The Generation Ship - lessons for your library from Star Trek

A Generation Ship is a spaceship that will take many years to reach its destination (a not unreasonable idea, considering the vast distances between star systems, and the enormous energy needed to accelerate a ship to even a small fraction of the speed of light).  Because of the vast span of time that its voyage takes, entire generations of humanity grow, live, and die on the ship before it reaches its destination.

It is therefore more a means of transmitting a culture, than of transporting individual people; it is in some sense a memetic container.

The problem with generation ships, as explored in many science fiction stories, is that it is hard to retain cultural coherence over long spans of time.  If you launch the ship from Canada in 2009, the people who arrive at New Canada 1000 years later are going to be genetically very similar to those who left (evolution doesn't operate strongly over 1000 year time spans, particularly in a controlled environment) but their culture may have drifted as far from Canada 2009, as Canada is different from Europe 1009.

One of the common methods a generation ship uses to enforce cultural non-evolution is to use Authority.  This may take various forms: a computer which can last the lifespan of the ship may be the Authority whom all must obey, enforcing cultural norms century after century; the society itself may be reshaped into an authoritarian mode so as to remain conservative and stable across human lifespans; or in some cases, the original Creators are kept in suspended animation, awakening briefly every generation to realign the society back to its original design.

A generation ship is thus often a conservative cultural institution, transmitting knowledge across vast spans of time.  That is, basically a library.

Of course, one of the other issues with a generation ship is that after being in space for so long, the society onboard begins to forget their ultimate goal, and may forget that they're on a space ship at all (often helped by the fact that in order to be sustainable across centuries, a generation ship is often a world ship - a vast space large enough to hold an entire functioning ecosystem - a ship so big that most inhabitants may never see its boundaries).  In short, on a generation ship they begin to believe that the ship is the world.

This is what happened to the ship, the "world" of Yonada, a generation ship built by a people called the Fabrini, in a Star Trek (the original series) episode.

The ship has a rather complex design, a central sphere beneath the surface of which is an underground city, corridors and rooms filled with life, with what appears to be a somewhat barren and uninhabited surface above (it seems probable that travel to this surface is restricted).  The surface appears to have mountains and a sky above.  What the inhabitants don't know (in fact are forbidden to know) is that the "sky" is actually the inner surface of a second sphere, an asteroid shell that surrounds them (a similar idea of a dome showing a false sky is seen in The Truman Show).  They are a world within a world.

This leads to a striking line, a bit of classic SF, in which an old man describes how he disobeyed the authoritarian rules of the society, and once climbed a mountain: "for the world is hollow, and I have touched the sky".

The system that the Fabrini have chosen is one with religious overtones (religion is a good vehicle for preserving memes across generations), with an all-knowing computer, The Oracle, which monitors the proper behavior of the inhabitants, through a thought-detecting device implanted in every citizen.  While this device can impose punishment for incorrect thoughts, it appears that over time it has become mostly social sanction that retains conservatively the ideas of the society.

In the Oracle's room there is a Book, known only to the woman who is the head of the society.  It is not permitted to be opened until the ship has reached its destination.  Until then it is an object of worship for her.

So, is your library a generation ship?

Do you worship the container of the book, not its contents?

Do you enforce the rules handed down, generation after generation?

Have you lost sight of your destination, forgetting even the box you're in, unable any longer to see the walls that surround you?  Have you forgotten the goal of the library is sharing knowledge?

Have you become simply an engine for blindly replicating your existing processes, without ever questioning what the original purpose of those processes was?

Are you now actually actively preventing the sharing of knowledge, because your legacy processes have become more important than your original goal?

Do you believe the library way is the right way, that all must be trained in the proper techniques, that when people do not follow the correct approach they are wrong, they don't understand.  Do you believe that the library is enduring, unchanging, always good, always correct, it is others who must adapt themselves to the library?

Do you bow to authority of the ages, instead of reinventing yourself for today?

When someone tries to bring new ideas, when outsiders arrive, how are they treated?

Just some thoughts about libraries, from Star Trek.

Previously:

December 16, 2008  guilds in a time of rapid change

Comments

[Frank Norman]

That's a very interesting comparison. I think there are libraries (that provide service) and there are libraries (that preserve material). Not all libraries are alike; some have more than one face or character.

As a service provider, my focus is on the user and I have to prioritise their needs over most other considerations. I do need to consider the needs of future users, but I am finding that my forward vision in that regard is shrinking. I am funded to serve current science. I am not funded to preserve current science for the next 50-100 years. That is just the nature of my institution.

For preservation I look to the major University research libraries, specialist libraries and national libraries. They can give that 50-year or 100-year promise. I cannot even guarantee that my own library will be around in 10 years' time let alone 50 years' time, so what business do I have in trying to preserve materials?

Writing about digital preservation, Chris Rusbridge said "Who has the resources to make a hundred-year digital preservation promise?" http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/rusbridge/ He suggested that it is only major research libraries that can do this.

For the rest of, we need to focus on service, users, flexibility and change.