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Ok, who do you think can man a generation ship? Who are the puritans today? You can’t call for help from the mother country on a colony. Unless burkhard heim turns out to be right instead of the German version of the time cube guy, you can’t even have meaningful inputs either. The civilization has to be built on-site. And that means you need high cohesion above replacement tfr high IQ types. The ultra-orthodox Jews aren’t interested and the Mormons have a declining tfr, who do you think can pull it off?
I think I can. I'd also ask like half of the people I play Blood on the Clocktower with regularly and they will probably agree and we will make it.
I think that if/when there's a call for it, it won't be the average ability of some particular ethnicity/faith/whatever, but self-selected (but also gatekept) people that are multiple deviations above the average in whatever traits you think are good for manning a generation ship. A random 1000 mormons have nothing on the top 1000 <insert the ethnic group you most despise> most excited about colonizing Alpha Centauri.
Are we playing with the same clocktower group? Good lord we would all kill each other day 1!
We manage to cooperate surprisingly well given that one third of the players are secretly demonic entities!
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Mormons would probably pull it off okay, especially since the hardliner Mormons still have steady tfr. Plus I don't think the tfr would keep declining once exposure to the monoculture is cut off.
Genetically, I'd choose the groups that settled the prior frontiers with minimal homeland assistant: the Borderers, Mormons, and certain Germanic groups. Pick some traditionalist subsets and go. How many people does a generation ship really need? 500? 5000? Either way it's so small that you're best off looking for weird small subgroup that is optimal for it rather than selecting people who are good at playing our society. High IQ is somewhat important, but not massively so as long as they're like 100 average at least, with a few especially bright individuals. I'm sure engineering a generation ship requires elite IQ, manning one likely does not. Probably a few solid Asian groups that would fit the bill, but I'd be hesitant given the lack of prior history of frontier-settling.
Beliefs-wise, nearly any cohesive religious group is fine. They do exist. It's not as if we live in a 100% atheist society.
I mean there’s the 50/500 rule for genetic quality, but any cohesive group is going to be more related than average so it’s higher. The more interesting question is ‘how many people are required for the maintenance and supporting the maintainers and passing on necessary skills, and what fraction of the population can be engaged in those things’. Is maintaining the ship the sort of thing largely restricted to able-bodied males, either because of physical requirements or because of radiation exposure precluding reproductively active women? And what’s the necessary precursor and support technologies that need to be brought with, how much redundancy is the minimum, and how many people are necessary to maintain those things? And that comes down to ‘how many people does it take to maintain a technological civilization in complete autarchy’.
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