Call me naive, but I'm personally highly skeptical of everyone in such a situation being willing to sacrifice literally anything in the name of species survival.
A more likely scenario would be that they either don't care at all, or an attempt to force Mandatory Motherhood escalates into violent revolt by women taking issue with the "mandatory" part.
Deliver Us Mars actually went into this. The colony failed because no one wanted to be the one to test if human fetal development is actually viable on Mars and it wasn’t possible for anyone to guarantee or test for it without risking extreme trauma.
Anyone trying to force a modern Earth culture onto a full survival colony is likely to just cause horrific depression across the board.
Edited by Zendervai on Nov 15th 2023 at 11:57:05 AM
Hey, how about we address the argument rather than whatever social justice issues we want to yell about, huh?
Nobody suggested the murder of infertile individuals, but any colony needs a breeding population to increase its population. I didn't think this was a controversial take. There's a limit to how many people can voluntarily decide not to procreate before everything falls apart. Whether children are raised communally or not and/or what gender roles this society prescribes are irrelevant.
The primary limiting factor on population growth in a colony is wombs. Well... that and resources. Having babies too quickly is as bad as having them too slowly.
Edited by Fighteer on Nov 15th 2023 at 1:46:35 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"It is actually relevant. Because it spreads the burden of raising children out among the whole population and not just the parents. The result being that if you get a group of women who actually do knowingly sign up for the role of “having kids”, they aren’t also solely responsible for all of the work of raising the kids.
Going “every couple needs to have two kids” or something similar is ridiculous, because you will get people who don’t want to have kids…but you’ll also get people who are fine having more than two kids, especially if they aren’t expected to shoulder that burden alone.
It also address the problem of what if the kids of the initial colonists have gay people or ace people or whatever. If you handle it in a sane and humane way, it’s not an issue because the people who want more kids will pick up the slack.
Reducing it down to a pure numbers game means you’re likely to miss a lot of the really fucking obvious elements involved. It also means you’d be pretty likely to completely forget about really important stuff like how to handle the inevitable extreme depression and ennui that would rapidly expand through any colony that isn’t on a perfectly earth like planet.
Edited by Zendervai on Nov 15th 2023 at 1:53:00 PM
Reducing it to a numbers game is what tells us the parameters by which a colony (in space or otherwise) will be successful. If it fails to maintain or increase its population, it will fail.
Within the parameter space of "sustainably manages and increases its population", there is a lot of room for figuring out how the society will be structured, but that structure must include "make more people" or it's suicidal.
If that means artificial wombs, great! We've freed up females from a lot of work.
Edited by Fighteer on Nov 15th 2023 at 2:04:13 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Why would pregnancy stop women from doing work? Are you expecting a Mars colony to be mostly hard labour?
And the reason you can’t reduce it to a pure numbers game is because of the depression problem. There’s a lot of bottom up problems that cannot be attacked using top down solutions.
Like, what do you do if you realize that no one is having kids because the population is dealing with crippling depression because they’ve fully realized they’ll never be able to go outside again? You can’t just go “HAVE MORE KIDS” because then you’ll be dealing with people who think bringing kids into that world is horrifically cruel and will go to extreme lengths to avoid it. You have to go down to the individual level and figure out ways to address the causes of the depression.
Edited by Zendervai on Nov 15th 2023 at 2:11:57 PM
After a certain point, the pregnancy kinda takes priority over everything including work. Between the hormones, pains and expectant behavior that any day could be the day that baby comes, it all adds up to that taking priority above all else unless absolutely necessary otherwise.
That’s how it went with my sister in law this past spring bringing in a healthy baby girl.
Okay, and how much time did that involve? Because it’s not the woman being out of commission for nine months. If things are handled with compassion and empathy, a pregnant woman working but with a reduced load (if they request it) would be perfectly acceptable.
Many women work right up until they give birth and then go right back to work after. Many are forced into it, but some prefer approaching things that way.
For something like a Mars colony, you’d need sociologists and psychologists and social workers on the governing board. The people focused on the pure mechanics shouldn’t get control over how the population is treated under normal circumstances because, above all else, you want to avoid the perfectly spherical cow problem. Programmers and engineers are notoriously bad at really understanding how non-engineer people actually think and react to things in a lot of situations. It’s why you never have an engineer have final say over a product.
But yeah, the number one concern, and what needs to be addressed before the numbers game, is to take significant measures to make sure it’s a world that’s worth actually living in. No one’s going to have kids if you go full utilitarian.
Edited by Zendervai on Nov 15th 2023 at 2:22:08 PM
No colony will be a "nice place to live" until several generations have passed at least. That's kind of the main thing. If you have enough technology that you can plop down ready-made "nice places to live" on any planet in the galaxy, great, but that's not going to be realistic for quite a while.
Edited by Fighteer on Nov 15th 2023 at 2:24:09 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Minimum six weeks. At least as far as ironing out maternity leave for work. The behaviors and everything else set in three months out from birth.
By one month away it was all baby all the time kind of a thing.
And it worked, my niece was born healthy and bigger than expected. My sister in law has since gone back to work.
So you get people familiar with psychology and sociology involved in the design. Because going “it’ll suck for an indeterminate amount of time” means that no one’s gonna want to have kids for that period of time.
You have to do significant work to minimize the stress of day to day life or the colony will commit mass suicide in short order. Because that’s what happens when you have a population that’s horribly depressed all the time and have no clear knowledge of when things will get better.
Instead, you put a significant amount of work into making it as livable as possible and, yes, if that work means the fully viable colony takes a bit longer to happen, it’s entirely and completely worth it, because 50 years of “this kinda sucks, but there’s a ton of work put into making this not horrible” is more likely to succeed than 30 years of “I want to die, this is awful, I am never leaving these tunnels and my kids will never leave them either, I might as well just drill a hole to the outside and end our misery.”
One person getting pushed too far can result in a ton of deaths even in the most meticulously designed colony if only the engineers are involved. You need compassion and empathy and people who know how people actually tick involved.
Edited by Zendervai on Nov 15th 2023 at 2:28:19 PM
Dude, humans have colonized new places since humans existed. Every such colony struggled, many died out, but enough did not that we now have humans everywhere on Earth. I don't get this "they'll all be too depressed to have kids" idea. It's contrary to everything we know about human nature.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Triply so if the colony is that survival scenario where they may be the last of their kind. Having “a nice place to live” is something you’d at best hand down to distant descendants. Like a century kind of thing. The founders are unlikely to live long enough to see that happen.
Because the first and most priority things are survival and recovery. Establish a food supply, build shelters, build security, find water, grow the population at bare minimum. If it has technological assistance to speed the process up then maybe the founders those who live to very old age anyways may see the return of “a nice place to live”.
If technological assistance isn’t there, well the old way makes for some nice stories to strive for.
How many colonies on Earth have been in entirely enclosed environments where the people living there know 100% that they will never be able to go outside again? Where the chances of them going home are slim to none? People already suffer from crippling depression in the Antarctic and Arctic research bases and they know exactly when they get to leave and those are the closest equivalents we have to a Mars colony.
We know the Norse Greenland colony collapsed from despair basically, barely anyone made it back to Scandinavia from that.
The idea that you can translate going from point A to point B on a planet where you can be reasonably sure that you can breathe the air and grow food reliably to living in an entirely enclosed and precarious environment on Mars is ridiculous. On top of that, we don’t actually know if it’s possible to safely have kids on Mars. We literally have no idea if human fetal development can occur safely in a different gravity from Earth. And that’s before the questions of what growing up in a different gravity does to human bones.
If you and your wife were on Mars and no one had kids yet, would you seriously turn to your wife and go “we’re having a kid, there’s a good chance of it turning out extremely badly or having a kid that can’t survive, but we’re going to go through a significant risk of horrible trauma”? Because that’d be a terrible thing to do if she wasn’t totally on board.
Edited by Zendervai on Nov 15th 2023 at 2:36:51 PM
Where the chances of them going home are slim to none?
Define “never go outside”. If like a constructed environment complex, an arcology or similar to a space station, never.
If referring to a place where escape or return to where they came from is unlikely or impossible, plenty of places. Most anywhere on Earth beyond central to east Africa fits that bill for a great many places. Plymouth Massachusetts and Jamestown Virginia are two such locations in the last 400 or so years. You can also look up the Polynesian voyages across the Pacific, many of which were one way trips with no communication or return. Some sailed off to the horizon never to be seen or heard again, others founded towns and communities of their own. Hawaii is one such voyage.
Edited by MajorTom on Nov 15th 2023 at 11:43:05 AM
I’m talking about fully enclosed “if you go outside you will die” levels.
Not being able to go back home is usually eased by the existence of breathable air and a visible sky and horizon. We do really bad when we don’t get the latter two.
If we do a Mars colony, it’s not going to be a fancy huge domed city, it’s going to be a tunnel complex. That’s the easiest way to handle the radiation problem. And that’s gonna cause horrific seasonal affective disorder and people won’t be able to handle the idea of “multiple generations will be stuck in these tunnels and we might honestly never be able to live outside them” once it finally clicks.
Edited by Zendervai on Nov 15th 2023 at 2:42:33 PM
The psychology of humans is pretty easy to figure out in situations like this. I have a degree in psychology, this is a problem actual psychologists point out all the time, but engineers ignore it because it makes their fantasies slide right into psychological horror and they don’t like the idea of giving up significant design control to people who don’t do a “hard science” from their perspective.
But a colony of humans needs to be treated as a group of humans first, before anything else factors in. Yes, even in a pure survival scenario. If you do not do that, the colony will die. No ifs ands or buts, especially if it’s on a planet that can’t support earth type life. Knowing that you’ll spend the rest of your life struggling to survive on a planet that none of your potential descendants will ever have an easy life on, forever, is depressing as fuck. Especially if your leaders are the kind of lunatics who try to bring money into it. And it would get worse with every successive generation that’s still fighting to survive, because none of them have any outside context and their only world is a brutal one fighting for a goal they have no understanding of.
We have a strong survival drive, but depression can override it pretty easily and in that kind of scenario, it takes one person hitting their limit and enough other people not paying enough attention to kill everyone.
Treating people like cogs in a machine is extremely bad for mental health, who would have guessed? I know, literally everyone who knows anything worthwhile about psychology or history.
Edited by Zendervai on Nov 15th 2023 at 2:54:32 PM
The psychological well-being of hypothetical interplanetary colonists will indeed need to be carefully managed. We've been studying psychology (among other things) in places like the International Space Station and Antarctica for decades, but all of them have rescue/escape options within days at worst.
I just don't see why it's controversial to say that we need additional human beings created in-situ for a colony to prosper. Apparently I'm some kind of human rights abuser for suggesting that people have children.
Edited by Fighteer on Nov 15th 2023 at 2:56:47 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"It’s that you keep zeroing in on it and it’s the only thing you seem to want to address, you dismiss or ignore every other point that’s brought up until you’re backed into a corner.
It’s legitimately extremely unsettling, especially in light of previous things you’ve said. It’s getting to the point where it feels like you have an ulterior motive to keep bringing up maximizing the number of kids people have and it doesn’t vibe like a wholesome one.
Yes, it’s important. But as a human with empathy and understanding of other humans, I recognize that telling people “you need to have kids” in a situation like that isn’t going to make them feel frisky. The first concern is to make sure the colony can support life. The second concern is to make sure the colonists aren’t majority suicidal. Then the third concern is reproduction. If you don’t handle the first two, you aren’t getting the third. No matter what. And dismissing the second concern makes it very clear you don’t really understand the stakes involved in a colony on a personal level, not just a top down city-builder game type level.
Edited by Zendervai on Nov 15th 2023 at 3:00:11 PM
This also isn’t a thing where you can go “tragedy of the commons, c’est la vie” because when literally everyone in a culture is dehumanized except the few people lucky to be in charge, that’s a horrible dystopian culture that deserves to be overthrown, because it means it’s being run by complete morons who can’t comprehend the idea that it’s possible to make things better for people in desperate situations, especially when there’s no reason for anyone to hog resources.
I do not want to live in a colony that’s incapable of understanding that people are people and deserve to be treated with respect. Because otherwise, that’s a culture that deserves to die, just like how the slave owning cultures in our history also deserved to die. Because it’s the exact same thing.
It’s not tragedy of the commons, it’s just a wilful refusal to understand why people matter as individuals.
Edited by Zendervai on Nov 15th 2023 at 3:45:03 PM
Well this moved fast.
The idea of needing humans to be a breeding machine makes no real sense when any sort of colony is going to see a lot of immigration. A planet with low habitability will need an incredible influx of machinery and expertise to get it to a habitable state. You can't really dump 100 people on it and expect it to succeed. We're going to be needing millions.
A high habitable world (so life, but not as we know it) is easier, but that also means it's that much easier to just dump more people on it.
In any case, it's obvious that colonization isn't something you're gonna do for funsies and natural population growth isn't going to drive it's growth. A scenario where you dump 100 people on a planet to try and plant a flag is nothing more than a recipe for disaster. It's not something you'd even do as a desperation move, it's just a plain waste of resources and human life.
Edited by devak on Nov 15th 2023 at 9:59:06 PM

Hello sexist stereotypes, talk to a psychologist or a woman some time Tom.
We are not any more inclined to be caregivers then men are, it's a role society forces on us.
Edited by Imca on Nov 16th 2023 at 2:41:00 AM