sobre la etica de los barcos

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Chapter 10: Generation ships
[pre-proof of a chapter from Nobody Owns the Moon: The Ethics of Space Exploitation
(Jefferson N.C.: MacFarland: 2015)]
I. Stargazing
Our best option for spreading life may be microbial but it remains tempting to imagine
something a little more ambitious, the spreading of our kind of life elsewhere. The ultimate
survival of humanity will require such a move. The future, if we remain dependent upon this
particular sun and this particular solar system is, in the very long term, bleak. At some point
in time, a few billion years from now, the sun will cease to nurture the Earth and instead will
engulf it. Long before then, the planet will become uninhabitable for humans. If we have a
duty to extend human life this generates a simple and obvious rationale for shifting humans
elsewhere, to some other world in some other solar system, at some point in time. Of such
worlds, there seems to be no shortage. Earthlike planets turn out to be plentiful although by
this I do not mean planets which are sufficiently like the Earth for us to walk outdoors, in the
open air, and soak up the atmosphere. We do not, as yet, know of anywhere which
is remotely like that. To be Earthlike in the relevant sense means only to be in a stable orbit
around a star, to be of roughly the right sort of size and to have a rocky composition. These
things are related. Larger planets such as those towards the outer edge of the solar system,
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, have a far deeper gravity well, but they are mostly gas.
Roughly, a planet needs to be between half and twice the size of the Earth in order to qualify.
It may, and perhaps should, be pointed out that the timescale for the Earth’s demise is
so great that we may not even last so long. Humans have been around for 3 million years or
thereabouts (depending upon how we read the bones) and show no signs of the kinds of
stability and endurance which would allow us to extend our presence into billions of years.

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We are exceptionally globalized and interdependent. From a survival standpoint this makes
us vulnerable in all sorts of ways. Sooner or later some very bad things may happen. Or our
capacity to breed may become so compromised that humanity comes to an end, not with a
cataclysm but with something of a whimper. Yet such an argument might be turned around
and used to point out the value of establishing humanity in multiple locations with limited
interaction or contact and hence with a reduced shared vulnerability. Should one settled
community fail others may continue unimpaired. Considerations of this sort may also lead us
to think of the right kind of ethic for a future in space as a frontier ethic.
Yet even if the rationale for sending humans elsewhere were to hold up under
scrutiny the process involved would raise a number of ethical and technological problems. On
the technological side, we do not have and are some distance from developing any viable way
of traversing the vast distances which would be required for interstellar resettlement (and
doing so within a survivable timescale). We can, of course, engage in conjecture about
technologies which might take us to other star systems albeit very slowly, even if we were to
travel at a reasonable percentage of the speed of light, say ten percent or thereabouts. Or we
can engage in more radical forms of conjecture about warp drives which would distort
spacetime and thereby provide a means of faster than light travel, a way which might even
allow us to survive the g-forces involved. The problems of logistics and engineering, not to
mention those of astronavigation (given that the relevant targets would not stay still while a
starship homed in on them) are a persistent challenge.
We may however, have some hope, or perhaps faith would be a better word, that such
problems will be solved. After all, we are only a century further on from the first powered
flight by the Wright brothers at the sands of Kitty Hawk. Powered flight of any kind is still in
its infancy. It is also tempting to note that, unlike a various core ethical considerations which
form absolute prerequisites for living in community, our theories of physics do not seem to be

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indefinitely fixed. The physics of five hundred years into the future may seem akin to a
replacement for our current theories rather than a continuation of the latter. To those with a
less technical mindset, the physics of the future may seem akin to magic. And so, while travel
from one solar system to another currently seems impossible, we may still be tempted by a
never-say-never attitude and such an attitude could conceivably turn out to be justified.
Wherever we go we will need to be sustained by a sun, i.e. a star and the nearest one
of these, outside the limits of our own solar system, is Proxima Centauri some 4.2 light years
away. That's a 42 year journey at ten percent of light speed. And the nearest Earthlike planet
is even further away although thoughts about proximity have shifted a good deal in recent
years, in a rather promising manner, since the launch in 2009 of NASA's Kepler Space
Telescope. Although the planets themselves cannot compete with stars as a light
source, Kepler is able to look for a dimming of the stars as planets pass in front of them.
Together with other techniques, such as watching for the gravitational influence of unseen
bodies, the results have been good. The current estimate for the nearest Earth-like planet is
around 12-13 light years away. (Although Ravi Kopparapu, an astronomer at Penn State
University, has made an optimistic attempt to bring this down to lower.)
Thanks to Kepler we do know that there is a truly vast number of Earthlike planets out
there. And whole many may be Earthlike only in a minimal sense that will not
automatically make them suitable for habitation, the numbers are so inconceivably large that
some are likely to have conditions (scale, composition, orbit, magnitude of the nearest star,
possession of a moon, running water, and so on) which are very Earthlike indeed. They may
also be hard to reach, perhaps impossibly hard to do so. Yet, from the point of view of the
imagination, such planets have an advantage. Where the science falls short we may indulge in
a spot of stargazing and imagine them as true sister planets. Artist impressions of Kepler 22b
are a case in point. Scattered around the internet, they depict a blue sphere resting in space

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and surrounded by wispy cloud. This is an Earthlike place yet a very different kind of place.
We still could not live there. It is too gaseous and perhaps, in any case, a water world. But it
does not disappoint. It holds out a promise or nurtures hope (again faith) in an interstellar
future for our descendants. If there are worlds such as Kepler 22b, there may well be other
worlds which are better suited to our needs.
This is the goal which science fiction has, for decades, presented as attainable and
which, more recently, has been approached in a rather different and thoughtful manner by the
100 Year Starship project, headed up by Mae Jemison. The project has over a million dollars
of US government funding, sourced primarily through the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA) and secondarily through NASA's AMES Research Centre. It aims
to make some form of interstellar travel a reality over the course of the next century. Not all
enthusiasts are content with an imagined journey. Some want to make it happen. They intend
to make it so.1
II. Extending Humanity
On the ethical side, while human colonization of the stars has frequently figured in patently
escapist literature, it is not obvious that colonization would involve some manner
of ecological disloyalty or a denial of our “earthliness.” Rather, given that we would have to
take various flora, perhaps fauna and certainly microorganisms with us, it could involve
the preservation of a significant legacy of life on Earth. Efforts in this direction might even
change our conception of the ongoing ecological impact of humans into a more mixed or
event positive appraisal. It is tempting to regard ourselves as somewhat parasitic upon other
earthly life-forms. At times we do not seem to contribute anything very positive to their
existence. But if we were to spread life elsewhere then our relation to non-humans could

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more readily be seen as symbiotic rather like birds which take the fruit or nectar from trees
but in doing so facilitate pollination and the continuity of life. Helping to extend the narrative
of life might go some way to correct the historic imbalance in human/non-human relations,
an imbalance which can make the image of human parasitism seem unsettlingly close to the
truth.
However, helping to extend the narrative of earthborn life might still only be a
contribution to a finite story. If our universe is on course to collapse inward at some point in
time then there really is nothing that we (or anyone else) will ever be able to do about it. If
the universe is ultimately going to be of finite duration then all life will share the same utterly
unavoidable fate. This in turn may lead us to wonder about the point of attempts to prolong
life's journey. I will suggest that such doubts may stem from an overly-perfectionist attitude.
Perhaps there are contexts (such as our everyday interactions with one another) in which
seeing matters in the light of the idea of that which is incorruptible and lasting may help us to
see more clearly. But there are also contexts in which a dissatisfaction with anything that falls
short of a permanently lasting ideal distorts the significance of what can be achieved albeit on
a far more limited basis. Even if humans and our descendants will have “only” a span of
millions of years, and even if this is second best, it is still a very long time for creatures of our
sort. Thought of in these terms, our recorded history to this point occupies only a brief flash
in time. Within that time a great many fellow beings have lived, loved and flourished. Within
a far more extended period of time a great many living things (human and non-human) may
flourish, love, live and find contentment. All other matters being equal, this sounds like a
good option. Who could ask for anything more?
Admittedly, there are a great many other good things that we might do instead of
attempting (or even planning for) interstellar travel. Firing ships off into space, never to
return, is not the only way in which we may could make the universe a slightly better

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place. Against this, it may be tempting to return to the idea that at least some of us have a
duty which demands that we must do good in just this way, in the way which carries the
promise or at least the hope of humanity's surviving into the distant future. And even if our
indefinitely extended survival is not an over-riding consideration we may still have strong
enough reasons to warrant acting now rather than waiting for a more technologically-
advanced future. This may be somewhat surprising yet true. Interstellar travel to save the
future of humanity, or to continue the legacy of the Earth, may seem to be the ultimate matter
of extreme non-urgency. Yet the length of time which we seem to have at our disposal, all of
those vast deserts of near eternity which stretch ahead, could lull us into a false sense of
security. After all, the sending of a viable ship (or ships) to another solar system could be a
truly colossal undertaking. From our limited point of view it certainly looks formidable. It
could well require a concentration of resources and effort on such a scale that our only point
of comparison would be some project such as the construction of the pyramids. If the goal
was to propagate humanity, we would, after all, have to send at least hundreds of humans, or
the means to build them, in order to have a viable population level for survival.
This might involve a great concentration of resources over a comparatively short
period of time or else a steady investment of resources over a prolonged period of time and
without the pressures associated with private capitalist economics, i.e. the need for a
discernible and short-term return. In this respect, the comparison with the pyramids is not
entirely arbitrary. Both involve the economics of waste, of productive efforts which do not
feed directly back into the economic system. And while all major civilizations have had
economies with significant waste sectors (arguably, in some cases as a way to reinforce social
stability by reinforcing laborer dependence and thereby slowing down changes in the pattern
of wealth distribution) such sectors can be especially vulnerable when resources are scarce.
Political pressures can make a waste sector obligatory as well as function (as in the feudal

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economy of medieval Europe) but political pressures can also make a waste sector difficult to
sustain.
It may be worth recalling, in this respect, that while Egyptian civilization lasted for
millennia, and built for eternity, its most impressive structures were constructed during a
comparatively brief 500 year window, with intermittent and failed attempts at a revival of
grand construction thereafter. For various reasons, the window of opportunity simply did not
remain open. We may think also of the glory of Athens, from Aeschylus to Aristotle, built as
it was upon slave labor and confined within a period of roughly 150 years. Or we may think
of the great human-swallowing construction projects of Victorian Britain or of the US
frontier. All projects which would be impossible now in part because we no longer believe
that it is legitimate to work laborers to death. A favorable (and often morally reprehensible)
set of political, economic and cultural circumstances may be required for certain kinds of
large-scale task.
Given this, it may seem that a slow and steady option is more viable than a sudden
assault which seeks to focus a major portion of our civilization’s resources. The
inconvenience of this approach is that while our window of opportunity for the planning and
initiating a journey to the stars is likely to be fairly broad, none of us really knows just how
wide it will be. We do not even know if such a window has already opened. We are (not for
the first time) at a significant epistemic disadvantage precisely because we are in a poor
situation to fit our conception of the opportunities which are currently available within some
larger picture which includes succeeding generations. The world that we leave to others may
not be as stable as our own. In retrospect, it may even be the case that a chronic instability
began some time ago perhaps in the 20th
century when we finally mastered the art of
destruction on a truly scaled-up basis. A genuine window of opportunity with adequate
sustained levels of political stability, may not yet have opened, but if it has then it may,

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conceivably, remain open for some time. If the latter is the case then it may be wise not to
press the point about limited opportunities too far. (Reliance upon such an idea may sound
rather like a thinly-disguised version of impatience rather than prudence.) The point here is
not that we should reject urgency but simply that the justification for urgency would have to
be something else.
We may, literally, have millions of years in which to act before the frailties of our
humanity make effective action impossible. But if we set aside the (possible) impatience of a
limited window of opportunity there is another, somewhat more pragmatic, reason why it
would be a good thing for us now to carry out at least a preliminary exploration of the
technical feasibility and the ethics of travel elsewhere. If we do have obligations to future
generations (and it seems intuitively plausible that we do) then we should be considering at
least some multi-generational projects from which we ourselves may never directly benefit.
Thinking about the possible future of humanity elsewhere may be a useful and instructive
step in this direction. We should welcome at least some instances of this kind of long range
thinking as a corrective to our short-termism. This is an ethically-significant consideration
although it does face a problem raised already in an earlier chapter: although we can do many
things which, if unchecked or irreversible, are likely to bequeath a legacy of harm, there is
very little which we can do which will actually have a predictably beneficial impact upon
distant future generations. Near generations are a different matter. What impedes
predictability is the way in which our actions ripple through time. Almost any social
innovation or technological invention which we can come up with, even with the best of
intentions, can be turned to human disadvantage. It is simply very difficult to do good in the
extremely long term. Even worse, if circumstances are genuinely liable to take a bad turn in
the not too distant future (as the limited window of opportunity argument suggests) then

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innovations to extend the lifespan of humanity could themselves be used instead to reinforce
authoritarian trends.
Here, we might think with some concern about the defense funding from DARPA for
the 100 Years Starship project (laudable though the latter may be). Although, it might also be
a very good thing if such funds were channelled away from anything with a clear military
purpose. We might also think of specialized futuristic technologies such as those required to
put humans into stasis. Should it ever become possible to put humans into a cryogenic ally
frozen state for a decades-long or many-lifetimes journey to the stars, exactly how long would
it be before the same technology was used to deal with prison overcrowding? The upshot
could then be an extremely abusive situation. Innocent inmates who fall foul of judicial
imperfections would be unable to personally state their case for review. Real social harms
could be the outcome rather than, or as well as, distant advantage. But something similar
might be said about many technological innovations and so this objection may be in danger
of proving too much. It may underpin a more general hostility towards technology for fear of
what may become of it. Somewhat paradoxically, technophobia of this sort is just as liable to
result in an unhappy and unintended future outcome for the very same reason of
unpredictability.
III. Hibernation, rearing and consent
Given the immense distances involved, a journey to any star system with an Earth-like planet
which has a survivable atmosphere (or one which might be made survivable) could take many
human lifetimes. Freezing humans, in a state of suspended animation, if it were possible,
might be the best ethical option given that the individuals involved might give initial consent
to such a project. Alternatively, and a little more problematically, we might send human

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embryos to some distant location where they might be automatically reared by some yet-to-
be-realized technology, thereby placing the resulting humans in an alien predicament without
their consent. As a variation of the latter we might think of sending data and equipment for
building human life from inanimate (or largely-inanimate) materials. As a variation upon the
variation, we might think of teleportation, a system which assemblies duplicates again upon
the basis of information received. (I take it that this is a more flexible version of the
technology-plus-information scenario rather than a system of actual travel. On the positive
side, it would avoid any problems connected to child rearing and infancy. On the negative
side, it may be technologically outlandish whereas suspended animation is not.) Finally, we
might opt for a true multi-generation ship, a large spacecraft which will contain successive
generations of humans locked securely inside. With the exception of the initial generation,
the individuals will not give prior consent to the project. Instead, they will be born into it.
Inconveniently, the least disturbing option, the option of suspended animation, is in
its early days and, although readily conceivable, it may never be available. Until recently it
has seemed close to science fiction but there are now at least some indications that we may
one day acquire the capacity to put humans into stasis and then successfully revive them. A
paper in the June 2005 edition of Scientific American by Mark Roth and Todd Nystull
indicated that the prospect was in the aether. Matters were given some impetus a year later, in
October 2006, when an injured Japanese hiker was reported to have survived for some 24
days on the Romeo Mountain without food or water after falling into a state akin to
hypothermia-induced hibernation. The hiker enjoyed a full recovery. From this point the race
to a solution seemed to be on. When Mark Roth then gave a TED talk in 2010 outlining
details of how suspended animation might be possible in humans, with a clear mechanism at a
cellular level, the background noise on the internet increased. There was a real sense that a
breakthrough was imminent. Roth is, after all, a credible research biologist who works out of

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the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle, and again has DARPA funding.
However, for unspecified reasons the clinical trials were withdrawn in 2011 leaving a
question mark over the mechanism and its human application. In any case, whether or not this
is a false dawn (one of many) the development of this technology will require human
volunteers, perhaps volunteers whose death is on the horizon and for whom the process may
offer some faint glimmer of hope (progress on HIV treatment has advanced in much the same
way). It may also require animal experimentation. Roth's research is based upon more than
human anecdotes and further animal use may be a requirement for success (again, if success
is at all possible).
However, even if it does involves a morally serious and problematic way of acting
this need not be regarded as a conversation stopper. After all, we may at some point reach the
stage where such harm to non-humans is historic, a point at which we know all that we need
to know in order to make the suspended animation of humans work. If familiar concerns
about resource expenditure and escapism could then be addressed there would, at such a point
in time, be a strong prima facie case in favor of putting humans into stasis if sufficiently well-
informed volunteers could be found and the project had a reasonable likelihood of success.
However, all this would still depend upon the viability of a hibernation process which could
turn out to be non-viable as a brute fact about our biology. Suspended animation, as an
ethically unproblematic option, may never truly be available to us.
The issues which are raised by the transportation of embryos (and variants thereof)
are somewhat different. Even if the problems of providing an artificial surrogate for parental
support could be solved we would nonetheless be depriving the resulting individuals of a
normal human upbringing. The ethical objections to such an approach are broadly analogous
to those involved in the placement of animals in zoos or the keeping of exotic creatures as
pets held under radically-alien conditions. We may, in any case, wonder about whether

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automated rearing by some manner of surrogate would actually work. Might it not just yield
psychotics who were incapable of normal human sympathies and incapable therefore of
functioning in a socially co-operative manner? If that were the case then settling other worlds
with such people would probably fail (co-operation is, after all, a far larger part of our human
story than conflict). Our findings here might depend upon a psychological assessment of
exactly how disturbed such individuals would be and the sense of loss that they might feel. It
might also depend upon an assessment of the kinds of worlds that we might be able to send
them to without loss of psychological equilibrium. Psychological disorder on one planet
might be less debilitating than on another The availability of a world known to contain
verdant river valleys might persuade us that, given what is involved, the risks might be worth
running. Such a world would not be the Earth, but it would not be out of keeping with our
evolved characteristics or out of keeping with the deep ecological needs which, it is
sometimes suggested, humans have: the need for wilderness experience, the need to connect
to forests and streams.
Minimally, it could be the case that the lives which were available to the resulting
individuals might be as good as, or better than, the lives of many ordinary, neurosis-ridden
humans now living. True, the remotely reared humans would not have chosen such a life, but
then again neither do we choose the world into which we are born. Might this also suggest
anti-natalism, the view that bringing people into being under regular conditions is also
wrong? Have we inadvertently stumbled upon a deep flaw in our everyday human practice?
The danger here, as with so many attractive arguments for what I have referred to earlier as
“fearless thoughts,” is one of proving far too much although in this particular instance we
may appreciate the driver for the argument: anti-natal arguments are driven by the impact of
human over-population. Many Western couples now choose not to have children. The reasons
for this are, no doubt, complex, but its apparent reasonableness is bound up with the familiar

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point that we have already vastly over-populated the Earth. However, accepting this is very
different from suggesting that it is never or even rarely right to have children. Although
there has been a good deal of work recently on David Benatar’s radical thesis that it actually
is wrong to bring into being, I will take it that such a thesis rests upon a flawed conception of
what makes ethics worthwhile, a flawed conception of what it is that a worthwhile ethic must
do.2
While there are circumstances under which it is unwise to have infants, and while
bringing certain kinds of infants into the world may involve some more specific wrong (for
example, infants who would result from genetic manipulation to maximize pain whenever
awake) the legitimacy of the regular practice of bearing and giving birth to children is in
some, difficult-to-articulate sense, basic to our understanding of what it is to lead a human
life, basic to those aspects of a human life that ethics is all about. It is not so much a case that
we can argue for or against humans acting in this way. Rather, an acceptance of the
legitimacy of doing so is a constitutive part of what it is to embrace our humanity (and again,
I refer here to 'humanity' in a sense which involves a deep bond with others rather than
'humanity' in the more limited biological sense).
If this is right then it may be difficult to rule out cultivating humans in remote places
just so long as we know enough about the likely conditions and hardships that they might
have to face. Insisting upon a life of leisure and pleasure would be to demand far too much.
After all, was it wrong for peasants to bring children into the world in the middle ages?
Perhaps sometimes it was, but if we deny that it was wrong on most occasions then we cannot
then consistently say that it would be wrong to bring humans into being whenever they will
face hardships, especially when the hardships may not turn out to be greater. But at the same
time, if we restrict the particular kinds of humans who can be brought into being such that,
for example, we ought not to engineer humans with a disposition towards various cancers,

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then there will be restriction of what we can and our approach will not obviously be under-
constrained.
IV. The Ethics of world ships
Inconveniently, the hardest ethical dilemmas concerning the colonization of other worlds
result from the one option which is not exactly available but is nonetheless closest,
technologically, to where we are now. Here, I refer to the multi-generational ship or “world
ship,” a craft in which at least one generation of humans must be born onboard in order, at
some point, to take the place of initial passengers and crewmembers (if there is any such
distinction). To get this option off the ground, we will have to assume that the basic problems
of prolonged living in space (radiation exposure; muscular atrophy; breeding or at least infant
rearing, and so on) can be solved. It may also be useful to divide the travelling personnel into
three groups: the first-generation (who could be there by choice); the shipborn (those born on
the ship and living out their entire lives there); and the arrivers (i.e. members of the final
generation who actually reach the destination or who would do so in the ordinary course of
events, barring accidents, illness and misfortune).
I will take it that the predicament of the first generation as a whole or individually is
of less direct concern than that of the others. Of course, if might still be indirectly of concern
if someone were to suggest that they ought to be coerced and they will be of ethical
concern insofar as they assist in thrusting a problematic predicament upon others, e.g. by
condemning the shipborn or arrivers to an intolerable life. In the latter case the first
generation would be co-operating with ethically-indefensible actions and they should not do
so. In other respects, their situation would not be so very different from that of agents who
happen to engage in space exploration over an unusually prolonged period of time. The

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situation for arrivers is a little more complex but not excessively so. As with the
transportation of embryos (or any variant thereof) as long as the world in question was
sufficiently welcoming and fitted to arriver biology, and as long as interaction with the first
generation on board ship, or the legacy of the latter, did not leave them with some terrible
psychological burden such as a sense of survivor guilt, the case of arrivers would generate no
great or special problems. The problems ordinarily involved in space travel would still apply,
for example the problems associated with devoting resources to such an enterprise, but little
or nothing more.
The biggest ethical problems would seem then to concern the shipborn and more
specifically the bringing of such humans into being given that they have neither enjoyed the
Earth nor chosen to leave it. Such individuals will also not benefit directly from a successful
journey. Theirs is a hard and multiple burden. It may even seem that they are being used
simply as a means to an end and not respected in their own right. Their predicament seems so
grossly unfair that a familiar theme in classic science-fiction is one of the extreme difficulties
of psychological adaptation that such an intermediate generation will face. On a familiar
fictional scenario, as the origins of the long journey become mythologized by successive
generations of shipborn the enterprise takes on a religious hue which rationalizes the
demands which continuation makes upon the journey's involuntary participants. The
mythologization is not simply about loss of contact with the original goals but is a necessary
escapist device, a noble lie which might arise spontaneously or, more sinisterly, it may be
encouraged by the original planners. This takes us far from the context of free-wheeling
private enterprise and into the territory of forward planning and authoritarian control.
Pertinent questions may then be asked about any such deception, should it prove
necessary. Here, we have Clifford D. Simak in Spacebred Generations (1953) pulling the
scenario apart to see how it works, “Could the Folk have lived through a thousand years if

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they had known of the purpose and the destination? And the answer seemed to be that they
wouldn’t have been able to, for they would have felt robbed and cheated, would have gone
mad with the knowledge that they were no more than carriers of life, that their lives and the
lives of many generations after them would be canceled out so that after many generations
their descendants could arrive at the target planet.”3
From the standpoint anyone involved in
planning such a journey, the ongoing threat which could undermine plans is the sheer fact
that humans onboard or elsewhere will act like humans. That is to say, they will not
subordinate all considerations to a worthwhile historic end-goal. Humans are not, by nature,
strict consequentialists with a good eye for distant horizons. Neither planners nor shipborn
could permanently exile our complex human moral psychology, that aspect of our being
which gives weight to immediate relations with others and weight also to matters other than
ultimate goals.
Stephan Baxter explores this failure to exile ordinary human concerns in his novel Ark
(2009). The inhabitants (or inmates) of the ark come to doubt the tales of their origins, even
the fact of their being onboard a ship. (Again, a familiar scenario in the literature.) At first
they doubt and then ultimately they rebel. The leader of the rebellion shows all of the
qualities necessary for survival at the destination and is put to death for her efforts, not by the
more obviously brutal officers but by order of the liberally-minded commander, “I don’t want
leadership,” Holle said. “Not among the shipborn. I don’t want vision, or idealism, or
curiosity, or initiative. I don’t want courage. All I want is obedience. It’s all I can afford, until
we’re down on Earth III and the kids just walt away. Yes, she’s the best of her generation,
and that’s why she’s such a danger.”4
Baxter situates the rebellion among the first generation
of those who are born on the ship. They are not quite shipborn in the strict sense but their
predicament is close.5
In both cases (Simak and Baxter) ethical considerations beyond a
concern for humanity’s survival must intrude. If an onboard population lives out their lives

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against a backdrop of the possibility of questioning, they might well become disinclined to
complete the task which had been set them. They could even become resentful towards the
planners, hostile towards the project. Sabotage would, perhaps unavoidably, become a worry,
possibly a suspicion and conceivably a reality once the authoritarianism of onboard life starts
to generate its own counter-culture. What crime have they, the shipborn, committed that they
should be condemned to a life in a space galley?
Given that we are not entitled to knowingly imprison the innocent, not even for the
sake of a good outcome, these are worrying thoughts. For generations of those imprisoned in
the ship it is unlikely that the ultimate goal to which agents on Earth have subordinated them
would, by itself, be sufficiently appealing to secure reliable and effective co-operation rather
than hostility. Although this might not actually necessitate the perpetration of a religious
myth, a noble lie in the classical sense, it might nonetheless require locking the shipborn into
a coerced co-operation by rendering the price of non-cooperation unacceptably high. The
most extreme version of this scenario is one in which they must either perform their allotted
tasks or die en masse through a loss of environmental integrity. A frontier ethic in the
harshest of senses might be encouraged or even structured into the very architecture of the
vessel. The latter might need to be, in effect, either a travelling panopticon governed by the
need for ongoing agent-visibility, punishment and reward, or else an environment where the
transgression of core norms leads automatically to harm. (With the norms externally imposed,
by the planners.) At the very least, on a somewhat simpler scenario, ship-board life might
have to become socially ossified with radical change precluded. Whatever else alters, the
requisite tasks would always need to be carried out or else the venture would fail. Given this,
the limits to anything akin to social or political change might have to be far greater than those
upon the Earth. The requisite ideology might have to situate order, cyclical existence and a
taboo upon waste at the very center of daily life. Reflections of this sort have given rise to

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fictional scenarios where castes and guilds onboard generation ships help to preserve
ideological uniformity and continuity in the patterns of action. The free open spaces of
Earthly politics would seem to be utterly ruled out.
Moving away from fictional scenarios, Charles Cockell has sought to generalize the
point beyond the context of world ships. Moving into space may extend freedom in various
ways, but it may be a paradoxical freedom, “freedom in a box,” which results.6
The
vulnerabilities of humans and the complex dependencies which will be inseparable from daily
life (for food and even air) may be more conducive to authoritarianism than to anything
which a liberal democracy let alone the quasi-utopian systems imagined by Tsoilkovsky or
Ursula Le Guin. Perhaps, if we regard ourselves as waseful consmers (which of course we
are, among many other things) then we might see such a life as more truly worthwhile, a
life freed from our consumerist triviality of purpose. This would be a form of positive or
constitutive liberty rather than a thin freedom of choice. But if the necessities of space would
require us to impose such a freedom upon others (the shipborn) when it is a freedom which
we ourselves are unwilling to embrace, this may give us reasons for caution. Few of us are
prepared to forsake even a fragment of our consumerist liberty yet here we are contemplating
entrapment within a radically different order of things. This might again be difficult to justify.
At the very least, while we might make a multi-generational ship comfortable in all
sorts of ways, the full range of social and psychological burdens imposed upon the shipborn
could extend well beyond the mere disconnection from a living, earthly, world. What I am
suggesting here is that their lack of initial choice about coming into such an existence is not
the deepest of the ethical problems which are in play. Rather, what is most troubling is the
prospect of an ongoing life-long denial of basic liberties. And this gives us reasons to accept
generation ships only if there simply are no shipborn. That is, only if there is at least some
prospect that all on board have either chosen to be there or else would have at least some

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reasonable chance of touching down and enjoying the benefits of the new world, if only
(minimally) the reward of seeing that their efforts have not been wasted. This might point
towards the need for some hybrid system in which all those born on ship have at least some
opportunity to enter stasis and so to become arrivers. And so, without a working stasis
system, even multi-generational ships might not be justifiable.
Against this, there are some obvious objections. Perhaps we might imagine a weaker
constraint such that generation ships (as conventionally understood, and without any
hybridity) are permissible whenever the lives of any shipborn will be worth living. And here,
a plausible case might still be made. After all, the dangers of authoritarian control may have
been overstated, predictions about the political shape of things to come are notoriously
unreliable and such unreliability may extend to the comments above. Also, while the
shipborn might feel a sense of resentment about not living out their lives on the Earth and not
enjoying the freedoms of the latter, such resentment could even be regarded as a
misunderstanding. Each of us exists only because of a precise sequence of events right down
to the movements engaged in by our parents when they had sex on a particular occasion some
time ago. That is one of the complex of reasons why each of us is here. A slight gesture in
some other direction and a different sperm might have fertilized the egg or perhaps none
might have done so. Each of us is, in a sense, already the winner of life’s lottery. Similarly
with the shipborn. Excluding those who matured from an existing embryo or foetus, they
would, almost certainly, not have come into existence if it were not for the journey. What this
might point towards is the slightly surprising possibility of a clause to the effect that no
pregnant women should go onboard as first-generation participants. Although given the
difficulties of breeding in space they might, from a more pragmatic point of view, make the
most desirable initial crewmembers.

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Connecting the existence of the shipborn to the project itself is a tempting line of
argument. It preserves certain hopes for the future. But it may be a temptation too far. What
jars about it is that we simply would not accept comparable arguments in other contexts.
Suppose, for example, that we were to speak to several members of some future generation
two-centuries hence and they were to reproach us with our damage to the environment. We
might point out that they came into existence only as a part of that very same sequence of
events which included our pollution and dangerous practices. Indeed, they would not exist if
it was not for the actions which they criticize. And so, rather than upbraiding us, they ought
to be grateful for the environmental damage that we have done. This would hardly be a
plausible line of defense. (To call it sophistry might be too gentle a criticism.) accordingly, it
seems that we could reasonably be reproached for inflicting sufferings upon some future
generation or generations of shipborn even though the existence of the very individuals who
then suffer depends upon our also helping to bring about the suffering in question. Gratitude
for existence, even when it is appropriate, does not cancel out wrongdoing.
1
For the 100 year Starship see http://100yss.org/mission/purpose [Accessed 16/04/2014].
2
Benatar, 2006.
3
Simak, 2009, 42.
4
Baxter, 2009,.491, see also Baxter, 2014, which looks specifically at the ethics of this
scenario.
5
Strictly, they are arrivers rather than shipborn in the terminology which I have favored, but
in the present context, that of the impossibility of exiling ethical concerns other than
consequences, this does not matter.
6
Cockell, 2014.