The ethics of bearing and raising children in micro-gravity

[Parson]

As to the less important question .... remember that there was a newly married couple who kept their marriage hidden from NASA so that they could fly together on the Space Shuttle. Space Sex Is Serious Business and there was also a pair of very recently married cosmonauts who flew together. Meet The Only Married Couple To Fly Together In Space I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

But as to the real question, the ethics. Ethics cannot be forced. True ethics is the result of decisions to follow a moral code. --- Can you force behavior which is considered by others to be unethical? Any study of ethics and the history of ethics will tell you that the answer is "Only imperfectly." I believe that the only logical response is to provide the best information that you can, and unless you sterilize or otherwise make pregnancy impossible you better expect that it will happen. --- Even going for the sterilization option my bet would be that sooner or later someone will beat it. Making the question of whether it will happen almost certainly an academic exercise if we have people spend years in space. (As a Parson I have no little experience setting up moral principles that "everyone" agrees with only to find considerable people find agreeing with a principle and living by it are two very different things.)

Any realistic story set in space for anything like a life time would almost have to deal with the question of kids to some degree. (I do like The Expanse's way of dealing with it.)

 

[Montero]

Incidentally, John Barnes Orbital Resonance might be of interest here. It isn't about genetic problems, but it is about social engineering for running a space station. Quite a lot of John Barnes's work has social engineering in it. I rather like "A Million Open Doors" on how a large number of colony worlds were recontacted after Earth had a bad time and dropped out of contact, and a theme through the story is how colonisation groups were chosen.

 

[tinkerdan]

I would also think that you have to separate exploration from colonization.

Think about this:
We landed on the moon in 1969.
That was just to prove we could do it.
50 years later we have done nothing more than live in a tin can in space.
I really think that many of us living now might not see anything more than a Mars landing.
By the time we even remotely think about colonization, all these things will be hashed out.

However the 'moral' issue here could just put the slamming brakes on all of space exploration for colonization and it might even explain the Fermi Paradox--all the advanced aliens decided it was immoral to send 'people' into space.

I think that we should also ask how morally correct it is to continue to propagate on a single planet and at the same time confine ourselves to just this one planet.

Overall I think that to answer the OP we have to delve into a lot more issues than just the one; because there are many more issues more important than what's being highlighted here that will ultimately have an affect upon the question.

At some point if things go on as they have; we will have to begin branching out and colonizing the planets around us, or face extinction when we deplete all our resources.
Should we bring children--who have no choice--into a world that might not last their lifetime?
Should we bring children into a world where we have no clear way to say how long they will live?
Should we bring children into a world that rages with wars and sickness and famine and death?
...
I don't want answers to these questions because that really does take us into the area of controversy that shuts down a thread.
However I am bowing out of this thread because I think there are better questions to ask than this one.

 

[Dave]

By the time we even remotely think about colonization, all these things will be hashed out.

I agree with all you said, but my earlier point was that experience shows that it will not be hashed out until the very last possible minute, and even then some more.

I think that what @Michael Bickford wants it to be hashed out right here now.

But as to the real question, the ethics. Ethics cannot be forced. True ethics is the result of decisions to follow a moral code. --- Can you force behavior which is considered by others to be unethical? Any study of ethics and the history of ethics will tell you that the answer is "Only imperfectly."

Exactly!

And no one is going to go on record to say how they feel in case they are out of step with the consensus of opinion, but the consensus of opinion cannot be determined until a good number of people go on the record to say how they feel.

 

[Danny McG]

 

[Michael Bickford]

Yes, that's what I meant by there being no room for neglect. Everything would be accounted for down to the gram.

I will say though, that I doubt any future will exist in which true spaceflight will exist outside of government control. The reason can be summarised as a black ball technology. Basically, any vessel capable of crossing the solar system in a realistic practical amount of time would also be capable of wiping out a city - or station - in a kamikaze type attack purely due to the speed. Any sort of warp drive antimatter containment thingamabob or even basic nuclear fusion would also be far too dangerous to put in civilian hands. All it would take is one crackpot with a ship to kill millions, and if regulations didn't exist before that they most certainly would afterwards.


This x1000! Artificial gravity on spinning stations makes way more sense than going to Mars, and the Moon I think would exist as purely an industrial base, maybe refineries or fuel depots dug under the surface for security and cheapness compared to stations.

Yet huge private interests are already involved in planning and executing those plans. I agree that this should not be a private sector venture at all, but the decisions on this are being made now. I'm not sure there are enough people even thinking about this stuff to make a difference unless—or until—some kind of disastrous error is made—perhaps taking out a city by mistake? Or something horrendous. Until there is a good reason, world public opinion is just gonna let the private sector have its way and existing governments will take the private money as a way of reducing their costs.

Is this too political, moderator? I'm not yet sure where the line is here.

 

[Michael Bickford]

The implications of growing up in other environments is often hinted at in SF - passing comments about someone having the muscular-skeletal development of a high grav world or a low grav world and the like, but it is usually handled at the level of an interesting bit of colour rather than anything more scientific. Though you do then get additional bits like a high-grav person with more muscle needs more calories. Bujold has people making egg and sperm donations before spending a long time in space, to freeze their genome before damage.

As to the ethics - well as others have said many children are already born into far less than ideal environments which can adversely affect their long term development. Whether this is rickets from lack of Vitamin D, heavy metal poisoning, insufficient food, damp, mildew - all of these have an impact and there is no prevention of child birth if the environment is less than ideal. You also get into arguments over what the definition of ideal is. I'm not going to take that line of thinking any further, especially not with real world examples, as we don't discuss contentious world affairs issues on SFF Chrons - we used to but there were some bad rows so now it is banned. So we do discuss things in the abstract, but if it gets too close to an area which might cause raging arguments the thread is closed.
By the way, are you separating out the impact of the environment on the child from the impact on their descendants if there is permanent genetic change? Would you consider permanent damage to the genome to be more serious than damage to the individual? I think some things in your posts implied you were thinking that way - just not entirely brainy today so wanted to check.

Good points. Thanks for responding.

And thanks for the reference to Bujold. I think this is already being done by current astronauts, but that's conjecture. I know it's something I would do if I knew I was going to be subjected to long-term high radiation levels and wanted to have children later.
I'm not as concerned about the radiation exposure in the medium term for space exploration as it is completely subject to mitigation. My thing is that the effects of micro gravity do not seem to be.
The big differences between previous historical examples of subjecting children and future generations to damage—as has been done throughout history—is that this damage—both to the individual born and raised in micro gravity, and to their genes, and therefore the genes of their offspring, is that this has no historical precedence, and that in the past explorers and colonists were not nearly as capable of clearly understanding the consequences of their actions as people are today.
Yes, I am making that separation, but I also see them as causally linked, and I see the preventative imperative as being the similarly linked. Damage to an individual that could have been prevented is both an individual tragedy and a moral/ethical error. Damage to our gene pool may or may not be so tragic for the initiallly damaged generation, but could have horrendous long-term consequences to our species and and to future individuals and so is also ethically questionable.

The argument has been made here that, to paraphrase, People can choose to do what they want, that You can't stop people from procreating, etc. But this is a qualitatively different form of colonization we are contemplating. People literally walked to occupy most of the world. Africans, Asians and Europeans could just set sail in existing ships as Old World explorers did. Emigrants and frontiers people could just pack up a covered wagon and move west. But neither individuals, families, nor most nations can just pick up and go explore the solar system. It will require coordinated efforts at the highest levels of human technology. It therefor must be organized and planned as no exploration or colonization efforts have ever been. So we not only have the opportunity to do it humanely and intelligently, but the responsibility to do so.

 

[.matthew.]

Yet huge private interests are already involved in planning and executing those plans. I agree that this should not be a private sector venture at all, but the decisions on this are being made now.

That is true, but we've yet to see any real results from this. Yes, they can launch rockets with satellites and soon manned missions, but that's a far cry from a sci-fi world where space travel is more commonplace. The vehicles they are currently building are also incapable of causing large scale destruction, mostly because the size is still constrained by the need to build on Earth and then launch them.

That said you are probably right about it taking a disastrous event to force future politicians to act against their financial backers.

Either that or military action will force someone's hand. For example, several countries are working on hypervelocity missiles designed to be launched on an ICBM missile before separating and using speed to bypass defences. With militaries aware of the power of this development, I suspect someone important will take note if civilian vessels could be used as a similar weapon.

It's all very far in the future though and I agree nobody is planning for it

It therefor must be organized and planned as no exploration or colonization efforts have ever been.

True but not wholly. The colonisation of the Americas was a hugely expensive undertaking and it really wasn't just a few people in a boat. They required extensive support for many many years. There were also wars fought over the land, both between native inhabitants and rival colonial powers.

It's nothing compared to colonising space I'll grant you, but I would be interested to research the percentage of GDP it cost / predictions for future costs.

 

[Michael Bickford]

The words form of rule there still implies some sort of control. Super-corporations would themselves be a form of government unaccountable to democratic ideals and with the wealth to match that of many world powers...


That would be the best way to ensure control but even then, the computers would need to be infallible and at the end of the day, all technology seems to become vulnerable to hacks with time, meaning that even if you make a perfect failsafe today, there's no guarantee it would work tomorrow.

Even self destructs or space-based defence systems probably wouldn't do much good.

Take the primary example of space traffic, freighters, moving refined metal ingots from the asteroid belt back to Earth. At 3.2AU closest distance (nearly 500 million km) it would have to be travelling at 55,000 km an hour (15 km/s or 15,000 metres a second) to make the trip in a year (not accounting for acceleration or deceleration). That is only 0.00005% lightspeed which is stupidly slow compared to sci-fi - this conversion might need checking for maths errors but isn't used in the below calculations anyway.

In fact, NASA has gotten a probe up to 69 km/s using slingshot manoeuvres.

If we take Panama sized freighters on Earth as a model (the smallest of all classes except feeder ships), they can hold around 165,000m3 of cargo. In terms of a sphere (as I'm using an asteroid collision calculator) that has a diameter of 64m. Steel weights 7,900 kg per cubic metre so that is the density I'm using and targeting fairly solid rock surface.

15 km/s. Even if it was destroyed as it comes down (which at this speed is likely) there's unlikely to be anything capable of stopping the thousands of tons of metal shotgunning the surface.

This would result in a 1.77 km wide crater, 600 m deep (though it would expand and grow shallower as it collapses and settles) and result in a 5.5 magnitude earthquake at a 100 km distance along with shattering glass.

At a 10 km distance, most wall-bearing multistory buildings will collapse - which I'd say would kill most people within that zone.

69 km/s. A 3.3 km initial crater, 1.1 km deep. At 100 km, the fireball will appear 3.8 times larger than the sun, with a 6.4 magnitude earthquake.

At a 10 km distance, the thermal blast will cause third-degree burns and pretty much set most burnables on fire. The pressure wave will cause steel-framed skyscrapers to suffer extreme frame distortion leading to incipient collapse. Most bridges would also collapse and cars/trucks would be blown over.

All this purely with speeds we are currently capable of obtaining with vessels that are far smaller than we can already build.

Note: I went a wee bit crazy with the research here but I thought it was interesting...

Yes, interesting.
I agree that the super speeds in a lot of Sci-fi are not obtainable in the medium-term future of the even the next millennium.
In addition to the physics of the energy required to accelerate massive bodies, there is the issue of the relatively small size of the solar system (compared with interstellar space). That sounds crazy since it is so vast compared with planetary sizes, but even if we could accelerate to, say, several percentages of light speed, the deceleration becomes a problem within the solar system. Like using high speed rail for inner city transit—you’d be using mega-energy to speed up just to immediately begin using just as much energy again to slow yourself down. Space is space: instantaneous chages of location are the stuff of science fantasy, not science-hewing speculative fiction. That’s OK, I enjoy reading it usually, but I don’t think it’s gonna happen unless and until we crack through this particular physical dimension we’re stuck in. Millions of years? I dunno.

Also, i don’t think we need to worry too much about artificial structures crashing into earth—though there could be a catastrophic errors at some point as even AI will have its failures. Tech will evolve safely because it will happen step by step. I imagine an increasingly complex conversation between us and our AI. I can also imagine scenarios involving break downs and disasters, but they will be quite rare, imo.
We won’t need massive structures to move payloads of material, I don’t think either, just the means at one end to connect masses of material together and accelerating them (think “trains” of material being extruded from an accelerating ring), and a means by which to “catch” or synch with them and help the earth decelerate them at our end. Many centuries ahead though.

 

[Michael Bickford]

It's quite possible that when people sign up for colonisation of another planet, they accept that they and their family are on a one-way trip. This new world would be their home, and for that of their family (and potential children in the future). It's conceivable that travel back to Earth (especially for their children) would simply not be an option. They would have bodies conditioned for living on the planet that they live on, and Earth would be as alien to them as Mars is to us.

Yes, I can see it going that way. In a lot of SF this creates “races” that then vie for various reasons and objectives.
That isn’t the world I’m building. Build the world you’d like to see, yuh know?

It seems that at this point, and for some limited amount of time—100-200 years?—that we have choices to make. There don’t seem to me to be any practical reasons to put people in micro-gravity in perpetuity, since everything we need from Mars or the Moon (why isn’t it capitalized? How bout just the T on “the”: The moon? or all caps: THE moon?) or from asteroids and other bodies can be had by robotics. For earth emigration purposes, it seems like artificial environments with full g simulation will be better for the populations of emigrants and better for the human race in space. Artificial environments would avoid the drama, struggle, and possible wars—that make much of SF so fun, but that would be HELL to live through—so why not choose them over planetary colonization if we have a choice?

 

[Michael Bickford]

With the other options being war or economic sanctions? either of which would cause more death than the alternative.

Plus governments don't like it when people butt into their affairs and many international treaties are based on the very idea that each country has self determination and territorial rights.


In this case, I'd follow the money. In general, the people making the decisions base their opinions on what is most profitable.

There is also the major issue of (as mentioned above) territorial rights. These rights are often granted and maintained on earth through habitation. Scientific or industrial occupation doesn't count towards them - such as with Antarctic expedition bases. Therefore, it would be in the interests of governments to take the health hits to claim what could later turn out to be valuable land.

Yet there is more and more international cooperation and condemnation of nations that abuse their citizens. I jus think this trend will grow And that people will continue to become less tolerant of injustice.

Yup, I think you’re on to a probable direction for many—maybe most or all—high-tech nations. I can see a kind of planetary land-grab happening among the space-faring nations, played out, as you say, by attempting to occupy territory on planets. This is a deep mine of interesting stories. I think most will be tragedies, though, so I’m trying to see my way to the other side, when humanity has learned its lesson on this. Naive, maybe, but that’s where I’m going. But a lot of good stories in the lesson-learning.

 

[Michael Bickford]

That is true, but we've yet to see any real results from this. Yes, they can launch rockets with satellites and soon manned missions, but that's a far cry from a sci-fi world where space travel is more commonplace. The vehicles they are currently building are also incapable of causing large scale destruction, mostly because the size is still constrained by the need to build on Earth and then launch them.

That said you are probably right about it taking a disastrous event to force future politicians to act against their financial backers.

Either that or military action will force someone's hand. For example, several countries are working on hypervelocity missiles designed to be launched on an ICBM missile before separating and using speed to bypass defences. With militaries aware of the power of this development, I suspect someone important will take note if civilian vessels could be used as a similar weapon.

It's all very far in the future though and I agree nobody is planning for it


True but not wholly. The colonisation of the Americas was a hugely expensive undertaking and it really wasn't just a few people in a boat. They required extensive support for many many years. There were also wars fought over the land, both between native inhabitants and rival colonial powers.

It's nothing compared to colonising space I'll grant you, but I would be interested to research the percentage of GDP it cost / predictions for future costs.

Very interesting!
yeah, they pretty much invented the insurance industry to secure the financing of new world colonization. Expensive and risky. I bet all that data is out there, but what a pain to collate and correlate it all!

The colonizing powers were all at war with one another as well. $$$$!!! Paid for by colonization as just another part of the overall struggle for domination. How stupidly human! Let’s avoid that next time, maybe.
I think with this new exploration we have a better shot at cooperation. That’s what I’m imagining. Psychedelic-inspired optimism! That’s instead of calling it cock-eyed optimism, which sounds weird and is probably not politically correct anymore. Don’t want to say bad things about other crazy optimists! We’re not crazy! Just too much peyote!

 

[Michael Bickford]

As to the less important question .... remember that there was a newly married couple who kept their marriage hidden from NASA so that they could fly together on the Space Shuttle. Space Sex Is Serious Business and there was also a pair of very recently married cosmonauts who flew together. Meet The Only Married Couple To Fly Together In Space I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

But as to the real question, the ethics. Ethics cannot be forced. True ethics is the result of decisions to follow a moral code. --- Can you force behavior which is considered by others to be unethical? Any study of ethics and the history of ethics will tell you that the answer is "Only imperfectly." I believe that the only logical response is to provide the best information that you can, and unless you sterilize or otherwise make pregnancy impossible you better expect that it will happen. --- Even going for the sterilization option my bet would be that sooner or later someone will beat it. Making the question of whether it will happen almost certainly an academic exercise if we have people spend years in space. (As a Parson I have no little experience setting up moral principles that "everyone" agrees with only to find considerable people find agreeing with a principle and living by it are two very different things.)

Any realistic story set in space for anything like a life time would almost have to deal with the question of kids to some degree. (I do like The Expanse's way of dealing with it.)

Thanks for the references and the response!
I’ve read the first one, but not the second. I’m on it!
I mean, yeah, it certainly wouldn’t surprise me, but I wonder how they, uh-oh... pulled it off? i think even the Russians—especially the Russians—are watched all the time. There is no privacy, so far, in space, outside the toilet. OK, I’m imagining it...

im not suggesting that anyone—some SF writer, far from it!—is able to dictate to any one or any society or culture what is ethical and what is not. Morality, through religion and region-like philosophy, has somewhat superseded national boundaries, though. It is wrong to do some things, at least officially, in every nation, and most stick pretty close to a basic code of ethics that even in, say, South Korea or Somalia is far more advanced than, say, Ancient Rome, or Aztec Meso America. What I’m imagining is a combination of a movement against micro g colonization and a reaction to its failures that feeds into that movement. Not a top-down ethical edict.
Here I’m more or less polling the SF masses to take the temperature of the issue. I’m writing what I’m writing—building a world as I’d like to see it according to my scientific understandings. But moral and ethical questions are not strictly scientific. The speed of light and the boiling point of elements at specific pressures may be constant and known—even unknowns like the nature of dark matter may be known in time—but what is moral and ethical can’t be “known” unless informed by some transcendental force such as that which religions posit. Ethics are what they are among the societies that promulgate them. It’s a social and cultural decision that must be made over and over again anew. What was ethical for Ulysses in the Odyssey is not what the Dalai Lama thinks Is moral or ethical, for example.
Space colonization will alter human culture forever. Our experiences there—especially our failures—will alter our ethics and morals. I am interested in that. What will we be like as social individuals when we occupy the solar system. I‘m thinking it will depend greatly on HOW we occupy it—what successes and failures we have—what those successes, and especially failures, do to our relationships and our culture, especially the fundamental culture of child-raising and growing up human.

 

[Michael Bickford]

Incidentally, John Barnes Orbital Resonance might be of interest here. It isn't about genetic problems, but it is about social engineering for running a space station. Quite a lot of John Barnes's work has social engineering in it. I rather like "A Million Open Doors" on how a large number of colony worlds were recontacted after Earth had a bad time and dropped out of contact, and a theme through the story is how colonisation groups were chosen.

Oooo, that sounds so interesting!
I‘m gonna read that! Thanks for the tip!

I am writing about that long-term loss of contact/reconnection idea myself. I have done a lot of research on the process of speciation—how new species evolve from older ones and at what point and under what conditions they are truly new and different, separate species. At what point six to eight million years ago did chimps and humans become different species? At what point will humans separated by millennia from the rest of the human race not be human anymore. If we split into two groups that no longer interbreed, which will be human and which will be something else? How different might they be? How similar? Bonobos, chimps, and gorillas are really not that different from us, but we are definitely different species. With different environmental conditions in an alt history, we might be even more similar to them. Where is the line? There isn’t one, really. We humans make all the rules. But if both “species” are essentially human...?
Thanks for the stimulating thoughts.

 

[Michael Bickford]

I would also think that you have to separate exploration from colonization.

Think about this:
We landed on the moon in 1969.
That was just to prove we could do it.
50 years later we have done nothing more than live in a tin can in space.
I really think that many of us living now might not see anything more than a Mars landing.
By the time we even remotely think about colonization, all these things will be hashed out.

However the 'moral' issue here could just put the slamming brakes on all of space exploration for colonization and it might even explain the Fermi Paradox--all the advanced aliens decided it was immoral to send 'people' into space.

I think that we should also ask how morally correct it is to continue to propagate on a single planet and at the same time confine ourselves to just this one planet.

Overall I think that to answer the OP we have to delve into a lot more issues than just the one; because there are many more issues more important than what's being highlighted here that will ultimately have an affect upon the question.

At some point if things go on as they have; we will have to begin branching out and colonizing the planets around us, or face extinction when we deplete all our resources.
Should we bring children--who have no choice--into a world that might not last their lifetime?
Should we bring children into a world where we have no clear way to say how long they will live?
Should we bring children into a world that rages with wars and sickness and famine and death?
...
I don't want answers to these questions because that really does take us into the area of controversy that shuts down a thread.
However I am bowing out of this thread because I think there are better questions to ask than this one.

I get that there are a lot of other interesting question, so cool. This is just the one I thought I’d open with since I’m currently writing about it.
Lots of food for thought there. Thanks.
You really highlighted my interest because for that list of questions, the answers are up to the individual who may or may not decide to conceive and bear another individual. Then, how will the new humans be raised, socially and culturally, in the new off-world environment. I’m interested in the experience of character who will be in positions to make those personal decisions as part of colonizing the solar system. What will it do to human culture and what will space society do to the individual and the culture she inculcates her children with. Seems like where the rubber meets the cosmic road. And it seems like it depends greatly on HOW we do the colonization.

maybe I “see” you on another thread.

 

[Michael Bickford]

I agree with all you said, but my earlier point was that experience shows that it will not be hashed out until the very last possible minute, and even then some more.

I think that what @Michael Bickford wants it to be hashed out right here now.

Exactly!

And no one is going to go on record to say how they feel in case they are out of step with the consensus of opinion, but the consensus of opinion cannot be determined until a good number of people go on the record to say how they feel.

Kinda brilliantly stating the conundrum!
Hashing it out here is just a lot of digital hot air—but grist for the story mill.
I get that things will really be hashed out in the due course of time, and you’re right that it’s gonna be at the last possible minute or Aahh! Too late! Disaster!
But envisioning those disasters and solutions is what we do here, right. This is what I’m writing about, Im just looting all your minds for material! Nah, I got my own ideas, but this has been tremendously helpful and inspiring.
I’m very appreciative of everyone who’s taken the time and thought to write. Some amazing thinkers here!
I hope in the next few weeks when I start posting pieces of my novel that some of you can respond with more understanding of where I’m coming from, if not where I’m going.

 

[Michael Bickford]

View attachment 76831

nailed it!

 

[CupofJoe]

Some work [admittedly no on procreation] is being carried out on the physical, emotional and mental effects and affects of Mars missions.

Astronauts on Mars missions could suffer cognitive and emotional problems – new research

High levels of cognitive performance and effective teamwork are crucial to long-duration space missions.

theconversation.com

 

[Parson]

Some work [admittedly no on procreation] is being carried out on the physical, emotional and mental effects and affects of Mars missions.

Astronauts on Mars missions could suffer cognitive and emotional problems – new research

High levels of cognitive performance and effective teamwork are crucial to long-duration space missions.

theconversation.com

Really, really interesting and a bit troubling as well.

 

[CupofJoe]

Really, really interesting and a bit troubling as well.

And there was me, thinking that getting the time off work was going to be the biggest issue...