Practical for a civilian to build a space suit?

onomatomanic

I'm not sure excluding the old makes any sense in this case.

It does if the impending disaster is only expected to last a time much shorter than a human lifetime, because then you want as many persons (women, really) of childbearing age as possible when things go back to normal, allowing you to repopulate the planet more rapidly. Unless I misunderstood the premise, though, this is for the long haul. The age distribution is going to normalize relatively soon anyway, so you might as well start out that way.

Or, to put it in even stronger terms, the space in the cities is obviously limited. If you only take young people, nobody is going to die for the first generation or so. So you'd either have to start with a half-empty city to accommodate the children being born in the interim, or start with a full city and ensure that no children will be born for a while. Neither seems like a appealing scenario.

Ryan_m_b

Space in the cities doesn't have to be limited after everyone else has died off. They can expand by digging and building

onomatomanic

Oh, true. I guess my mentally equating them with lifeboats wasn't really appropriate after all, because of that aspect. Thanks for pointing that out!

CCWilson

I'm not sure exactly where the optimal age cutoff would be, but the older the citizenry, the more medical problems. Significant disabilities would also disqualify. Political correctness has to go out the door when the survival of mankind is at stake.

I myself would not make the cut. Glad it's just a story.

onomatomanic

What about later on? There could be measures like enforced abortion if a fetus is showing any signs of abnormal development, and no medical care for those too old to productively contribute any longer, and so on. If the agenda is survival at any cost, those decisions should be made solely on the basis of material benefit versus impact on morale, with no ethical considerations directly taken into account. Examining these issues gives the story depth, but at some point can make it too "dark and edgy" to provide enjoyable escapism any longer.

ps: This is not "political correctness", though. That's a fad, whereas these are real ethical issues.

Ryan_m_b

I'm struggling with seeing this society to be honest. The majority of humans aren't purely rational and wont stand for what is essentially a totalitarian society in order for some abstract ideology of "continuing the species". I really don't see why people would dedicate the remaining time they have left when they know that there is a slim chance that their family is going to survive (hence my proposal earlier that the selection process needs to be made so that everyone knows at least one person who will be saved [ideally more] to make it personal and identifiable).

As for age and moderate disability I don't think it's too much of a problem. You're going to need very good social medicine anyway, it really isn't going to be much of an expenditure to keep the elderly and sick alive and aside from humanitarian considerations these people will likely have skills you need. Becoming an expert in a skilled field takes decades of training, you could try to include a cut off below retirement but especially for scientific fields you're going to be loosing a hell of a lot of tacit knowledge that your high tech survival cities are going to need.

Also political correctness is not a fad, though the term gets bandied about and abused quite a lot it will be an extremely important consideration in this scenario. Social tension in a closed environment will be something that is paramount to diffuse. A riot in a modern city IRL can lead to the death of hundreds, significant damage to infrastructure and cost a lot to repair. A riot in a city where the very ecosystem is in a tight balance and breaching the wall could kill thousands is not something you want. Standard cliche is to go overboard in the totalitarianism but that's just going to delay the problem and give you one heck of a revolution when the lid gets blown off the boiler.

CCWilson

The moral issues in this scenario are thorny, all right. Let's take the following individuals - a man in jail for assault, an undocumented worker, a mentally handicapped child, a thirty year old obese woman with diabetes and heart disease, a victim of cerebral palsy, and an eighty year old man. In our current politically correct society, we feel morally bound to help them all. We want to treat the first two fairly, at minimum, and the last four will be given all necessary government assistance. But if species survival is at stake, we must make difficult and repugnant decisions, and those six people should not become residents of the underground cities.

In order to limit public outrage, there will be a national referendum before the lottery in which the people will have a say as to how residents will be selected and what categories of individuals will be included in the drawing and how many political figures will get automatic selection to facilitate organizing life underground.

Of course every country will set its own rules and build its own shelters, and those with more autocratic regimes will not be concerned with fairness and therefore will be at huge risk of revolution by those with nothing to lose.

onomatomanic

I partly agree. If what people see is that an authoritarian government is murdering people they love and like, the impact on morale would be disastrous. However, if the situation is one in which people for the most part believe that such measures are necessary for their own survival, humans can also be remarkably callous.

That depends entirely on what you mean by "keep alive". It's one thing to not letting an 80-year-old starve just because they can't work any longer, it's quite another to go to great lengths to try an cure them if they develop cancer.

Maybe we're using the term differently. I understand "political correctness" to be the fairly recent notion that anything that could possibly be perceived as offensive ought to be avoided at all costs. People don't riot because somebody offended them, they riot because they have concrete grievances.

onomatomanic

Why is an undocumented worker less likely to contribute to the survival of the species than a documented worker?

What's the timeframe covered by your plot? I was assuming that it continues well into the future of the cataclysm, but you keep only talking about the initial stages, so maybe that's another unfounded assumption of mine?

CCWilson

No country is going to include in its limited survival population someone who's in the country illegally. Certainly the US wouldn't, even aside from the practical fact that you've got to be on the books in order to be in the lottery.

Oh, it's long term, as in permanent. The Sun is gone forever. Of course anyone born in the bunker with a disability or reaching a ripe old age would be treated compassionately, but common sense says you stock your city initially with able-bodied, productive, healthy, good citizen types.

onomatomanic

Pragmatically, that makes sense, but it makes the moral high-ground of any subsequent "the survival of the species requires it" justifications rather shaky, don't you think? That would be my perspective in such a situation, anyway.

sshai45

So is it for some kind of "eugenics"-like "improve the gene pool while we're at it" kind of thing (pseudoscientific garbage), or more like "we just don't have the resources to care for the disabled & old, and crooks would be an obvious threat to the integrity of the society"? I.e. you want your society to *work* first of all, and with things this tight, there just isn't any way to be *able* to do the caring without jeopardizing that. E.g. medicine is gonna be limited, so then you don't want to bring along medical liabilities.

And what else is required for them to "make the cut", beyond being not too old, not disabled, and not a crook or illegal immigrant?

CCWilson

That should be obvious; the only consideration is what gives us the best shot at keeping homo sapiens alive for long enough that the new generations can work out the kinks in closed ecological systems. As I said above, around half the population would be technicians - doctors, dentists, veterinarians, engineers, electricians, plumbers, scientists, medical technicians, computer and electronics guys, hydroponic farmers, manufacturing experts, and so on. Once those essential positions are filled, a lottery will be held among able bodied citizens of good mental and physical health and at least decent moral character between say 15 years and 45 years of age. In order to motivate those who work to design and build the underground cities, they will be given extra tickets to increase their likelihood of having their numbers drawn. Those selected would probably be allowed to bring in their family members who meet the criteria. There will be a national referendum where the public can choose the standards to be included in the lottery, and until that vote I can't say for sure what the final criteria will be.

Ryan_m_b

I don't think this lottery system will be that viable. You're going to need an optimum amount of every kind of skilled worker (as well as unskilled) to keep a technogivally advanced society going. Leaving it to chance won't be good enough.

As for medicine being limited I really don't see why. Just think of the scale of the industry this society is going to possess. You are proposing that they build closed underground cities for millions in a handful of years (something I think your readers will find unbelievable). Any society with that kind of industry isn't going to be short on medical devices or medicines.

CCWilson

If my scenario came to pass - if tomorrow we were told that a black hole or neutron star was approaching and would throw us out of orbit - what would we - specifically, our governments - do? I suspect it would be something like what I'm suggesting, since there would be no alternative. I will admit that I grossly misstated the lottery odds earlier. I envision building underground cities to house somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 people in perhaps 20 sites in the US, but that figure is still being worked out by my crack team of architects, biospheric scientists, engineers, climatologists, and psychiatrists.

The concept of a lottery is to give all Americans at least a chance at surviving. Seems only fair. The last thing you'd want is for the public to think that the resources of the country are going to the benefit of a privileged elite.

Ryan_m_b

Panic. Then spend years organising international conventions where they bring many of the worlds top experts in all fields. Honestly it's going to take a long time just to decide where to start. This isn't something that one country is going to pull off, even an economic giant like the US, China etc. Reason being that the world economy is going to have to be significantly put into this endeavour: think of all the factories in the far east, mines in Africa etc etc.

A really tricky thing to handle will be getting countries to agree on what method to take versus how they want to contribute their resources. That and deciding how much goes to what country. Imagine a scenario where smaller nations with less resources have nothing to contribute and aren't chosen as a site for a city. What are the people going to do? Probably hike to a neighbouring country as refugees (good luck building that city with hundreds of thousands of occupiers, you could turn the military on them but that could spark an international incident. Humans en mass aren't coldly logical, even if their lives are at stake).

I imagine that different cities would be built with different methods in an effort to appease this political problem and ensure a chance that some survive.
I'd revise that number up to at least a million, though realistically it's likely to be more than ten million.
I advise you start thinking of this internationally, one nation isn't going to do this alone. Certainly not if you're sticking to this 5-year-plan. Whilst a lifeboat lottery is a common trope it really doesn't seem likely to work. Are tickets going to go to families and close friends? If not you're not it doesn't sound like a system people will vote for but if so it limits who can win. My advice would be as I posted above. Think outside the box and chose a system designed so that everyone personally knows one or two people selected to survive, by making it personal most people have a very concrete reason to work and sacrifice: for whoever that friend is, rather than the abstract chance that they might win a ticket that will separate them from their friends and loved ones.

CCWilson

I liken this to what happened in World War II. Each country would, I think, get off their butts and go to work with all due haste trying to save some of their own people. Closed ecological system research would be shared, in a spirit of brotherhood, but each country would start building right away. Certainly there would be international conferences and think tanks, but any country with the resources to do so would mobilize and begin construction without waiting for the science to catch up. Countries without the wherewithal to build shelters and power them would, I'm afraid, be out of luck. And obviously that would cause huge social upheaval, wars, riots, and all kinds of nastiness.

Even some developed countries would be in big trouble. Great Britain and Israel, for example, have no geothermal power plants and unless they could drill some they would have to rely on fossil fuels and nuclear for energy, which would have a limited life span.