On Thu, 18 Apr 2002, Selma Singer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>I find the whole idea of using technological tools to help devise better
>social structure, very, very exciting. As long as the techology is seen
>as a TOOL for human purposes, that is.
>
>Why would it not be possible to feed a computer the kinds of outcomes one
>would want to see and what characteristics the behavior would exhibit and
>have the computer HELP us think about that. I'm not saying the computer
>would necessarily be able to devise those structures but it very well may
>be able to help us in our thinking about the strategies we would need to
>employ, especially in getting from where we are now to where we might
>want to be.
In this case, the computer is simply used to model the society, basically
by modelling the actions of very large numbers of individual agents
representing different sorts of individuals, the advantage being
that modern computers are capable of running such models quickly,
thus allowing engineers to see the results of their work quickly,
and adapt it accordingly. It is the engineers who spec the desired
outcome, and design the system to meet it, and evaluate its efficacy
from the result of the simulation. This kind of computation-intensive
modelling has recently become practical at the desktop level, due to
the continuing advances in hardware.
>The question of how much energy was given to the social arrangements of
>such societies is a very interesting one.
>
>Weren't there some reports about the biosphere in that regard? Didn't
>they have to cut the experiment short for reasons having to do with human
>relationships or was it health issues? I don't remember.
The "Biosphere II" experiment suffered from a basic lack of communication
between the ecologists and the civil engineers, compounded by deadline
constraints. The facility was built rapidly and put into use almost
immediately, with a sealed ecology calculated to be self sustaining
for int human inhabitants. The problem was the whole structure was
based on a concrete platform, and as any good civil engineer should
have known, concrete takes between six months and two years to cure,
the rate being dependent on humidity, as water vapour is involved
in the reaction. During this time, the concrete evolves massive amounts
of CO2, far more than the ecologists had designed for. Being built
in a relatively arid climate, the foundation should have been left
to sit for a couple of years before construction proceded.
At any rate, the population of the B-II building was hardly large
enough for any thought to need have been given to socio-economic
dynamics. My search for discussions of such issues among space
colony enthusiasts has so far turned up nothing useful, but I
continue to pursue it. The one person who seems to have thought about
it seriously, Robert Zubrin, came to the facile conclusion that it
could never be done successfully, and therefore energies should be
directed toward colonizing Mars, where the existence of a raw frontier
beyond the colony would allow room for expansion, and thus a simple
19th century american frontier capitalism model could be used.
-Pete Vincent
