On a different spectrum, institutions like the Army are not growth-focused in a different way. Individuals are focused on their own growth, but the “up-or-out” structure is designed to work with a limited pyramidal structure that does not grow. (By contrast, the assumption at a tech startup is that everyone will grow in seniority as the institution grows, that there is no competition over promotion slots, or that individuals are often promoted even before they are ready.). The up-or-out structure obviously can’t scale to an entire society, but perhaps there are ways to mix and match institutions that do.

This isn’t a direct reply to the Le Guin suggestion, but I was struck at this sustainability event that David Orr was totally hostile to robots and automation. Certainly as we’re going now it’s terrible in that global societies seem completely unwilling to provide any structures for genuine human flourishing in the event of the widespread automation of work, but I could imagine a “dynamic steady state” that rested on automation and robotics, where most human endeavor was concentrated narrowly in those domains distinctive to our minds or our specific bodily capabilities and much of our consumption was similarly narrowly focused on cultural goods that consumed relatively few material resources. There’s at least some SF work that operates in that imaginative space.

Is this really true? It may be a “normal expectation,” but does the system really operate in this way? Your account of internal competition resembles a tragedy-of-the-commons model, which assumes independent, non-communicating actors, whereas at an institution the size of Swarthmore, there are customs and common-good identities that act as internal brakes to the growth-at-all-costs dynamics. Talk, for instance, to your admissions and enrollment-management staff: I doubt they’re operating on an continual growth model. I’ll bet they have optimizing parameters that include some sense of how scale matters to the quality of a Swarthmore education. Likewise, I’d be surprised if you didn’t have some sense of good class size, when it’s too big or too small. Those are often tacit, practice-based beliefs that resist precise modelling: or, to give them another name, values. It is–or should be–axiomatic that sustainability requires continuing negotiation among potentially conflicting values, and thus structures and practices that allow those values to surface. Those structures can be designed to be more or less democratic.

I can’t help but think, as something of an outsider to this topic, that it would be nice to see an example of the biological system you are talking about. Can you give an example of how they function? Not asking you to say that such a system is a direct comparison to or a direct replacement for our current institutions, I would just like an example to flush some things out.

We have (most) of the technology to think about a mission. The structure of society and life is a bigger barrier. What does your community look like on a 3 generation trip to another solar system? Generation 1 volunteered, the next 2 were born into it…