Thanks for your contributions; further discussion.

As far as a 'police' force on a habitat, I'd rather see a situation wherein there is no standing security force but rather one where all members of the hab receive basic training in emergency management and if an emergency arises a 'response team' is elected that would include whichever specialties are needed to respond to the crisis at hand. This would tend to minimize traditional misuses of power inherent in police forces, and to more deeply involve all members of the hab in the overall responsibility for their own environment and its' maintenance and tend to make interpersonal interventions and discipline fairer and more equitable. The crisis teams would, of course, have access to all the data available on jurisprudence and other subject matter that mankind has amassed over the ages at the touch of a computer screen.

From: l_ed_cox
Sent: Thursday, September 02, 2010 12:22 PM
To: spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [spacesettlers] Re: Thanks for your contributions; further discussion.

Wow! Thanks for all the responses so far to my initial post!

With this post I want to develop the subject a little further.

But first I would like to respond to some of the comments in a general way.

First: The most common reaction I get when I bring this subject up is a sort of a brush-off. It's as if most people are convinced that we are doing the best we can to deal with the frailties of being human and we should basically just learn to live with them. I don't agree with that. I think these problems are worth devoting considerable time and effort to handling, and that they pose a significant threat to the survival of the human race.

There was an old sci-fi flick called "Dark Star" that depicted a space ship whose crew had basically "gone bad." It ended up blowing up due to an accident, if I recall correctly. Though some see Earth as going down this path, it has so much physical and social inertia that the negative influences in society have not (yet) been successful in causing total destruction. But what if things got so bad on a space colony that something like 911 were allowed to happen? An act like that could knock out the entire colony. So it seems to me that, both down here and out there, it would behoove us to get a better handle on this whole self-destructive phenomenon that goes on with some people.

Second: Who will leave earth.

I was looking at a future where everyone would ultimately be forced to leave earth or die here, due to solar system changes. But I know most of you are looking at a shorter time line than that. In almost any colonization scenario I can think of, you are going to get a very mixed population. To get onto the International Space Station you need all kinds of training, a certain psychological profile, extreme physical health, etc., etc. In most colonization scenarios it wouldn't be like that.

Some of you speculated that the first to go might actually be people who felt out of place or rejected on earth. That might be an accurate prediction. If so, they would need some sort of workable social technology even more.

Third: The role of fiction literature in exploring possible futures.

When I was younger I read a lot of sci-fi, but I didn't keep it up. So now I am really behind. But what most of the books I read did was to take some existing or proposed technology, either "hard" or "soft," develop some future-time scenario for it and then see how it played out. The memorable stories survive as warnings of what could happen if we blindly embrace certain "solutions" or carelessly move ahead without any.

To cite another movie example: Star Wars had the Jedi, who were very instrumental in keeping things going. But we don't have any group like that these days. Do we, perhaps, need such a group? Fiction is great for making people think, even introducing new ideas.

Space Colony Ideal Scene

Some messages had to do with how people who misbehaved might be treated on a colony. This is more to the point of my first post.

Here are some of my ideas for how a space colony would have to operate socially to survive for a reasonable length of time:

1)Don't mess with people if things are going well. Police actions tend to be wasteful because most people are cool. The police function itself can go criminal, so it has to be kept very focused.

2)Have some sort of "early warning system." People have to take some responsibility for each other. If there is a reporting system that is fair, people will use it to help resolve situations. This means no one reports on someone else behind their back. The "police" function uses reports to identify possible bad situations and handle before they blow up.

3)Don't wait for something criminal to happen. Accidents are considered a part of life. But if someone starts having a lot of them, it can indicate that the person has an issue that needs to be resolved. The system would be designed to catch people before they go "hard core."

4)Effective corrective technologies are known and used. People are valuable to a group. They are doing jobs that help the group survive. If they start failing, there are measures short of kicking them out that can be taken. A well-run space colony would invest most of its corrective energy in applying technologies designed to strengthen its members so that they would be very unlikely to "go criminal."

5)"Hard core" misbehavors are effectively handled. In a society where criminals are not under good control, a bright or creative person can be seen as a threat, labeled as "misbehaving" and sent away, never to be seen again. This gives the whole justice system a bad reputation. A well-run space colony would not allow such a thing to happen. Its justice system would have to be set up to correctly identify persons who were a real threat to the group, and to protect good people from malicious attempts to use the justice system to get rid of them. And its corrective technologies would have to actually be effective. Most people think that hard core misbehavors need to be jailed or killed. That might make someone feel better, but it does nothing to handle the criminal. My research tells me that criminals think that some external force made them do bad things. To break that thought pattern you have to get them to take back their own sense of responsibility for what they do. A well-run space colony would discover and use a technology that could accomplish that.

6)There are more interesting and worthwhile opponents in the game of life than criminals. A well-run space colony would invest the majority of its creative energy in playing the higher games of survival, having solved the basic problems of body health and mental health within its own group.

Well, there you go. We could just leave it at that. The BIG problems of space colonization, after all, ARE the engineering problems. BUT will we ever get the chance to lick those problems and move forward to actual implementation of the first space colony? That depends on how well we handle "Space Colony One" (Earth). We need more time to solve the engineering problems of space colonization. That means we need our home planet in good enough shape to support such a project.