I think 1a and 1aa would depend a lot on technology. Do you have a fuel source that's compact and/or renewable enough to allow a ship to travel to another star system, deposit colonists, then leave again for yet another interstellar trip? Alternatively, you might design the ship so that it could be disassembled and used to build habitats on the surface; that would probably be the most efficient design choice, but then large parts of the ship would have to be capable of reentry.
Spaceships are normally designed to be just strong enough to complete whatever mission they're designed for, since the more mass you have, the more fuel you need. Even a craft like the Space Shuttle, which was designed to be reusable, requires a huge amount of retrofitting between missions; for a crew to do that all by itself would be a monumental undertaking.
Of course, if you're building a ship that would need to last for decades and possibly centuries with no outside maintenance (and sustain a large enough crew for a replacement-level population), that would require a whole new kind of engineering mindset. And technology that doesn't exist yet. (I suppose technically we could build a generation ship with existing technology; it would just take pretty much all the money in the world.)
To answer your first question last, my reading is that culture depends a lot on your environment, so the nature of the particular planet the colonists land on would probably have a strong influence on what their society looks like. (Same for the ship they lived on during the trip. That would actually pose its own problems: How does a culture that's developed, by necessity, on the need for sustainability adapt to an environment where space and resources are relatively unlimited? Assuming the planet is habitable.)
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branchandroot
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Date: 2009-12-19 03:06 am (UTC)Spaceships are normally designed to be just strong enough to complete whatever mission they're designed for, since the more mass you have, the more fuel you need. Even a craft like the Space Shuttle, which was designed to be reusable, requires a huge amount of retrofitting between missions; for a crew to do that all by itself would be a monumental undertaking.
Of course, if you're building a ship that would need to last for decades and possibly centuries with no outside maintenance (and sustain a large enough crew for a replacement-level population), that would require a whole new kind of engineering mindset. And technology that doesn't exist yet. (I suppose technically we could build a generation ship with existing technology; it would just take pretty much all the money in the world.)
To answer your first question last, my reading is that culture depends a lot on your environment, so the nature of the particular planet the colonists land on would probably have a strong influence on what their society looks like. (Same for the ship they lived on during the trip. That would actually pose its own problems: How does a culture that's developed, by necessity, on the need for sustainability adapt to an environment where space and resources are relatively unlimited? Assuming the planet is habitable.)