A dangerous space mission that requires a lot of helping hands

[Strato Incendus]

As I've mentioned in a few previous threads, at the midpoint of my sci-fi story on a generation ship, I need a disaster that wipes out about a third of the (male half of) the crew. Several people have suggested things like "a virus that disproportionately affects men", but that didn't quite cut it for me:
For one, this event is supposed to make a point about the hostility of space itself, about the universe's indifference to life; so having a bunch of characters die to some man-made disaster, like a virus somebody concocted on board, would still end up feeling like "the crew kind of brought it on themselves".
Second, by having them go onto a dangerous mission (=forced to participate in it), there would be more of a parallel to the draft for military service on Earth. Hence, the characters being "passively slain" by a virus would not fit this predicament: It needs to be a commander's active decision to send these people on that mission (by force), for the "greater good" of securing the survival of the entire crew.

Recap: My ship, the Exodus, looks like a dumbbell, with two massive water tanks at the front and back, to protect against radiation. (Those spheres store the water in 21 smaller sub-spheres within the larger spheres, so it's a sphere-packing-in-a-sphere setup. If one of the smaller sub-tanks takes damage, the water only escapes into the outer sphere, rather than escaping directly into space.) The drive is behind the aft sphere, that is, at its rear ending. The nuclear-fusion drive sits inside one of the sub-spheres, the one in the very middle, which therefore does not contain water, of course. However, there is a third sub-sphere on axis, in front of those containing the engines and the reactor, to protect the ship's trunk from radiation.

In a previous thread, somebody already told me that anything involving radiation is more dangerous to female reproductive organs than to male ones. That as a baseline is a perfect setup to me, since the story is about a generation ship, after all. And my vague ideas for this plot point indeed revolve around sending these men somewhere in the proximity of the ship's nuclear-fusion reactor (=the primary energy source for everything on board).

However, they could also be working on the ship's engines themselves, trying to get them to fire up again: The ship needs the drive to brake again, as it's approaching its destination star. Working so far in the back of the ship, they would then instead be exposed to all the radiation from the cosmos itself, as they would be working behind the protective layer of all the water tanks.

So what kind of mission inside a spaceship could it be that
a) requires lots of hands (and, potentially, physical strength) to solve
b) can be clearly anticipated as being a dangerous mission in advance?

Those are the two crucial main factors, in my view, that would make it a wise decision for a commander to only send male crew members onto said mission.

One idea I had...

Spoiler

...was to have the engines (the thrusters) retract into the aft sphere of the ship during the coasting phase, to protect them from space dust etc. while they are not needed. Then there could be a malfunction, causing the engines to power up too early, so that the ship's AI shoves the engines out into space, to prevent them from firing while still inside the ship's aft sphere. If that were to happen, it would probably threaten the structural integrity of the entire ship, or it would at least blow up the nuclear-fusion reactor, thereby depriving the ship of its main energy source, etc.

If the AI now opens the lid at the very rear end of the ship, in order to protract the engines back into space in time, anyone still working inside that sphere at that time would either get blown out into space, or be fried by the engines firing. The AI would have a reason here to actively ignore the fact that there are still people working in the sphere, since not protracting the engines into space would endanger the entire ship, rather than just "a few crew members". Hence, even though there is a safety mechanism that would normally stop the AI from opening the lid while people are still present in the sphere, here the AI could be compelled to override that fail-safe mechanism, in order to preserve the lives of everyone else on board (=mainly the women and children).

But I have no clue whether that makes sense. Namely, if such a "retracting mechanism" for the engines would even be realistically built into the ship in the first place.

Even if such a mechanism does make sense, that still leaves the question open of what could go so wrong with the engines that it would require about 93 people to fix it.

So if you have any other, more plausible ideas for on-board catastrophes that fulfil the criteria a) and b), I'm happy to hear them!

For reference: The largest crews that have been sent into space on a single ship for real, in our current day and age, seem to have consisted of between 8 and 11 people, based on a quick Google search. So we probably won't have any real-world examples here. Rather, we may have to extrapolate about the potential pitfalls of nuclear-fusion drives...

 

[anorlunda]

Perhaps a male only athletic competition to be held in a separate chamber, or extra vehicular. Or a women only competition. Something to put the men and the women in different places on the ship.

 

[berkeman]

So what kind of mission inside a spaceship could it be that
a) requires lots of hands (and, potentially, physical strength) to solve
b) can be clearly anticipated as being a dangerous mission in advance?

Those are the two crucial main factors, in my view, that would make it a wise decision for a commander to only send male crew members onto said mission.

That seems pretty sexist to me. I personally know some female SWAT officers that would probably like to step outside with you to discuss this further. They are bad-a$$, and would take serious offense at your attitude...

Perhaps a male only athletic competition to be held in a separate chamber, or extra vehicular. Or a women only competition. Something to put the men and the women in different places on the ship.

I was thinking along similar lines, but more like if the men and women still use separate shower facilities and all were involved in some large athletic event, a micrometeorite strike in the men's showers would selectively kill mostly the men...

 

[Vanadium 50]

Suggesting to the female SWAT officers that women aren't up to the job may cause a number of fatalities among those suggesting it.

 

[berkeman]

Suggesting to the female SWAT officers that women aren't up to the job may cause a number of fatalities among those suggesting it.

I see what you did there.

But the more important question, is did the OP understand what you said...

 

[hutchphd]

Perhaps the engines need to be hand polished for maximum operating efficiency and the entire crew is enlisted because there is some nontrivial radiation exposure associated with the task: the duties are spread through the entire crew.. The captain decides to make a competition of the event, and some of the self-selected teams are essentially uni-gendered. One such team meets a bad end for technical reasons

 

[BillTre]

Do you need to kill them or can you just change some into women?

Breeding:
One possibility is to have a Y-chromosome linked lethal or a synthetic lethal (to mutants at the same time) spread through the population and kill (or sterilize) the males. This is based on the idea that you will probably have a fairly small population where inbreeding is almost inevitable without some counter measures.

Or, targetted biological difference:
Any kind of chemical that had bad affects on males (or more bad effects on males) would work. It could be a chemical from some overlooked process going on in the ship. Fixable, but then a bunch of guys are gone.

Or, targeted difference in location:
A disaster during a sexually segregated (sexes in different locations) "Olympics" event held on the ship in which everyone participated.

 

[Rive]

I need a disaster that wipes out about a third of the (male half of) the crew.

Space does not discriminate.
So you (your commander) need to do that.

It's one old story that males are lot less important for producing the next generation than females. So - expendable. Just invent some hazmat (radiation?) cleanup or so and send in your excess males (well, they might rebel, you know).

But please be sure that it's something important and really needed for the story. In any series those unexpected but frequent disasters which are there only to have something happen are called 'fillers' and usually not really appreciated, regardless of the number of redshirts spent.

 

[Strato Incendus]

Thanks for your many replies. I think @Rive understood my goal with this scene best:

It's one old story that males are lot less important for producing the next generation than females. So - expendable. Just invent some hazmat (radiation?) cleanup or so and send in your excess males (well, they might rebel, you know).

Exactly. The point is about evolution, and how nature and the universe are basically the same mindless (and therefore merciless) force. Humans adapted to that by raising certain principles (like male disposability) to virtues (like dying in battle / on a mission).

But please be sure that it's something important and really needed for the story. In any series those unexpected but frequent disasters which are there only to have something happen are called 'fillers' and usually not really appreciated, regardless of the amount of redshirts spent.

I'm on board with you here; I also hate shocking disasters for the sake of it.

This event however is the mid-point plot-twist, so it isn't just some random tragedy, nor is it filler; it has massive ripple effects throughout the second half of the story. Among others, a lot of women are without their partners now (or without prospects for finding a partner). And the crew needs to be replenished to its original size as quickly as possible.

This is the flipside of male disposability: Almost all women on board got to survive - but in turn, now they're expected to have more children. And the (female) commander is determined to enforce this, if need be. Naturally, my (female) protagonist, the ship's pharmacist responsible for contraceptive production on board, is having none of it.

This takes the story down a similar path as the TV show "The 100": Survival - at what cost?

Humanity (humaneness) can die even if humanity (mankind) survives...

That seems pretty sexist to me. I personally know some female SWAT officers that would probably like to step outside with you to discuss this further. They are bad-a$$, and would take serious offense at your attitude...

What's sexist - nature, for evolving male disposability? Or the commander, for only sending men on this mission? Could it be that the (female) commander is a representation of "Mother Nature"...?

Yes, when the mission starts, there are a few female crew members who protest for not being allowed to join. Then, once disaster strikes, most of them find themselves relieved in hindsight.

Female SWAT officers are not just at the top of the distribution (for physical prowess, stress tolerance etc.), and therefore not representative of the average woman. The even more important point is of course that SWAT officers chose to work this job. This is not about any supposed "privilege" of being allowed to go on a dangerous mission. This is about responsibilities to the ship, and the vast majority of the people who go on the mission did not volunteer for it.

The mission is not some fun adventure, like being on an away team in Star Trek - where you could make the case that being barred from participating is a disadvantage.

Spoiler: Star Trek: The Next Generation

Riker may often advocate against Captain Picard being on an away team, because his responsibility is to the ship; but the captain can override that advice any time he wants.

Conversely, though, Captain Picard once sent Riker on a planet mission on his own birthday, interrupting the celebration Riker was just having, and Riker even ended up getting abducted on the planet. And still, Riker had it better than my male crew members - because he chose to become a Starfleet officer. The men on board the Exodus, just like everyone else, were born there - and they have nowhere else to go. Nowhere they can escape to.

There are indeed a few female security officers joining the mission, too. They are compelled to go on it by the job they chose - the men, in contrast, are compelled to go on the mission simply because of their gender. I agree that's sexist - probably not in the direction you were thinking of, though.

Only one of the women ends up dying, though - because the men on the mission still act out their protective instincts, to get them out of harms way first, once the catastrophe begins.

The woman who dies during the mission is one of those particularly tough ones. Among others, when it comes to the daily runs around the rotating rings that everyone has to do to maintain their fitness, she always does them in her complete combat outfit / security armour - to increase the challenge, and to always be prepared for the case of emergency.
She actually steps in front one of the male main characters to save him - because he's a regular civilian, and she therefore considers it part of her duty.
From an evolutionary perspective, though, a woman sacrificing her life for a man is suboptimal (and therefore infrequent, since women who show this behaviour have a lower chance of passing on their genes).
At the same time, that's what makes it heroic in a different sense - not in terms of what benefits the survival of the species, but in terms of going against one's default biological programming.

After the mission is over, dozens of people gather around her coffin at the burial ceremony. The dozens of guys who died in the mission, meanwhile, are mostly just a name on a list that the commander reads out aloud once.

I was thinking along similar lines, but more like if the men and women still use separate shower facilities and all were involved in some large athletic event, a micrometeorite strike in the men's showers would selectively kill mostly the men...

A micrometeor was indeed my first idea for causing the failure at the reactor / the engines to begin with. Because there's hardly a better way to illustrate how merciless space is.

However, in the threads about the construction of the ship, we already concluded that the ship would have to be heavily shielded (potentially with an ice shield in front of it, plus deflector lasers operated by an AI, etc.) in order to travel through interstellar space in the first place. A micrometeor hitting the ship at 12.5% light speed would probably annihilate the entire ship altogether, wouldn't it?

In short: A micrometeor, as far as I can tell, would be the cosmic equivalent of a roleplaying game master pulling a "rocks fall, everyone dies". ;) Except in this case, it only takes one single, tiny piece of rock.

Perhaps the engines need to be hand polished for maximum operating efficiency and the entire crew is enlisted because there is some nontrivial radiation exposure associated with the task:

I actually quite like that! Also because it's such a menial task - there's nothing "glorious" about it.

One problem with this idea is that I have cleaning droids on board. However, those are mainly for vacuuming and cleaning the quarters (where there is artificial gravity). The engines are on the ship's central axis, that is, outside the rotating sections, so there should be no gravity there. If the robots require gravity to function, they would be useless here. Even if they can work in zero g, the engines are a different cup of tea than just mopping the floor: They're a lot more complex, it's easier to break stuff, etc.

Naturally, the helping hands will be given orders by the engineers, because most of them won't be familiar with the intricacies of the drive. Hence, it's precisely these "easy" tasks, those that everyone could do in principle, that don't require a lot of learning time, but are dangerous and/or require certain levels of physical (upper-body) strength, that you could more easily order some random young guys on the ship to carry out.

For example, at my institute, we once had to assemble two soundproof cabins on the third floor. The company only sent us two people for the setup, so me and all the other guys in the offices (academics, not weight-lifters) ended up helping to carry the heavy wall pieces around. The assembly was done by the two guys from the company, but they still needed us to get all the pieces in place. Guess who didn't help...

One possibility is to have a Y-chromosome linked lethal or a synthetic lethal (to mutants at the same time) spread through the population and kill (or sterilize) the males. This is based on the idea that you will probably have a fairly small population where inbreeding is almost inevitable without some counter measures.

Correct me if I got this wrong, but to me this sounds like another variation of the "virus that only affects males" idea?

As outlined in the starting post: The main problem with this is the passivity of the crew in the problem. Yes, a virus is a great way to illustrate how merciless nature can be - and as I've said at the beginning of the present post, ultimately both the universe and nature are just the mindless laws of physics. However, if it's a virus that escapes from a human lab on the ship, it will still feel like the humans brought it on themselves: Someone was careless at work, and hence the catastrophe.

The cause of the catastrophe, ideally, should be no-one's fault - it should arise simply by virtue of going up against the forces of space. Where human action comes in is in the decision who to send on this mission.

The latter part is the problem with the idea of "men happen to be in this area": That reduces the part where the recruitment for the mission takes place to a passive, random incident. I could easily see this happen if there's simply some accident in the reactor, where most likely, through sheer self-selection based on personal interest, more men will be working. However, this will probably not be a third of the male half of the crew.

Hence, the sequence of events is 1) random, 2) deliberate: 1) A random, unforeseen event happens to the ship that causes a disaster, 2) Now what do we do about it?

Any kind of chemical that had bad affects on males (or more bad effects on males) would work. It could be a chemical from some overlooked process going on in the ship. Fixable, but then a bunch of guys are gone.

Do you mean that the chemical is transmitted via the ventilation system? Or via injection? Via the food? Via the water pipes?

If this can happen to guys, irrespective of where they are on the ship, that would be another "too passive" solution. But I'm happy to entertain the idea of a chemical issue further, if it's a dangerous chemical in a certain area of the ship, where the commander would first have to actively send a bunch of people to fix the problem.

Perhaps we've just identified another potential location of this mid-point disaster, as an alternative:

One entire ring of the ship is the factory ring, where everything that can't be manufactured by hand is produced with the help of large machinery. There is chemical production here, water purification, there is a furnace... a bunch of things could go wrong on the factory ring, too. It might not have to be something in the reactor or with the ship's engines, after all.

However, a malfunction in the fusion reactor or with the engines might still be more convincing as an iminent threat to the entire ship.

A disaster during a sexually segregated (sexes in different locations) "Olympics" event held on the ship in which everyone participated.

Nice idea, but this would be another "coincidental" event, that just so happens to disproportionately affect the men on board. Thus, readers would be justified in accusing me of plot convenience if I went for that route.

There already is mandatory daily exercise on the ship, due to people spending a lot of time every day in zero g. However, those exercise sessions are not sexually segregated.

Hence, these olympics would not be integral to the mission's success, either. If something happens during such a "superfluous" event that ends up having dire consequences, it's all the more frustrating to the reader if the event was something that could easily have been avoided.

In fact, sexual segregation during sports might actually even run counter to the mission of a generation ship in particular - if this is one of the primary opportunities for people to meet outside of work.

The point is: The commander needs a good reason to send the crew members onto this mission and, by extension, potentially into death.

Spoiler: Star Trek: The Next Generation

In fact, in Star Trek, this is the primary qualification you have to demonstrate in order to obtain the rank of Commander: The ability to send a crew member on a lethal mission. Troi has to send a fictional Geordi in the holodeck simulation onto a mission with no return to become a Commander herself.

 

[anorlunda]

Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious...service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.

 

[256bits]

So what kind of mission inside a spaceship could it be that
a) requires lots of hands (and, potentially, physical strength) to solve
b) can be clearly anticipated as being a dangerous mission in advance?

Does it have to be a hazardous mission the people are sent on.

why not a training mission that went bad.
Afterall, in times of catastophe, first responders and people ( in this generation ship case they should also be trained on what to do or expect )

for example:
'Captain, I don't know what to tell you, but it is a complete and utter disaster. at last count 247 dead, 43 hospitalized, 67 missing and unaccounted for. Of the dead, sir 202 males ranging in age from 11 to 43, and females 45. The cause of death mostly aphixiation. the hospital cases...

"What do you mean males as young as 11 for a training mission. For what.?

They were volunteers, sir, portraying accident victims in a simulated disaster. The first responders were to go in and aid the victims and the whole process..."

"so how many children."

"102 sir , all male." Any female volunteers were not available due to the schedule of the Olympian meet that day, so count our blessings of chance in that regard "

"OK. Alice, give me a rundown on the time slice of events that led to the disaster>"

"Captain, she's not herself at the moment. she won't answer. She is well, blaming herself for the deaths and .."

"what! she went neurotic. A neurotic computer is what I really need. "

" hector, what do you know? Your better not and gone half crazy either ?"

"No captian. I have not been programmed for emotion.
From what I gather, a malfunction in one of the beam units caused it to fall onto an electronic unit, causing sparks and a fire ensued. Since alice was instructed to consider the event as a training mission, she delayed an evacuation order for 12.37 seconds, during which she accessed the situation , and gave the order to evacuate. Or I may be wrong, someone pulled the fire alarm during that time, I am not sure. Automatic failsafes waited the standard 5.2 seconds to respond for evacuation of personnel, but due to the large number of people, all could not exit before the area was contained by the closing of locked doors. The fire suppression units were activated, You can, I assume, know the rest, as..."

" OK stop Hector. and what the hell is a beam unit? Why don't you talk normal?
And what is a pull the fire alarm. We don't have any of that on this ship. It's all sensors and automatic. You know something I don't?"

 

[BillTre]

Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious...service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.

Some I issues I raised are concerned with a lack of considering unintended consequences. The inbreeding issue is not like a virus, it is population genetics. There are however, easy fixes like taking a vast and diverse library of frozen sperm. This would prolong genetic diversity. It would also allow the elimination of men from the crew and make to crew more reproductively effective upon arrival at their destination (everyone would be able to have babies, a trait favored in species where rapid population growth is an advantage. New males would appear in the first generation at the destination.
With a generation ship, the population is way more important than the individuals involved if you want to set-up a successful new colony.

So what kind of mission inside a spaceship could it be that
a) requires lots of hands (and, potentially, physical strength) to solve
b) can be clearly anticipated as being a dangerous mission in advance?

Normally some automatic system takes care of some process of importance and widespread over the ship (maybe ship hull structural integrity).
The system breaks, people have to go out and do stuff (standard back-up plan), exposed to unusual space conditions (space storm or something), resulting in biological damage. (They would all have stored sperm before hand, want to propagate that genetic diversity).

 

[Melbourne Guy]

This takes the story down a similar path as the TV show "The 100": Survival - at what cost?

Eek. The 100 was such YA fodder, all those smart people in orbit who couldn't even measure radiation on the ground so had to send their children down as literal canaries in the coal mine

That aside, are some of your crew in hibernation? Can't you just engineer a fault - perhaps caused by radiation if you need the inimical nature of space as the reason - and kill off that many men?

 

[Strato Incendus]

Thanks again for your ideas!

the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.

Since there is at least one couple per country on Earth, most countries hold national selections to find their ideal representatives for the mission.

During a TV broadcast of a gathering of all winners selected so far, one of the characters watching asks whether a particular country hosted a national selection for a space crew or a beauty pageant. To which another viewer replies that were part of the job requirements, since the project founders are expecting people to have babies on the ship. Priorities in terms of what qualities people are selected for will of course differ between cultures.

Does it have to be a hazardous mission the people are sent on.

why not a training mission that went bad.

Because that‘s another case of a “random incident”, rather than a commander making the deliberate choice to send people on a kamikaze operation. Stories live from character’s choices, and suspense is often preferable to surprise (=plot twists out of nowhere). Seeing the inevitable coming actually makes it worse.

Sure, to some degree, an incident happening out of nowhere can be helpful or even required to illustrate the merciless indifference of the universe towards life. But then again, on a universal scale, most of these things you actually see coming from literal light years away. We’ve already gone over a bunch of things that could happen to the ship externally - passing by in too close proximity of a flare star, running into a rogue black hole that’s invisible because it’s currently not consuming any matter in interstellar space, getting in the pathway of an impending supernova, etc.

All of these are things we would already see coming today. So aside from “colliding with a tiny speckle of dust” - which would most likely blow up the entire ship, and therefore has to be accounted for in advance, before the mission even starts - there don’t seem to be a lot of things that could happen as surprises out of nowhere, without requiring prior setup.

I appreciate you having taken the time to come up with a scene on your own! The main problem for my purposes is of course this particular line:

They were volunteers, sir,

That would eliminate the entire point of the analogy to mandatory military service. That, and the fact that you’ve included minors among the casualties; if there are any children who die at this plot point, it would indeed be “just an accident”, not because of the commander deliberately endangering any kids on board.

Some I issues I raised are concerned with a lack of considering unintended consequences. The inbreeding issue is not like a virus, it is population genetics. There are however, easy fixes like taking a vast and diverse library of frozen sperm. This would prolong genetic diversity.

Yes, and that sperm bank would create quite a few plot holes if I allowed it to exist in my story. At the same time, as you correctly pointed out, it would be unwise for the initiators of the mission to have planned without redundancy in this regard.

Hence, my rule of thumb has become that it’s usually more convincing to include something, and then have it be destroyed - rather than to claim it had never been aboard in the first place. This is especially convenient in a generation ship story, since once something breaks, the crew can’t go back to get replacements. If they can’t produce a particular thing themselves, they have to make do with what’s available.

In this case, the sperm bank got destroyed by a group of rebels in Generation One. They were the first generation born on the ship, and some teens were upset about their parents having made the choice for them to spend their entire lives on a spaceship. Since of course the ship wasn’t too far out into the interstellar void at that point yet, these rebels tried to get the ship to stop and go back to Earth - which is why they named themselves Turning Point. One of the things they did, as an act of vandalism, was to destroy the sperm bank. Because they were hoping that, without this redundancy, the mission would be doomed to fail, and therefore, the ship would be forced to return back home to Earth.

Here we see a similar writing choice: I could just have the sperm bank be destroyed by radiation exposure, or a hull breach, or cooling systems failing, etc. But having it be due to human actions is more interesting, because that immediately raises follow-up questions about the motivations of those human beings. Also, deliberate destruction is more likely to be complete. If the sperm bank got destroyed by an accident, it’s unlikely that all of the contents would get lost.

It would also allow the elimination of men from the crew and make to crew more reproductively effective upon arrival at their destination

Even with the sperm bank destroyed - that is, with all the additional genetic material they had from Earth - the ship can still require regular seed samples from all the male crew members, as a backup plan if any of them die.

The time interval for this depends on striking a good balance between sperm viability and motility. You could store a single sample for a long time if you freeze it (which is what the sperm bank did with all the extra genetic material from Earth). As far as I could tell from the studies I skimmed over, the frozen sperm will survive (remain viable) longer, but motility will go down, compared to storing them at a temperature closer to room temperature. Hence, a one-shot sample from Earth (pun intended) would not be wasted on intra-uterine insemination, but for in-vitro fertilisation only.

The samples from the male crew members, meanwhile, can be “renewed” more frequently. So far, I’ve said that interval to around 3 weeks. Which is also the reason why only the female crew members are allowed to receive contraceptive injections (which allows me to create a situation more analogous to present-day Earth, where male hormonal birth control isn’t really available yet).

With a generation ship, the population is way more important than the individuals involved if you want to set-up a successful new colony.

Indeed. And hence, that is precisely the justification my commander uses to override one individual right after another, the more pressing the situation on board gets.

Anytime I talk to people about this, some of them indeed adopt this position. Whereas others react in horror, and wonder who in their right mind would even go aboard a generation ship in the first place. Most strikingly, both sides usually seem to be completely convinced of their own position - which makes the showdown of these two views in the story all the more interesting!

So what’s the protagonist supposed to do? Well, for starters, she can only make a case against the commander by adopting a different framework of values altogether. As long as someone accepts the commander’s premise that the success of the mission - the survival of not just the crew, but humanity as a species - is the most important goal, the commander’s actions can be justified by asserting that she’s merely doing everything in her power to live up to her responsibility as the commander and ensure the success of the mission.

Normally some automatic system takes care of some process of importance and widespread over the ship (maybe ship hull structural integrity).
The system breaks, people have to go out and do stuff (standard back-up plan), exposed to unusual space conditions (space storm or something), resulting in biological damage. (They would all have stored sperm before hand, want to propagate that genetic diversity).

When it comes to AI failure, one of the ideas I formerly contemplated was to have the deflector system fail, which then leads to a collision with space dust particles. Analogously to the destruction of the sperm bank, this would make more sense than the ship not having a deflector system in the first place - that would again just be irresponsible mission planning. Having people rely on the AI to prevent collisions, only to be confronted with a “random” collision with some cosmic matter as soon as that AI fails, would indeed help to illustrate the mercilessness of the universe.

The problem with this, again, seems to be that a collision with even just a speckle of dust at 10 to 12.5% light speed should destroy the entire ship outright. In the movie Passengers, it’s even more than just a speckle of dust, it’s an actual micro-meteor. I don’t recall the travel speed of the ship in Passengers, but I would again assume that most likely, such a collision would have ripped the entire ship apart in reality.

The other general problem is with spacewalks at a coasting speed of 10% to 12.5% light speed - or the impossibility thereof. The radiation exposure should indeed be so high that a commander would probably not even begin to entertain sending someone out there - least of all 70 to 90 men at once.

Even if I came up with a reason for that - like broad-scale hull damage that requires lots of hands to repair - death by radiation alone would probably be rather slow. The more spectacular option would of course be to have the spacewalkers get pushed away from the ship somehow, and vanishing into the void.

That was probably the very first option I had considered for this disaster. But ever since I’ve heard PBS Space Times take on spacewalks at these coasting speeds, I’ve been wondering how much sense the setup for such spacewalks makes in the first place.

Eek. The 100 was such YA fodder, all those smart people in orbit who couldn't even measure radiation on the ground so had to send their children down as literal canaries in the coal mine

I totally get what you mean. :) Indeed, I’ve seen a lot of people thrown off by The 100 as early as the first episode, precisely because it seems like it would mainly have “teenager appeal”.

But after having seen the entire show, I would mainly attribute that to its aesthetics. When the first episode starts, it looks like it’s going to be The Vampire Diaries. Then it gets going, and it instead turns into some mixture of Lord of the Flies, The Hunger Games, and a post-apocalyptic version of Game of Thrones. Including, just like GoT, a pretty nonsensical final season…

What’s surprising to me, though, is that both The 100 and Passengers, neither of which are technically about generation ships (you could at best call the Ark a “generation space station”), are closer to my story - and also closer to what I think the core ethical problems about generation ships are - than any generation-ship story I’ve read or watched so far.

Sending your kids on a dangerous, potentially lethal mission without their consent, for the purposes of colonising a planet and thereby allowing humanity to survive. Is that The 100, or is it a generation-ship story? The description alone could apply to both.

That aside, are some of your crew in hibernation? Can't you just engineer a fault - perhaps caused by radiation if you need the inimical nature of space as the reason - and kill off that many men?

Then my story would be pretty close to Passengers, wouldn’t it?

Also, this would again be a random accident, without any commander actively sending people on the dangerous mission.

Hibernation technology does not exist yet in my setting - at least not on a sufficient level to keep people frozen for over a century and then wake them up again.

A general problem in terms of plot holes arising from overpowered technology is: As Isaac Arthur pointed out, once you have the technology to wake up humans from centuries-long hibernation, you consequently also have the technology to make them immortal. At that point, generation ships are superfluous altogether; instead, hibernation ships are generally closer to Methusalem ships, where the crew simply lives forever, for one reason or another. Just like with magic in fantasy, it’s easy to make a sci-fi setting too powerful, by introducing too much advanced technology.

Passengers gets around this problem by having the hibernation pods fail - and thus, the similarity to a generation ship becomes much greater. As “waking up on a spaceship between the stars, where you can neither go back to Earth, nor will get to live long enough to see the arrival” is pretty much the same predicament, irrespective of whether you were kicked out of a hibernation pod on that ship, or whether you were born on it. The only difference is that hibernation passengers will usually still have personal memories from Earth - crew members born on generation ships will not.

Spoiler

At the very end of the trilogy, once the crew has landed on the target planet, but on the way there, all the built-in ethical problems with generation ships have been demonstrated - that’s when they pick up a message from the solar system (with the appropriate amount of time delay, 12.5 years both ways). They have just received the footage and reports that crew members sent back to Earth after the events of book 1 of 3. (Between book 1 and 2, almost two decades pass, as the perspectives of the next generation are introduced.)

Now, after having seen what happened under the rule of the commander back then, the people on Earth decide they will not build any further generation ships - no matter what. Instead, if they ever go visit other star systems again, it will have to be with hibernation ships, and/or Alcubierre warp drives.

Then, in the epilogue, 25 years later, the first hibernation ships arrive in the target system. But the society that already lives on the planet, the settlers from the generation ship, have developed a very different set of ethics than what the hibernating settlers personally know from Earth. The first settlers have build defense systems, weapons pointing into orbit, and will only allow the new settlers to join their colony if they accept the colony’s constitution.

Out of the five hibernation ships, four of them actually decide to settle elsewhere on the planet, establishing separate colonies, and therefore a pluralistic society on the planet - with different values competing against each other, to see who fares the best. The fifth hibernation ship however sends their communications officer down to the first colony, the one established by the generation ship, to engage in a conversation with them: Why have they adopted the values they hold, after this 125-year-long journey? Thus, the protagonists begin to tell the stranger the story, taking them all the way back to the very beginning.

Which kind of acts as a transition for me to follow-up the third book in the trilogy with the first prequel.

 

[Melbourne Guy]

I totally get what you mean. :) Indeed, I’ve seen a lot of people thrown off by The 100 as early as the first episode, precisely because it seems like it would mainly have “teenager appeal”.

I also persevered for a few seasons, @Strato Incendus, having suspended my disbelief enough to get through the silly setup, but eventually my interest waned as the plot holes and deus ex machina situations started to add up.

Then my story would be pretty close to Passengers, wouldn’t it?

Hopefully not, it's almost a trope in sci-fi, and Passengers was pretty awful, but without hibernation my idea is irrelevant.

With your spoiler, why would such a defensive / paranoid society with the weapons noted allow the new settlers to even get close to the planet, let alone land? Presumably, there's some failing of their armaments that allows that?

 

[Drakkith]

The easiest way to have a mid-story disaster without it coming across as an ass-pull is to foreshadow it well in advance. Think about it. These people are on a huge vessel designed to last for hundreds of years. There are probably millions of potential disasters on board this ship in the guise of aging gears, doors, cables, wiring, computers, engines, generators, etc etc etc. By far the most believable scenario that's also very easy to set up is "important bit fails because people are lazy". That is, the maintenance of this vessel has been given to people who will do almost nothing else for their entire lifetime. Extended periods of doing the same routine leads to boredom. And boredom leads to complacency.

Complacency leads to things going wrong.

What can go wrong on a huge scale? Oh so many things! Electrical explosions! Noxious fumes filling entire compartments! Rooms being vented into space! Reactors doing reactor things when they shouldn't be! Engines exploding! Radioactive fuel finding its way into the mess hall! Torpedo warheads detonating! Thermal coolant being too hot where it should be cold! Batteries arcing and detonating! Corrosive compounds leaking into the showers! Fires in storage room 17!

The list is endless!

Need mostly male crew to die? Seems easy enough if there's already a proportional difference between the numbers of men and women working as technicians, maintenance personnel, first responders, etc. A fire could wipe out dozens of people in seconds or minutes, and firefighting is typically a male dominated profession. And fires are one of those things that are almost always believable, whether they kill one person or one hundred people. They are wildly unpredictable and require very little details to be explained to the reader.

Seriously. It just takes a few lines:

"How many people?"
"A hundred and forty. Mostly from the fumes. A few from the flames."
"How did this happen?"
"Electrical short. Frayed insulation on cabling is what we're thinking. The spark ignited a poster on a the wall nearby, and then a stack of junk someone threw out into the hallway. Firefighters responded, but their equipment..."
"What?"
"Well, it's older than they are. Or were. Half didn't work, half of the rest worked just well enough to get them killed. Flames spread out of control along the cluttered hallway. A survivor said even the paint on the walls was on fire."

This kind of disaster is easy to foreshadow too. Just throw in a few quick lines or short scenes of people being complacent about routine maintenance or other such work. Believable and effective.

 

[Strato Incendus]

Thanks again for your suggestions!

With your spoiler, why would such a defensive / paranoid society with the weapons noted allow the new settlers to even get close to the planet, let alone land? Presumably, there's some failing of their armaments that allows that?

The meek shall inherit the Earth - or in this case, Earth 2.0. And the traditional translation of the “meek” was “those who have weapons but choose not to use them”.

I wouldn’t call them paranoid simply for wanting to have a method of defending themselves. They’ve never met anyone from Earth personally; they have no idea what will happen if they send the signal home that they’ve established the colony. It comes with similar worries as those some people have about signalling to potential aliens where Earth is.

Sure, the new settlers will still be human, but they might be raiders, or have a more colonialist mindset than the first settlers of the new planet themselves. Or they could simply feel entitled to everything the first settlers built up on the new planet - whereas the first settlers are aware that they’ve developed different values than the people on Earth by now.

Conversely, though, the main reason they find meaning in their mission is of course to provide a refuge to the people still on Earth. This of course only makes sense if propulsion technology does indeed advance drastically during the course of the plot (say, increasing travel speeds from 12.5% light speed to 77% light speed). This happens in form of the on-board development of a black-hole drive during part II, where the deflector lasers the ship has to shoot down debris are repurposed, and one of the empty spherical water / gas tanks serves as a container for the artificial black hole.

If travel speeds remain at around 10-12.5% light speed, all future settlers would still have to make it to the new planet via generation ships - which means the planet itself would not be a refuge for people on Earth, but only a home for people who wouldn’t have been born in the first place otherwise.

Thus, the first settlers still want others to come to the planet - they are aware they hardly need the entire planet for themselves. They just want to make sure that people who may not share their values don’t settle down next door to them, since that would most likely cause tribal warfare (as it exists pretty much non-stop in The 100) all over again. “If you don’t want to abide by our laws, go elsewhere” is easier to say when it means “elsewhere on the planet” than “elsewhere in space”. The new ships can land wherever they want, but they most likely won’t be equipped for another journey of one to several hundred years to make it to a different star system.

The easiest way to have a mid-story disaster without it coming across as an ass-pull is to foreshadow it well in advance.

Sure, that is true for anything I decide on. I had already implemented the foreshadowing for the “passing by too close to a flare star” idea (by announcing an encounter with Argelander’s Star) when we ultimately decided that this was too unlikely.

These people are on a huge vessel designed to last for hundreds of years. There are probably millions of potential disasters on board this ship in the guise of aging gears, doors, cables, wiring, computers, engines, generators, etc etc etc.

Yes, that’s a good thing in principle - lots of options to choose from for brainstorming (divergent thinking). However, in order to write the scene, I of course need to choose one specific disaster and then narrow things down to that particular event (convergent thinking). And then, having so many options, rather than one obvious disaster that would be most likely to happen, can lead to choice overload.

By far the most believable scenario that's also very easy to set up is "important bit fails because people are lazy". That is, the maintenance of this vessel has been given to people who will do almost nothing else for their entire lifetime. Extended periods of doing the same routine leads to boredom. And boredom leads to complacency.

I agree, I generally prefer these Ockham’s-razor explanations. Again, for the previous ideas of possible disasters, I had already implemented foreshadowing in form of a somewhat-negligent weapons officer (=in charge of monitoring the AI-based deflector system) who might overlook something. And the reason why he still has that job is that the people cannot recruit the best of the best from Earth (only for the initial crew), like for regular space missions; they can only pick from those born on the ship, and sometimes, they have to pick the least bad candidate available for a given job.

However, 1) it would be unrealistic to take that gamble on such a vital job, and 2) a negligent deflector-systems officer would again lead us down the path towards a collision of the ship with some space debris. Which, as established before, would probably destroy the ship entirely.

Of course, I could just as easily have a negligent engineer, who is then responsible for something else failing. The question here is: What fails? The reactor? The engines? Electricity, heating, air recycling? Which of these things failing would require the highest number of (physically strong) hands to repair quickly?

Need mostly male crew to die? Seems easy enough if there's already a proportional difference between the numbers of men and women working as technicians, maintenance personnel, first responders, etc.

Yes, highlighting these effects of self-selection is something I’m generally in favour of, since a lot of people these days seem to have a hard time wrapping their heads around why this occurs.

However, for this scene in particular, the military analogy only works if even unskilled people are sent on the mission, not just those who volunteered to work in those jobs (like engineers or security members, respectively). The thing about the military is that it usually needs large numbers of people, even for unskilled labour. Some tasks don’t require a lot of instructions or complex training; they just require a lot of hands to get done.

A fire could wipe out dozens of people in seconds or minutes, and firefighting is typically a male dominated profession. And fires are one of those things that are almost always believable, whether they kill one person or one hundred people. They are wildly unpredictable and require very little details to be explained to the reader.

In terms of determining the standard sizes for respective departments, since my ship has a crew of 1,500 people at max, I like to refer to the Pacific-Island nation of Niue, where a friend of my brother’s once went for one of his internships during medical studies. Their population is around 1,700 people.

I know from this friend of my brothers that Niue has, for example, three physicians (a gynaecologist, a surgeon, and an anaesthetist). If you need a different kind of specialist on the island, you either have to be flown to New Zealand - or, if it’s an emergency and you don’t make it there in time, you might just die.

Flying people to a different country is of course not an option on an autonomous generation ship. So they would probably have a little more redundancy than an island nation. Say, five doctors instead of three. And certain skills must be learned by all of them - including anaesthesia, including surgery, including delivery of children. If the only specialist for a given thing on board dies, the others must be able to chip in for them.

Yet, while redundancy works to explain some over-staffing in certain areas, my security force for example was initially way too big for a ship of this size. The Niue police force seems to have 12 people (assuming everyone who works there is on the photo I found). The fire brigade might have similar or even smaller numbers. Thus, the fire department on the generation ship would probably also be rather small for standard cases.

So we could just have a fire that’s so big it exceeds the ship’s capacities - or even better, several fires in lots of different places. More different places than there are individual trained firefighters on board, ideally. And since everyone on board can (and most likely will) be trained how to handle a fire extinguisher, a lot of people could be conscripted for that task.

In that case, the question would of course be: What singular thing on a spaceship can cause a bunch of fires in lots of different places?

In principle, the ship must have a lot of hydrogen on board - which by itself might not be that dangerous, but since there’s of course also a lot of oxygen for the crew to breathe, hydrogen leaks as a general rule could cause a lot of fires all over the ship.
That would only shift the question, though: What, in turn, could cause a bunch of hydrogen leaks at the same time in different places all around the ship?

This kind of disaster is easy to foreshadow too. Just throw in a few quick lines or short scenes of people being complacent about routine maintenance or other such work. Believable and effective.

Ideally, I’d like to frame this as a mistake that could have happened to anyone, or that even happened to several people at once - rather than e.g. chalking it up to one particular character’s incompetence.

Thinking of the Swiss-cheese model: Usually, there are several safeguards in place, where if one layer has a “hole” (the safeguard fails), there will be a countermeasure on the next level that still prevents the whole thing from escalating into a greater disaster. Only if the holes “overlap”, a “tunnel” can form, with several layers failing at once, or the safeguards not engaging properly.

The point is: I wouldn’t want to make one specific individual character guilty of such a big omission that a bunch of people end up dying. Real catastrophes are often triggered by an unfortunate chain of events, with the blame having to be shared among several people and institutions as a result.

Perhaps someone didn’t complete a routine check all the way to the end one night, because no errors had been found so far, and their kid was sick or had to be picked up from school for some other reason. Then they gave the task of finishing the monitoring of the routine check to their co-worker, and the co-worker agreed to do so, but was then distracted by someone else interrupting them or giving them a different, seemingly more important task on top, etc.

Sure, if the reader realizes that the plot needed a bunch of male characters to die at this point, this chain of unfortunate events may still be perceived as plot convenience. But it would still be realistic - stuff like this just happens - and what the characters do after that is just dealing with the natural consequences of that event. Of course, if that disaster hadn’t happened in the way it did, the plot would have gone down differently. But a story only presents one reality, the one that did end up happening.

 

[Drakkith]

In that case, the question would of course be: What singular thing on a spaceship can cause a bunch of fires in lots of different places?

The first thing that comes to mind is an electrical issue. Electrical cables are widespread and typically all run to a single or a handful of electrical sources.

People could also be the cause. Riots, protests, or Mrs. Smith's homemade candles exploding because they were made with tainted chemicals could all cause fires. Or maybe the 75th annual stove maintenance event goes wrong when a typo is encountered in the maintenance instructions. Just throwing out ideas.

The question here is: What fails? The reactor? The engines? Electricity, heating, air recycling? Which of these things failing would require the highest number of (physically strong) hands to repair quickly?

Well, you're on a spaceship. So probably not a lot of things require huge numbers of physically strong people to fix given that it's very easy to turn off gravity. You might have to specifically set up a scenario to force the issue. As in something like having the magnetic couplings on the reactor malfunction, requiring that the entire manifold be physically pulled back by hand, against the force of the magnetic field, to open it for repair. Or some other technobabble. Perhaps something requiring teams of 10 men to operate giant prybars or pulleys or something.

 

[Vanadium 50]

The first thing that comes to mind is an electrical issue.

Fires caused by a short circuit in the fire suppression system. As soon as you get one fire, you get lots of independent fires.

 

[Melbourne Guy]

I wouldn’t call them paranoid simply for wanting to have a method of defending themselves.

I've been thinking about this, @Strato Incendus, not the paranoia, but the weapons. Building a colony is hard enough, but having the resources to establish that and develop planet protecting defensive systems seems unlikely. They're going to be heads down trying to survive an inimical environment, what are the odds that they even worry about being attacked over light years, let alone bother to invest in defences?

 

[hmmm27]

So, you want to kill off most of the guys ? Why ?

Perhaps the "enhancement" pills half the male population subscribes to are faulty.

For that matter, maybe in the future of society, the 70'ish different genders are all enhanced by gene-surgery and dietary supplements to become more whatevers (which include the boring old cis choices).

Is everbody married or shacked up ? or are there spatially separated bachelor/spinster quarters. Or, separate banks of bachelor/spinster freeze-pods : easier to maintain, logistically.

Maybe a freeze-pods malfunction starts the process of waking everybody up ... the women are woken up first so they can do their hair and make all the space-sandwiches, thus they're out of the pods when the second malfunction hits.

Further along that route, maybe the passengers are all flat-earthers, who think that their sponsored emigration is to a newly discovered continent. The accident takes out a meeting of the Jebediahs club.

 

[Vanadium 50]

o, you want to kill off most of the guys ? Why ?

Issues. Someone has issues.

 

[Strato Incendus]

So, you want to kill off most of the guys ? Why ?

I don't "want" to do that, the plot requires it. To show at least two things:

1) If the shoe was on the other foot and the same number of female characters died instead, the mission would most likely be doomed to fail at this point.
2) Therefore, when fit hits the shan and a crisis occurs, it will always be the guys who get sent into the fray first.

One year ago, when I first came up with the rough sketch of the plot, that was still a somewhat hypothetical scenario. Now, we're seeing that script in action again in the real world.

For that matter, maybe in the future of society, the 70'ish different genders are all enhanced by gene-surgery and dietary supplements to become more whatevers (which include the boring old cis choices).

The original crew was comprised out of 250 heterosexual couples only (and they all signed a contract in which they agreed to have two children on the ship - no more, no less). Yes, the founder of Project Exodus caught some flak for that from the media, back in 2373 when the selections were held. But he's basically the Elon Musk of his century. He doesn't need to care.

Btw: He also faced lots of criticism for not allowing more androids on board. His argument was of course that he wanted people to have biological partners, not synthetic ones. Others meanwhile saw this as discriminating against "robosexuals" (people who have robots as partners). Some view robosexuals as merely objectophiles (like there is someone who is married to the Eiffel Tower). However, those with robots as partners of course see them as people, and therefore insist on being distinguished from objectophiles.

Then, in the first generation born on the ship, of course some crew members naturally turned out to be LGBT (statistically, 3.5% of the population, that's 17.5 of the 500 people that make up one generation). Or, given my above explanation, the full acronym in the 24th / 25th century is actually "LGBTQIAOR" .

Hence, the next captain developed a concept called a "procreative alliance", which ensured that everyone got to procreate, potentially independently from who they were married to: A 2 x 2 agreement, involving sperm donors and intra-uterine insemination or in-vitro fertilisation. (This of course presumes there were about equal numbers of gays and lesbians in Generation One.)

In Generation Five, there is a singular trans-male character, who still has a functional uterus - and is consequently expected to meet the same quota of children as all the cis women on board. For the same reason, this character isn't sent on the dangerous mission we are talking about in this thread. ;) As in, the commander doesn't allow it.

Is everbody married or shacked up ? or are there spatially separated bachelor/spinster quarters. Or, separate banks of bachelor/spinster freeze-pods : easier to maintain, logistically.

It's more about who's cohabitating (as that affects the planning of the quarters), i.e. common-law marriage. Though in the cases of procreative alliances, not even that is relevant, since the two biological parents will be members of two different couples.

People who don't find a partner can still donate their sperm or eggs - and then, the medical staff can decide how to put those to use (e.g. via surrogacy). Maintaining genetic diversity is paramount, given the comparatively small crew size.

But of course, the social pressure to contribute to the mission is so high that taking that walk to the doctor is considered rather "shameful" by many. This has led to some of the "less-in-demand people" getting together as a makeshift solution - a literal "marriage of convenience". On paper, this is voluntary - for the longest time, there used to be no "arranged marriages", or anything like that. In practice, the social pressure can of course still make it feel like that to the people involved.

It is only after the crew gets decimated by the disaster we're contemplating right now, that the commanding officers consider themselves "forced" to take more control of the process. At this point, partner-less people who are not too closely related (genetic tests have already been mandatory for all couples that found each other naturally) may simply be "paired up" with each other eventually.

And in turn, it is only through this type of overreach that the first rebel units start to form on board.

Maybe a freeze-pods malfunction starts the process of waking everybody up ... the women are woken up first so they can do their hair and make all the space-sandwiches, thus they're out of the pods when the second malfunction hits.

The Exodus is not a sleeper ship; there are no freeze pods to keep people in hibernation. As I've said previously, this would make the story more similar to Passengers. That story has already been told.

Further along that route, maybe the passengers are all flat-earthers, who think that their sponsored emigration is to a newly discovered continent. The accident takes out a meeting of the Jebediahs club.

Given that the ship has the entire internet on board, up to the year 2375, which is when the Exodus left Earth, it is not ruled out that some people pick up some whacky ideas from what they call "the catalogue". Some crew members of the later generations also rediscover their ancestors' culture and/or religion, even if their predecessors were atheists - or vice versa, younger crew members might question the belief systems that their Generation-Zero (great-)grandparents took aboard with them.

But overall, supreme levels of ignorance are very unlikely to ever affect the entire crew like that, given that they have all this information readily at their fingertips.

Issues. Someone has issues.

Yes - that would be the commander. Since she ultimately always places the success of the mission as a whole over the rights and well-being of the individual on board.

Building a colony is hard enough, but having the resources to establish that and develop planet protecting defensive systems seems unlikely.

Do you see the problem on the energy-supply side? Because we already seem to have a hard time imagining how far the mass application of nuclear fusion would exceed our energy needs. Now consider that, by the time the Exodus arrives, they've even succeeded at implementing (for a short time) the first functional black-hole drive.

They should still have the lasers that were used to create that black hole. And orbital lasers must already be a thing anyway, since those (either placed on the ground, in orbit, or on the moon) are required for projects like Breakthrough Starshot (hitting unmanned solar-sail probes with lasers to accelerate them to close to light speed).

Breakthrough Starshot is an important piece of backstory, since without such unmanned probes confirming the habitability of certain planets (Teegarden b being one of them), the huge investment of a generation ship would never have been made - since it would have been a big gamble whether the destination star is even a viable target or not.

Sure, perhaps the James-Webb telescope will be able to tell us soon what the atmosphere of Teegarden b is comprised of. But if you consider sending a manned ship there, that's still not a lot of information. Much like with Mars, you'd want unmanned probes there first, with rovers exploring the surface, before you'd ever consider having people go to that planet.