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I am exploring the idea of humans leaving planet Earth and colonizing different planets. However, I would like the humans to remain "human". By "human" I mean that the different peoples still look mostly human (by today's standards) and could still have children with each other if they wanted to. I do not want the different human populations to diverge into different alien species.

So how does humanity prevent speciation? Speciation: the scientific concept that when populations are completely separated from one another (for example, humans living on different planets), the different populations will gradually evolve into different species.

What are some likely ways that a futuristic human civilization could prevent this from happening?

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    $\begingroup$ What's stopping them from enforcing a minimally-allowed genetic divergence standard shared and maintained via an ISW(Inter-stellar web)? $\endgroup$
    – Lemming
    Commented Sep 16, 2022 at 14:41
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    $\begingroup$ Why would you EVER want to preserve our current 'humanity'? Seems to me it is so deeply flawed, one would WANT to change it. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 16, 2022 at 14:43
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    $\begingroup$ @Lemming This occurred to me, but it seem that as humanity spread out more and more, this will become harder to enforce. Though some kind of genome standard seems like it will be a minimum requirement. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 16, 2022 at 15:05
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    $\begingroup$ The answers given traipse through eugenics, sex trafficking, cult behavior, the setting of Gattaca (film,1997) and a plot point in the Gundam anime series in service of your concern. Nevermind the fact that human speciation is almost inevitable provided we survive long enough, your planned efforts to prevent it essentially guarantee a violation of the rights of the inevitable 'non-human' human descendent just by giving the 'racial purity' people a talking point. They'll probably have a checklist and everything making it nice and legal. $\endgroup$
    – user8827
    Commented Sep 17, 2022 at 2:53
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    $\begingroup$ Speciation requires (a) significant amount of time (b) significant geographical isolation to occur; we're talking literally millennia of a specific human colony being completely isolated from the rest of humanity. Unless your scenario encompasses those specific plot elements, speciation is never going to be a concern. $\endgroup$
    – Ian Kemp
    Commented Sep 18, 2022 at 18:13

13 Answers 13

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To begin with, it can take quite a while for speciation to occur. Human populations in the Americas and Eurasia were separated for 10,000 years, but remained the same species. Depending on duration of the separation, there may be no issue.

For genetic diversity in a given star system, enough trade and travel would occur to allow populations to mix. Even with "weaker" slower than light torch drives and travel times of a month or two between populations, a trade network would be feasible. Just look at intercontinental travel during the age of sail.

Once you want genetic mixing across the light years separating star systems, you start running into some problems. With cheap and fast enough FTL travel, trade and migration could still occur. With more expensive or slow FTL travel, or even no-FTL, you are left with more intentional methods to ensure genetic mixing. If gene editing and interstellar communication are possible, then adjacent systems could transmit the genomes of local humans to each other. Then systems could use cloning or gene editing to introduce new genes into the population to make them more uniform with their neighbors.

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    $\begingroup$ If you have FTL this isn't a problem. If you don't have FTL this still isn't a problem. +1 $\endgroup$
    – Mazura
    Commented Sep 17, 2022 at 3:46
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    $\begingroup$ I like your idea of transmitting gene information via communication, and manually making an effort to stabilize the population. That way people don't actually have to mix, in order to "mix". It seems feasible even over great distances. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 17, 2022 at 13:04
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    $\begingroup$ I like this answer! It's even likely that frozen human sperm and ova would be trade goods to provide enough genetic diversity to a given colony. Without it, many might fail due to accumulated genetic problems. $\endgroup$
    – user53931
    Commented Sep 19, 2022 at 12:18
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    $\begingroup$ "Human populations in the Americas and Eurasia were separated for 10,000 years" - This is untrue. Humans have had boats for 10's of thousands of years. There was constant gene flow over Beringia during that entire period (as there is today by native peoples), and there were in fact at least 2 further migrations into NA from Asia. There certainly was a genetic bottleneck there, but they weren't cut of entirely. $\endgroup$
    – T.E.D.
    Commented Sep 19, 2022 at 13:30
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  1. The different colonies can keep a system where periodically adolescents or young adults of both sexes are sent on visiting trips to other colonies. During these visits cultural exchange, also in the form of physical intimacy, is tolerated or even better encouraged. The fruits of these encounters, which ensure that there is some genetic mixing between the colonies, might even be considered as members of higher status in the colonies.

  2. Same as above, but this time the trip is one way, with colonies exchanging young adults as a way to keep friendly relationships. The young adults will end up reproducing with the local, again ensuring that some genetic mixing is assured.

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    $\begingroup$ I think both points are good. Basically trying to keep the planets connected by travel. Do you have any thoughts on what could be done if this is scaled up. So for example between solar systems; where free travel may become expensive or otherwise difficult. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 16, 2022 at 15:14
  • $\begingroup$ I like both of these points as well. I would suggest possibly adding interplanetary anti-alien miscegenation laws to prevent humans from breeding with compatible indigenous alien races (will there be other alien races?) and maybe employing standardized radiation protection across the colonies to prevent rapid gene mutation from occurring in planets that have high radiation exposure. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 16, 2022 at 15:45
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    $\begingroup$ @TylerS.Loeper, travel doesn't need to be very frequent or very large -- Australia was almost totally cut off from the rest of the world for about 10,000 years, but the small number of Torres Strait Islanders landing on the coast from time to time was sufficient to prevent human speciation. $\endgroup$
    – Mark
    Commented Sep 16, 2022 at 23:32
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    $\begingroup$ This is literally just immigration with a dash of spring break. Yes, absolutely. Let's do that so hard that the eugenics and purity people cry. $\endgroup$
    – user8827
    Commented Sep 18, 2022 at 1:34
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    $\begingroup$ @server_unknown In a story that cares about biological realism, there are no extraterrestrials reproductively-compatible with humans. $\endgroup$
    – wizzwizz4
    Commented Sep 18, 2022 at 7:45
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It's easier to build habitats than to change environments:

Your humans can live almost anywhere they want. But modifying the environment of a whole world is really hard. There simply are no pseudo-Earths. So people put increasing effort into making habitats livable, comfortable, and familiar. They can modify everything, from pressure to gasses, and eventually develop the ability to manipulate gravity. So really, people in widely different worlds and colonies are living in almost identical conditions.

Eliminate Founder effect:

Building colonies is a massive undertaking. Several million colonists selected from a wide cross-section of humanity show up in prefabricated controlled environments. So the large and very diverse population is resistant to founder effects and genetic drift that might locally skew genetics. Colonies that have issues where the populations drop receive massive influxes of new resources and colonists to solve the problems.

Prevent variations from arising:

An increasing tendency for people with mutations to survive and reproduce with undesirable traits (Ideocracy syndrome) leads to neo-eugenics movements, especially amongst the elites who control colony selection. Everyone wants off poverty-stricken overpopulated Earth, and are willing to agree to screenings of potential offspring to assure mutations don't "damage" the human genome. This screening is habitual and universal on colony worlds. Not following it results in discrimination similar to that seen in Gattaca. People just accept the need to pre-screen offspring for defects, and genetic change grinds to a halt.

FTL reinforces a colonial model:

Faster than light travel makes movement almost instantaneous. New colonies are established to exploit local resources. Colonists typically live in a large, re-locatable orbital habitat. Planets are visited by FTL-communicating robots, allowing real-time virtual experience of the surfaces without the hazards of actually going there. When resources get used up, the whole habitat can be easily relocated to a new system.

But all specialized functions, like advanced medicine, education, human modification and manufacturing are going on on Earth or a few selected core planets. Specialization allows these systems to totally dominate trade. The colonists (and often the whole colonies) periodically visit these core worlds or are at least dependent on them and regularly receive visitors.

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  • $\begingroup$ Most FTL flavors are rarely portrayed as "instantaneous" for any interstellar distances. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 19, 2022 at 16:05
  • $\begingroup$ @MichaelRichardson If they were, humans wouldn't even need to be "in system" to operate equipment or experience the surface in real time. It's like TV - technically at the speed of light, but so fast the delay doesn't make a difference. Still, enough FTL is instantaneous that you can discuss it as a possibility. $\endgroup$
    – DWKraus
    Commented Sep 19, 2022 at 16:16
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Your concerns about speciation depend on your time-frame. My understanding of speciation is when descendants of a common ancestor can no longer produce viable offspring. For example a horse mated with a donkey produces a mule which is sterile. Their last common ancestor was four million years ago. Now at which point along that timeline speciation occurred I don't know but a single, permanent, species wide genetic change takes on average about one million years to complete. So at least that.

I would suggest that if your time-frame is less than one million years you don't need to worry about speciation.

However regional adaptive changes can take place in much less time. The eye folds common among Asian peoples, skin and eye color changes, regional height and build etc. all changed in time periods much less than one hundred thousand years. Many changes have taken place since the Neolithic Revolution about ten thousand years ago like the ability to digest wheat and milk. The blood cells of Tibetan people evolved to deal with a thinner atmosphere in only three thousand years which is about one hundred generations.

Humans diverged from our last common ancestor about six million years ago and we still all look pretty much the same and can interbreed without problems.

Given that evolution is driven by environmental change, it will also depend on what kind of environments your people live in. If they live in cities that are fundamentally similar then their environments won't actually be that different. You might introduce something like the tall, thin "Belters" from the Expanse series who have colonized an asteroid belt or deal with issues like gravity using technology.

So to answer your question I would suggest that if your time frame is less than one million years people will "[...] still look mostly human (by today's standards), and could still have children with each other if they wanted to."

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  • $\begingroup$ Mules are rarely fertile, but documented cases exist. $\endgroup$
    – jmoreno
    Commented Sep 18, 2022 at 14:06
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Back-crossing.

They're sufficiently advanced to create planetary colonies in many different star-systems, certainly over lightyears, possibly tens of lightyears or more - then they can freeze a few tissue samples.

Background:

Every time a child is born (more than 11,000 children are born every day in the US), the umbilicus is cut off and preserved. The great thing about the cord is that it contains cells which are as near as being totipotent as you can get. This means that cells cultured from them can be grown into any tissue type the human body normally has - such as testicles or ovaries. These organs can be grown in vitro, or inserted into a "volunteer" (with the appropriate compatibility or immune suppression drugs to prevent rejection). Sperm or eggs can then be used to inject this original genetic material into the genepool of the general population.

Any umbilical cord can be used again and again over many thousands, possibly millions, possibly more iterations to create testicular or ovary tissues. Ten thousand (or more) umbilicals can be held in-stock giving a massive variety of genetic variability to chose from. Mixed with the changing and evolving general population's DNA, this would give adaptive ability in terms of dealing with disease, and millions of years (or more) of genetic stability, preventing differential speciation. (You could even have the same umbilical material sent with each colony).

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Each colony carries a copy of a large and diverse sperm and ova bank, collected on Earth in the early stages of generation-ship space travel and frozen. The original function of this seed bank was to avoid genetic bottlenecks, especially when, early on, only relatively small crews could be found for one-way interstellar travel. Colonists are encouraged to use both sperm and ova from the bank; using their own genetic material plus one bank donor is frowned upon, although tolerated, but entirely natural conception is taboo, and children born from two colonist parents are pretty much assumed to be genetic dead-ends. Note that this is not really scientifically accurate, but the fear of inbreeding is such that it has created a strong cultural opposition to natural reproduction.

The side effect is that all colonies draw from the same, static genetic pool; there is basically no evolution, because any selective pressures on the colonists do not apply to the gametes, which are selected at random from the genetic bank. The only human population still evolving is that on Earth, and perhaps some stranded colonies that have lost their seed bank due to accidents or misuse. All babies born from a seed bank colony are just as related to their "birth siblings" (carried by the same mother) as to any random baby born in another colony.

A frozen seed bank is entirely possible given current technology (we've frozen gametes and used them for fertilisation for decades); with additional near-future tech, you could have synthetic gametes, where DNA assembled according to a recorded sequence is introduced into harvested ova and sperm. This would address the perhaps obvious concern about running out of gametes in the cryobank (I don't know what timescales you're thinking of). Once digitised, the sequences could be shared across colonies, edited to remove known deleterious mutations, and even potentially "enhanced" with genetic engineering.

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Gene dictionaries to stabilize the genome.

The English language, once far more in flux, has stabilized immensely because there are now online dictionaries helping everyone spell things properly and making sure everyone has the right genome.

They have the same. At birth, almost everyone is given a gene treatment that eliminates common genetic diseases, improves health and intelligence somewhat, and ensures that speciation doesn't happen.

This is needed to interface with a lot of common technology. It's designed for human normal, and if you deviate too much, it won't work with you. As such, the vast majority of people use this genome stabilization, rather than try to modify the technology to make it work for a new genome.

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  • $\begingroup$ I was thinking the mutation repair mechanism could be engineered in. Germ cells do not mutate. Meiotic shuffling stlll allowed but nothing new. $\endgroup$
    – Willk
    Commented Sep 17, 2022 at 17:43
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Just like European Union does today with Socrates/Erasmus programs that ensure students from different countries enjoy sexual intercourse between national groups. Just provide some incentive (i.e. housing in a foreign country) and people will move.

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Big populations

If you colonize a world with a hundred people, any genetic mutation on one of those hundred people is likely to be spread to a big portion of the future population of that world.

If you put one hundred million people, any individual possible genetic mutation would be more thinly spread (although there will be more different mutations).

Lack of environmental pressure

Mutations cause change, but it is environmental pressure that spread it. If you have a hot world where people who cannot stand the heat die young/are less atractive as partners, those mutations favoring heat resistence will thrive.

But in a modern setting, where people live in terraformed planets closely resembling Earth, and mostly in the interior of their cozy dwellings, there would be not many pressures in favor of most of the mutations, so they will not be considerably spread.

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  • $\begingroup$ We still have environmental pressures in society - they're just not the same things we used to have. If having straight teeth makes it easier to get a good-paying job, or to find a mate, there's evolutionary pressure for straight teeth. Orthodontists can straighten them, but that takes money. Anyone capable of dealing with minor leaks in their space suit / habitat has evolutionary benefits in frontier towns / asteroid-mining operations, etc. If everyone lives in tightly-controlled habitats, expect mutations which save resources by ditching the ability to deal with environmental stress. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 19, 2022 at 17:09
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The technology required to do interstellar colonization and terraform planets (or build stable habitats in hostile systems) is quite advanced.

Far before we reach that level of technology, we will have highly effective gene editing, cloning and artificial reproduction.

For many, many 1000s if not 100,000s of years as the planet is terraformed, artificial environments and technology will be required to maintain a livable environment for humans (or, any life that is similar to complex earth life). And shipping physical humans over interstellar distances is a lot more expensive than just printing them out at the other end.

So your colonies will descend from printed, gene tailored humans, and probably the later generation humans living there will almost all be printed and gene tailored; the failure rate of traditional human reproduction is quite high, we only don't consider it a horror show because we don't have a practical alternative.

Keeping the ability to reproduce naturally might be something humans do, culturally. But the practical use of it when you live in a spin-gravity asteroid using fusion power and oort cloud ice miners to keep your civilization alive isn't all that high.

Two people who want to have children (or more) would do a gene-mixing or gene-writing (depending on their preferences) and get a new baby printed out more times than not. It is true there would be some who do "natural" childbirth (with varying degrees -- I mean, to these people, letting germ line naturally mix might be slightly granola, but very very few people would be so far as to grow a fetus within a human body; or vice versa, where almost everyone has a baby via pregnancy, but nobody does natural germ line mixing), and maybe they'd (culturally) keep this natural childbirth reverse compatible with traditional human genetics.

To avoid this problem, the issue of gene editing would have to become non-tractable; ie, changes beyond the superficial level cannot be done without a very high risk of the resulting embryo being non-viable.

If, culturally, genetic technology led to the idea of "making an experimental embryo" to be abhorrent, then gene tailored babies will just be remixes of existing human genes, and contain almost nothing new. You'd repair "damage", you wouldn't experiment with other possibilities, because most experiments would result in a dead embryo.

In this regime, evolution would mostly freeze. There might be "natural birth" communities that would continue to have babies that aren't tailored, but said communities would be akin to people today who choose to live without electricity. Over time, they'd shrink, or cross-breed with the rest of the community, where almost any mutations produced would get filtered out by genetic cleanup in the next generation.

So, the inability to predict the result of novel mutations, together with the unwillingness to create non-viable human babies whose life is full of suffering, could result in genetic stagnation. The people ion this scenario wouldn't breed naturally, because that is dangerous and error prone (with small minorities being an exception), resulting in each generation being a genetic remix of the baseline set of "known good" genes.

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Most of the existing answers address only drift between subpopulations, not between a future population and the current one, as OP requested.

In addition, any answer which depends on cultural / legal / political institutions is going to be inadequate to the time scales involved: The Neanderthals died out around 40k years ago and first emerged around 400k years ago, yet were still the same species as us. The earliest surviving religious traditions date to around 35k years ago, with actual written documents being much younger - and little things like "laws" and "countries" being far younger still. Cultural and environmental differences between settlements will eventually cause some to cut voluntary ties with the rest of humanity. Cultural and environmental differences between current and future human societies will eventually cause genetic variations to arise.

In addition, technology is progressing to the point where deliberate genetic manipulation is consciously implemented for non-human species, and under serious consideration for humans in special cases. Although not yet common practice for healthy humans, it will not be long (on a speciation time scale) before someone, somewhere seriously pursues making baseline humans stronger, faster, smarter and healthier. That seems likely to yield speciation eventually.

If you want to prevent speciation, you need to think on time scales of at least a few hundred thousand years. You need to abandon constraints which depend on mutable things like religion, economics, law, culture and morality. Ensuring that different populations mix with each other will be necessary but not sufficient.

In short, I see two options, neither of which is defensible from an ethical standpoint, but ... amoral apocalypses are a thing:

  1. Build an automated system which keeps human populations and genetic drift in check. It tracks every person from birth to grave, samples genetic material at birth (or at least before adolescence) to confirm parentage and monitor mutations. Anyone who diverges outside the range that's considered "normal" is murdered before they are old enough to produce offspring. Children whose genetic profiles don't match those of the assumed parents are taken as evidence that someone has found a way to subvert the system. As a result, their appearance triggers a heavy-handed investigation likely to result in the deaths of themselves, their actual parents, their previously-assumed parents, guardians, and any other likely collaborators. The machines running this system also have significant military might and a monopoly on all technology capable of interstellar flight (whether FTL or otherwise). Again, those seeking to escape from the machines' control face lethal consequences. The machines have their own error-checking mechanisms, large databases describing the allowed rage of "human" variability, and complete control of any process that might lead to a human population breaking away from the bulk or from their control.
  2. This option is easier to describe, but only slightly more drastic: Kill all the humans. This will be hard to do on an interstellar scale, but you could do it with a machine authority which works covertly and on longer time scales than the first option. To start, it mainly tracks movement of entire human populations: Which colony ships are deployed? Where are they headed? It then builds a self-replicating automated army complete with nukes, von Neumann and Berserker probes, and a secret Doomsday clock. When the clock strikes midnight, all the probes trigger simultaneously and nuke every human settlement. Leave a few monitors in each known system (and keep replicating them for a while to check systems near those) so you can find and kill anyone who survived the initial strike. No humans implies no speciation...

Very dark, but... effective.

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It seems that there are three main contributors to speciation: separation, small gene pools and lots of time. Environmental pressures factor as well, since it's the environment that historically provided the main selection pressure, but humans have been subborning that for centuries now. Small gene pools are readily resolved by having large colony complements - hundreds of thousands at least, preferably millions. You're clearly wanting this to last, so we're not going to get around the time factor. That leaves separation as the best point of attack.

The first solution that springs to mind is cross-polination. If there is enough interbreeding between colonies then any deviation from baseline human would eventually spread through the entire species, evolving the species as a whole rather than branching into incompatible sub-species. A constant flow of emigration between wide-flung colonies may be costly, but the alternative is a little terrifying: war between insular worlds, each of which believes themselves to be the one true human race and all others are subhuman animals.

Yeah, bit dark there. But common enough in SF to be a trope we can leverage.

For this to last though, it needs to be deeply embedded. Not just legally, not merely logically established plans, this needs to be so deeply embedded in human society and morality that it is never questioned. You're going to have to program your colonial societies to desire miscegenation (which is a scary word, usually perjorative, but entirely applicable here) at a deep level. Insularity and racial pride must be crushed ruthlessly, and children will have to be indoctrinated towards your cultural norm.

Yeah, lots of scary words in that paragraph. Because that's what you're going to need to make this work across deep time. But your goal is pure, so the methods don't matter... right? Anything goes as long as your goals are righteous.

So let's start with inter-system colonial law. Every colony is required to accept a certain number of unmarried, fertile immigrants of mixed genders each year (or whatever time period fits your FTL system best), and to supply an equivalent number of suitable emigrants. Failure to do so will be met with varying degrees of censure from trade embargoes all the way up to eventual dissolution of the colony and redistribution of the colonists to other worlds. Worlds that resist will be cleared of all human life one way or another, and may be restarted with a fresh stock of willing colonists drawn from a variety of other worlds.

The reasons behind these laws are of course well publicised, so that we know that it's our duty to ensure the health of Humanity's future. This is where it starts to become a moral imperative, a duty to our descendants, to the trillions of lives yet to be born. This gives us licence to do some things that might be considered a little... worrying to some. As long as we're doing it for the "right" reasons though we are clear in our conscience.

Having established a moral imperative, we can proceed - clear of conscience - to indoctrination. All news media outlets will be encouraged (by threat of legal censure if necessary) to spin their reporting subtly in the direction of xenophilia. Insular groups are to be vilified, immigrants and mixed groups are to be portrayed as favorably as possible. Works of fiction will be lauded highest when portraying insular groups as ugly, villainous social cancers and 'xenos' as desirable heroes and positive influences. When anyone espouses any form of exclusion they should be destroyed thoroughly in the media, and we'll allow any lies to be told about them if it serves this purpose. Meanwhile we'll encourage active suppression of negative reporting or portrayal of xenos as it could harm our lofty goal of galactic integration. We're not monsters of course, we're not going to make it illegal to marry people from your own colony or racial group, but by normalizing mixing on all media we can at least make it mildly distasteful. If we get this part right we can make it eminently desirable to marry outside your colonial group.

And finally, let's address children. They're not that difficult to indoctrinate with the right methods, and they'll carry that indoctrination into their adult lives. It starts easy, making minor changes to stories and myths to normalize xenophilia and demonize insularity. Rewrite the children's stories of monsters and princesses and all that tripe. Princesses (and princes) are always from exotic worlds, monsters and evil antagonists come from terrible, insular coloniss. Children's visual programming should be gradually filled with heroic xenos, evil insulars, etc. The bad guys are always from some colony that cut contact with the rest of the galaxy, and the good guys are teams made up of the best representatives of multiple worlds. Young adult programming will have endless examples of troubled same-world relationships, while the only perfect relationships will be between people from different colonies.

We don't even have to be particularly gentle with it. Anyone who objects is nominating themselves to be the bad guy in our society, and can be used as object lessons in why you don't fight the narrative.


Yeah, I'm a terrible person. But really, how does one program a society otherwise? If you let people go their own way they might not do what you want them to do. Social programming is the only way you're going to get this to work in the long term, and it's the long term you're really worried about.

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  • $\begingroup$ Do you know how much interchange we need? Could we get away with sending off orphans? Would minimise felt impact on the general population, orphans are always easy targets. $\endgroup$
    – lidar
    Commented Sep 19, 2022 at 0:55
  • $\begingroup$ @lidar Wouldn't work long term, you need 'new blood' at all levels of society, not just the least able to look out for themselves. Otherwise you'd potentially end up (over deep enough time) with speciation between classes on the same planet. Class divisions aren't necessarily inevitable, but they seem quite likely. $\endgroup$
    – Corey
    Commented Sep 19, 2022 at 1:56
  • $\begingroup$ @lidar As to how much... it depends on the population and mutation rates, so may differ between planets. I suspect that it'd be on the order of 1:10000 or so per generation, more if there's significant stratification of the local society. $\endgroup$
    – Corey
    Commented Sep 19, 2022 at 1:58
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This is a plot line in Dan Simmons' Hyperion.

Humanity has become very good at terraforming, so humans only inhabit worlds that are very similar to Earth, so no speciation occurs. For counterbalance, there's a breakaway group of humans that thinks speciation is a good idea and is pushing evolution in new directions.

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