Poll: A theoretical moral dilemma

[Soods]

Backstory: It's year 2375 and Earth is a few years away of becoming inhabitable. All the countries in the world have united to finish the space program, to build as many ships as possible to travel to a far away, habitable planet. Earths population has been run through some tests, and the ones with the best genetic traits get to habit the new planet.

Problem: There is a screaming shortage of fuel, and one ship must be left behind. The fleet consists of 20 ships that contain 100'000 civilians (and lots of supplies) per ship, there are also 2 military ships that contain 100'000 soldiers (and lots of supplies) per ship. Lastly, there is a ship that carries frozen test subjects of every species from Earth (lets say they started collecting them in year 2000). As the Über Prime Minister-General, it's up to you to decide which ship is left behind.

What would you do?

I would

Spoiler

Leave a civilian ship behind, soldiers can be civilians too, but it's harder for civilians to be soldiers. And as the most technologically advanced race of earth, I think it's up to us to safeguard the future of the other species too.

 

[Jamieson 90]

Why do we need a ship for the data and 1 person? wouldn't it reasonable to just put them on one of the other two ships?

 

[Jezzascmezza]

Let someone else decide.
I'm not a very good leader; never have been.

 

[rossatdi]

Assuming the military ship has also been tested out to include the best of the best, and assuming a gender mix on-board, the military ship would be at least as useful as the civillian ship but with additional skills and training.

The only counter argument I could predict is that those in the military have signed up to a lifestyle with a high risk of death for the protection of their people/nation/etc.

 

[Soods]

Why do we need a ship for the data and 1 person? wouldn't it reasonable to just put them on one of the other two ships?

DNA of one species would require unbelievably lot of room in a computer, and when you have the DNA of thousands of species, it's gonna take a lot of laptops.

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

Leave a military ship behind.

Civilians are the ones who are going to rebuild society.

The genetic info will allow for an eco system.

Military may or may not be necessary.

However, I do agree with a previous poster - why can't the genetic info be stored on one of the other ships? Digital info isn't exactly space consuming. Can't one of the military guys carry a portal hard drive?

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

Why do we need a ship for the data and 1 person? wouldn't it reasonable to just put them on one of the other two ships?

DNA of one species would require unbelievably lot of room in a computer, and when you have the DNA of thousands of species, it's gonna take a lot of laptops.

Um, no it's not. It's the year 2375. Considering how fast storage capacity is increasing, we could probably fit each species on the future version of a flash disk.

Now, if you're talking about test tubes in freezers, then maybe....

 

[repeating integers]

This is an interesting question I can't decide my answer to right away. I'll get back to you.

 

[Kordie]

I'd say there are a lot more factors at work here, and that dedicating ships to single uses is kinda silly, 23 ships with 2,300,000 personnel plus the data ships crew... I am assuming we have the tech to recreate species (clone) with the data or that is kinda useless to have, and we can drop it. If we can clone, we can lose 100,000 people easily and make new ones on a colony.

But putting everyone in one massive convoy and aiming to one planet sounds kinda risky to me (all our eggs in one basket). What if there is something wrong with that planet we couldnt forsee? Why not split into 4 convoys of 5 ships with military and civilians intermixed, and cut the data down to what we need, and not every last species that exists?

 

[Jakub324]

Leave the civilians. Yeah, the soldiers knew the risks when they signed up, but if the planet has indigenous hostile life, we'd need all the guns we could get.

 

[TheFrost]

I chose to leave the military ship behind, guessing that the civillian ship has about 50 - 50% males and females and the military ship has 90% males and 10% females (from the military standards of our time) humanity needs more females than males to repopulate

 

[Kenjitsuka]

Bye bye, useless civilians!
The Data ship is super important for all, we need to get food staples going on Planet Earth 2.0!

 

[Grospoliner]

Well if I was in charge, I would be ordering the ships to be built to exacting specifications that will sustain the human population for the duration of a sub-light trip. In other words, the ship would be large enough to house food growth facilities for all 100k passengers, cold sleep systems to keep them alive and or from aging, and automated systems to keep the ship in working order, along with human crew work rotations. I would also build space bound linear motor catapults to get the ships up to speed thereby reducing the need to consume additional fuel. Each ship would also be equipped with on board processing and fabrication plants so they can mine asteroids and process fuel.

We have the engineering sciences so that we can overcome our technical limitations, there's never just one answer.

 

[Soods]

Now, if you're talking about test tubes in freezers, then maybe....

That sounds better, I'm gonna edit it to the original post

 

[Mafoobula]

Random number generator. It's a little like the "let someone else decide" option, except I'll ultimately be the one to say "yes, let's do this."

 

[GiglameshSoulEater]

You mean uninhabitable, right?

Leave behind a civvie ship. Damn civvies.

 

[Thespian]

Damnit I knew I should have taken the job as Vice Uber-Prime Minister General.

Anyway, I would make a representative from the military and civilians pick a straw. Whoever gets the short one get's a ship that needs no fuel and is powered by a couple of thousand hamster balls.

Run, you short straw picking fools! Run for your survival!