A Game of Consequences

Lets think about this on an even smaller scale: Individual abusive relationships. Given the degree of individual suffering they inflict and the degree of societal harm and crime caused when children grow up in an abusive environment, I strongly suspect that it is worth investing significant resources. Also, it may be that the same principles of justice and conflict resolution that apply to this problem can then be scaled up to larger problems.

On Earth, when we see someone in an abusive relationship, our solution is to provide them with resources that allow them to exit the situation. As this essay explains, that is not an option in space. How then can we prevent long-running abusive relationships (romantic or otherwise) in space?

Some lines of thought:

0) More clear-cut definitions. One problem in conversations around verbal/emotional abuse is that it is not very well-defined. You can easily find lists of "signs that a relationship might be abusive", but it is hard to have a discussion around the trade-offs to make in preventing a phenomenon when not everybody can agree on when something is actually an instance of that phenomenon.

1) Filtering: It may be that the most effective thing we can do is just to screen for people who have habits of abusive behavior. Given that both false-positives and false-negatives are costly, what are some good classifiers with a low error rate?

2) A conception of abuse-adjacent (or reckless) phenomena: Drunk driving does not directly kill or injure anyone. However, it has such a high risk of causing traumatic injury that the law punishes people for it nonetheless. Are there habits that have such a high probability of developing into abuse that we should prohibit them under some category of interpersonal recklessness?

3) Better tools for detecting and changing situation-triggered habits: A person's habits can be dramatically different in different physical settings and in different dyads of people. This makes doing #1 before a mission more difficult. It also means that if a crew notices #2 (and using #0, convinces the person it is a problem), the person can work on training different habits in one simulated situation and then copying those over to real life.

The way it reads, the consequences of failure are so high that we're going to make it a pressure-cooker kind of situation which will inevitably cause the very outcomes that their whole governance model is based on avoiding.

The baseline will likely be "everything is great, be happy!" and expressing dissatisfaction will be deviation from baseline. Deviation from baseline can't be tolerated because Bad Things Can Happen (tm) so a few people who express dissatisfaction outwardly will be locked up, shipped home, etc. People will quickly learn to shut it if they don't like their situation and viola we've got a resentment escalating apparatus assembled. What happens next? Eventually someone can't stand it anymore and goes fully off the reservation with dire consequences.

Pretending that you can effectively manage your way out of the unpredictable nature of human beings when they don't have any outlet is tremendously naive or arrogant, or perhaps both.

The idea that we can just design something that'll last for more than ~50 years without falling apart spectacularly only works on Earth where the people who really are sick of $X have the choice to opt out by moving jurisdictions.

Seasteading -- as crazy libertarian as it is -- is probably the only thing that provides hope of finding a truly stable governance mechanism. It's like those crazy libertarians say, we need tons and tons of tries to get governance right without needing a revolution every time we make a mistake.

There is critical delay of communications beyond which an empire becomes ungovernable. If the Atlantic was narrower Her Majesty would rightfully rule the whole of North America. If it was wider - we may not have been able to settle there.

And history gives us pretty good idea what kind of ping political governance tolerates.

I think it's a bit naive to assume there will be self sufficient space colonies with humans that are just like us, 300 years from now. Imagine a person 300 years ago speculating about the present.

Assuming we somehow survive 300 years, technology will be so advanced. We are just a few years away from genetically engineered humans as it is. And people argue about whether AI is 20 years away or 100, but we Will certainly have it by 300.

We've known for quite a while that "Mars ain't the kind of place to raise a kid ..."