Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to An easy solution.

"Historical baggage" for cultural evolution is a lot like "genetic baggage" for biological evolution
TB — (archived)

You never know when you will need something from off-the-shelf to meet a completely different situation. It's a bad idea for a culture to forget anything that has worked in the past, and especially bad to forget things that didn't work under some circumstances, or ALL circumstances, and why.

"By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the Earth." Wells was talking about evolving resistance to the Earth's environment, but the same is true for whatever wisdom we have gained since we came out of the caves.

Incidentally, I can just imagine the process by which the new set of values and cultural ideals would be selected.

It's ironic that so many colonists in human history have not been a selected elite. In fact, almost none were. By definition, those people who are a society's ideals tend to occupy a high and comfortable position in such a society, and are unwilling to be pried loose from it.

Most colonists turned out to be people who were misfits in their own societies--the exact opposite of that society's ideals.

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