A stayship is a spaceship without engines.
Hi! Mesh society, Irreni World Scale, relies on stayships. A stayship can simply be thought out as a spaceship without engines but is more than that.
Stayship Requirements
- Small fixed size population: 30.
- One years supply of survival needs such as food, water, and electricity.
- Stayship computer or AI.
- Only sovereign with bodily autonomy control such as imprisonment.
- Fifty-percent dependent capacity such as elderly, children, and mentally or physically disabled.
- Manufacturing such as food, clothing, and high tech assembly.
- Professional expertise in such areas as law, computers, plumbing, medicine, dentistry, or farming.
A stayship is similar to a spaceship in its survival capacity. A spaceship needs to survive long periods of time in space without any support. A stayship needs to survive a year without any support.
A stayship is a core design in support of the Irreni World Scale prime directive: Life Goes On. In mesh society life goes on means indefinitely. Indefinitely means until the end of this Universe and if possible, stopping the end of the Universe. A stayship supports this by building resilience into human society that we lack today.
Stayships provide resilience by optimizing for survival. Imagine that mesh society was already the only society on Earth today. A population of eight-billion would require on the order of three-hundred million stayships. Now, further imagine a large asteroid were to hit the Earth imagining today’s hierarchy society versus a mesh society. Mesh society would result in the most people surviving in both the immediate impact and the long term fallout: fires, floods and years long ash cover. Hierarchy is so fragile that just eliminating the government of a few people would greatly reduce survival capability.
However, stayships provide more than just asteroid collision survival. They also provide new opportunities to occupy spaces on Earth currently unoccupied. For example, the majority of Earth surface this is covered in water. We could build stayships there. We could build stayships on the highest mountain peaks. We could build stayships deep underground.
Stayships underground and in the ocean have obvious reasons to do so. Why mountain peaks? The reason we might want to build stayships on the highest peaks is to experiment with stayships in hostile low-oxygen and increased radiation environments.
Seven-tenths of the Earth’s surface is ocean means a huge stayship opportunity. Imagine stayships built as a ship-in-a-ship design where the inner ship has inertial dampeners such as being immersed in vegetable oil. No rocking-and-rolling felt most of the time. Simple motors would provide worst weather avoidance. Ocean ground tethers could provide ports.
Stayships provide Life Goes On. When we get around to space travel the spaceship will internally be divided into stayships to the extent possible. Single astronauts are not recruited, instead stayships are recruited. They’d be trained the same as astronauts are today for working in space.
Stayships being all of the same size provide resilience by allowing stayship crews to easily rotate. Imagine a life where you spent five-year terms on a different stayship. One term could be underground. One term could on the ocean. One term could be on the equator and another at one of the poles. Rotating crews is a requirement for mesh society. Humans will have the most resilience in surviving by having the most experience in surviving under all kinds of conditions. This requires that all MGOs or mesh nodes constantly rotate on an ongoing basis.
This requirement for rotating stayships answers the question hierarchy people have today about private property. Private property is antithetical to the survival of our species. Rotating crews of MGOs between three-hundred million stayships is optimal. There is no private property, just stayships. Note that the five years was only used as an example not the only term time.
Let’s talk holodecks like on Star Trek. A holodeck is a three dimensional virtual reality. Stayship computers will have such things as well. The initial implementation is simply a room where all the walls are computer screens. These holodecks provide stable environments throughout life. The initial implementations will be crude relative to what will be available in the future. Holodeck improvements with things like environment aromas, wind, etc. will continue to provide permanence that humans need and crave today.
However, over thousands of years humans will evolve to a constantly rotating stayship environment. This is desired. We want further increases in human resilience to survive the worst natural disasters.
The mesh node, the MGO, the micro-governing organization of fixed size thirty people, do not own a stayship then. They are stewards of the stayship for the term they spend there.