(i) teen-age marriage as the norm;
(ii) high social status for mothers of many children;
(iii) a family-centred culture;
(iv) strict exogamy, e. g., marriage of cousins forbidden;
(v) sexual permissiveness;
(vi) no stigma on illegitimacy;
(vii) encouragement of married women to have children with different men;
(viii) large clans instead of small families;
(ix) artificial insemination;
(x) exogenesis;
(xi) a legal requirement for each family or clan to adopt one exogene;
(xii) genetic manipulation.
Coupling (ii) with "...the desirabilty of independent pioneering outside the original settlement...", Anderson thinks that the family-centred culture (iii) might also be "...patriarchal..." (p. 184). Sexual permissiveness (v) is presented as an alternative to the patriarchal (iii). However, different approaches might be tried in various settlements or alternatively a colonial society might combine features that would have seemed incompatible to the Terrestrial ancestors.
6 comments:
Hi, Paul!
We see some of the characteristics Anderson thought might arise in early extra solar colonies in his book ORBIT UNLIMITED, about the colony on Rustum. I don't think v, vi, and vii very likely, esp. if the colonists are Christians or Jews, but it might happen with some of the more eccentric colonies.
I suggest as a real world, historical analogy, the small Norse colony which settled Iceland. From what I recall of its history, vi, vii, ix, x and xii from the list above are the only ones which doesn't apply. And most of these only because of technological reasons.
Sean
I note that Iceland had continued contact with Europe & so was able to get *some* genetic diversity from continued immigration.
The deleterious effects of inbreeding could be avoided by the Heinlein Solution — "allowing couples to select which naturally produced sperm and ova they want to combine into a child, but forbidding them to actually alter the natural human genome."
I would expect CRISPR or later technologies to make this easy long before interstellar travel is feasible.
Another problem with small population is lack of specialists to do the jobs needed to maintain a high tech society. Can this be mitigated by such things as 3D printing?
We wouldn't have to have a habitable planet in a colony solar system. We would likely have billions of people in rotating space habitats in the solar system before there is interstellar travel. That will give some data on the minimum population to maintain a high tech society, & lots of people who would be happy to live in such habitats in a solar system with no habitable planets. (Though such a solar system might have 'easily' terraformable planets.)
So we could put a colony at the nearest star or even a rogue planet rather than the nearest habitable planet with would be much farther away.
Would we colonize a nearby solar system with something like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9KjiqFgo_w
Or perhaps use beamed propulsion to send a stream of *small* craft each containing a few colonists in cold sleep, or useful supplies, to build up the colony into something self sustaining?
Kaor, Jim!
While, over centuries, I agree Iceland did get some immigration, it does have one of the most homogeneous populations to be found in any European country.
I have nothing against O'Neill habitats, and I agree they can be used for colonization, I still think most people who leave Earth would prefer to settle on terrestroid planets.
But I would expect many newly founded off Earth colonies to be, for several generations, to be less advanced. Because all available resources would have to be used simply for the most basic purposes: getting established and enabling the colonists to become self sufficient. E.g., horses might be used instead of machines, on farms. And so on for other trades and professions. Till capital has been built up to pay for imports or the knowledge needed by colonists sent to off planet schools for advanced studies.
Ad astra! Sean
"I still think most people who leave Earth would prefer to settle on terrestroid planets."
What people would prefer & what they can get aren't necessarily the same.
I don't expect FTL to ever be available, so it will be a long time before we get to any planet that is naturally a place we can walk the surface without a space suit. Also it will take a long time to terraform a planet sufficiently to be such a place.
So I think there will be a few developments at the same time.
1) People who go to live in space will be self selected to be those who don't mind the differences between the artificial environment of a rotating space habitat & the surface of Earth.
2) Rotating space habitats will be designed to minimize those differences.
3) We will make enclosed habitats on eg: Mars, balloon habitats in the upper atmosphere of Venus etc. also designed to minimize the differences from the surface of earth. There too there will be self selection for people who don't mind the differences.
For enclosed habitats on Mars, Mercury, various satellites, there will be the issue of 'can humans be healthy living at significantly less than earth gravity.
So I think most of the people who get to another solar system will be happy living in rotating space habitats. If there is a habitable planet in the system there might be quite a large population in space, before the oddball minority that wants to try living on a planetary surface is large enough to colonize that planet.
I will add that any advances in anti-aging research would mitigate the problems of low initial population. A longer health-span means more people who can do productive work & help raise the children.
Kaor, Jim!
I actually don't, mostly disagree with you. Gerard O'Neill himself, in his book THE HIGH FRONTIER, explained how habitats of the kind you advocate could be so large that I can see large populations being happy there. Complete with wide farmlands, lakes, rivers, etc.
I really don't see anti-aging advances amounting to much more than what we see in Anderson's Technic stories: people using antisenescence to live in good health till about age 100-110.
And I still say most who leave Earth will prefer to settle on planets, if possible.
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