No idea. I would expect that to be part of the research… especially if you were trying (for instance) to set up three well running habitats initially and come back 100 years later and find seven habitats that were running with additional optimizations that the initial three lacked. You want persistence, growth, and innovation instead of just grim survival.
If you seeded them with “astronaut quality” people then you’ll probably get regression to the mean in subsequent generations, and if the initial group was barely surviving then their descendants would probably run out of luck. It seems likely to me that you’d get a more robust trajectory if you start with mostly average people from scratch, but with a seed culture that was optimized by a vastly smarter community to be something they can teach their basically normal kids to use, maintain, and augment in the course of living.
The personal satisfaction question loops back more brutally when you think intergenerationally, because the kids certainly never gave informed consent to be part of a traumatic science project. But if lives in such habitats are highly rewarding it stops being such an ethical dilemma. One way to look at it would be to have people live in weird places in exchange for having been given ownership of millions or billions of dollars worth of awesome technology… if they aren’t “stuck in a lousy experiment” but instead “inherit stewardship of a treasure” then the ethical question mostly evaporates.
.
No idea. I would expect that to be part of the research… especially if you were trying (for instance) to set up three well running habitats initially and come back 100 years later and find seven habitats that were running with additional optimizations that the initial three lacked. You want persistence, growth, and innovation instead of just grim survival.
If you seeded them with “astronaut quality” people then you’ll probably get regression to the mean in subsequent generations, and if the initial group was barely surviving then their descendants would probably run out of luck. It seems likely to me that you’d get a more robust trajectory if you start with mostly average people from scratch, but with a seed culture that was optimized by a vastly smarter community to be something they can teach their basically normal kids to use, maintain, and augment in the course of living.
The personal satisfaction question loops back more brutally when you think intergenerationally, because the kids certainly never gave informed consent to be part of a traumatic science project. But if lives in such habitats are highly rewarding it stops being such an ethical dilemma. One way to look at it would be to have people live in weird places in exchange for having been given ownership of millions or billions of dollars worth of awesome technology… if they aren’t “stuck in a lousy experiment” but instead “inherit stewardship of a treasure” then the ethical question mostly evaporates.
.
You just need to find a couple hundred for each habitat—seems easy enough.