldi.net
To be fair, that's not a commercial monopoly, even an unchallengeable one. That's an illustration of life on a habitat run by the Space Mafia's uglier competition.
The way most 'verse commercial life support providers work would be better illustrated by the less graphic but substantially more common in _civilized_ space
https://eldraeverse.com/2016/06/14/failure/
@cerebrate @nyrath @dashdsrdash @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja Hopefully, life-support providers don't get bought up by equity investment firms that start looking for ways to maximize return.
@60sRefugee @cerebrate @nyrath @dashdsrdash @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja Along with firefighting services. 🏦
@60sRefugee @nyrath @dashdsrdash @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja@vivaldi.net
It helps to be in a place and time in which the phrase "We have a contract, do we not?" still means something.
@cerebrate @nyrath @dashdsrdash @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja It helps even more that the Eldrae do not consider "be the crookedest greed bastard you can get away with" to be socially acceptable.
@dashdsrdash @cerebrate @60sRefugee @nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja Hydraulic Despotism is not a good term as it comes from orientalism.
The idea of something going wrong sort of strikes me as what if the public waste dept made a move to take over town? Wouldn't the director simply be fired? At what point do people simply say no? Employees would be looking at them like I'm calling the mayor's office.
@dashdsrdash @cerebrate @60sRefugee @nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja
Who's doing the purchasing? Breathing air is not something that is readily metered and purchased on an individual level, like food items.
The purchasers would be some sort of collective(s), whether that's a single body or maybe some relatively small number. Either way, it's not clear to me that 1&2 could merge and for #5 out of the market. The purchasers have power to punish them for trying that.
@isaackuo @cerebrate @60sRefugee @nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja
If you can assess rent, you can assess an air charge.
It would be wise for any artificial habitat requiring a managed ecosystem to keep track of comings and goings, births and deaths and all redox reactions.
@isaackuo
Within a given habitat, life support is really going to be a natural monopoly—much like I can’t choose my water company now. Where the power lies in negotiations depends on the scale of the entities: If you have huge Imperial-scale engineering firms, a hab with a few thousand people might have essentially no bargaining power. But if this is a contract for 10M residents and we’re your only customer...
@dashdsrdash @cerebrate @60sRefugee @nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja
@cerebrate @60sRefugee @nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja What are anarchic space Cossacks
@nyrath @cerebrate @60sRefugee @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja Being related to them, I would say, yeah no. lol
@nyrath @cerebrate @60sRefugee @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja Though I should add, that Cossacks, and Tatars are often differentiated by religion, such as my father had the "Tatar fold" and people would ask him where he was from, thinking him Asian. Though I beleive some of my family might be Baluch. By late Tsarist times, Cossack was a military unit, light cavalry, or lancers.
@nyrath @cerebrate @60sRefugee @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja Interestingly, the name is from the same entomological root as Kazakh - wanderer. It all comes back to #Traveller :D Anyways, here is a cool video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XbMXAuEsDU
@60sRefugee @cerebrate @nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja
I don't really see air as quintessentially different from water or food as a resource - especially considering breathable air is going to be a byproduct of food production.
I mean, obviously it must be monitored and managed at some level, but I don't think the management principles need to be particularly different from what we currently do for food supply, water supply, power, sewage, etc.
@isaackuo @cerebrate @nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja But two things: we instinctively understand what no food or water means, but no oxygen is a rare crisis that you either escape from or die; we aren't used to having to _guarantee_ an air supply. And related to the first, no oxygen (or frequently no CO2 removal) is a situation that you have very little time to correct.
@60sRefugee @cerebrate @nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja
We DO have instincts about availability of oxygen, though.
Immerse yourself underwater for a few minutes. You will experience visceral instinctive reactions just as much as what you feel from deprivation from water or food.
It's a threat that our ancestors dealt with enough to evolve such instincts. In contrast, we don't have such instincts about, say, ionizing radiation.
@isaackuo @cerebrate @nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja But that instinct isn't much more than panic: get air THIS INSTANT or die trying. Thirst and hunger are survivable for long enough to take longer-term action.
@60sRefugee @cerebrate @nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja I don't really see what the problem is - we humans are used to translating fears of such dangers into long term action plans.
For example, one visceral fear is fear of fire. Lots of pilots have a fear of going down in flames. By the time one is experiencing first hand going down in a burning plane, it's too late. But humans are able to focus that fear into long term actions to do what's necessary to prevent the fire risk.
@cerebrate @nyrath @maxthefox @michael_w_busch @sudnadja
Ooh, ooh, ooh, I hear the clinking of axes begging to be ground. Let me breathe it in. Yeah, this is the good stuff.
(I am very much a fan of purposeful political axe grinding in SF. I mean, all SF is political whether the creator intends it or not. I prefer intentional.)