So memes, genes, and chain letters are a kind of thing, a message of some sort that may in the right host environment provoke a chain of events that yields more copies of that thing
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I like the analogy here, comparing a starship and a person's mental life, with memes beaming in and out and doing who knows what etc.
Honestly, treating a starship as a reproductive unit is incredibly profound, and the implications are rarely talked about. Not in the literal sense, like in Farscape or whatever, where living spacewhale starships reproduce. But in the mechanical/memetic sense. Meaning.. a starship (on the star trek or The Culture level) is a full unit, a full germ seed of its parent civilization. Contains all of its knowledge and instrumentation and capabilities. Which is actually why having the tech to support space colonies (even on a super primitive 'our first Mars colony' level, is incredibly subversive. (In that, just due to the distances involved, a colony is a self-sufficient civilizational unit, if not necessarily self-reproductive-capable).
I do wonder what the smallest self-sufficient/self-reproductive unit of OUR current civilization is. It seems to be the entire planet. (The First One to Orbit Wins game idea is part of this interest/investigation). Given some restructuring of power infrastructure, I bet it could be reduced to the USA level (maybe?). Where things get really interesting is if we ever got to a level where our civ is reproducible/holographic on a city, or a village level.
Or smaller than a village - starwisps, or seeding interplanetary clouds with suggestive amino acids! Egan has a story where two travellers meet casually both far from home, and the basis for one asking the other for help is that they're both descendents of species that used DNA.
There's some things that are well-explained by the interior of a starship being something like a simulated environment - holodecks, replicators, beaming, everyone is roughly human-shaped except possibly for a polite ancestry-marker on their forehead, people are often interested in sex with people from other species (memes are promiscuous).
Honestly, treating a starship as a reproductive unit is incredibly profound, and the implications are rarely talked about. Not in the literal sense, like in Farscape or whatever, where living spacewhale starships reproduce. But in the mechanical/memetic sense. Meaning.. a starship (on the star trek or The Culture level) is a full unit, a full germ seed of its parent civilization. Contains all of its knowledge and instrumentation and capabilities. Which is actually why having the tech to support space colonies (even on a super primitive 'our first Mars colony' level, is incredibly subversive. (In that, just due to the distances involved, a colony is a self-sufficient civilizational unit, if not necessarily self-reproductive-capable).
I do wonder what the smallest self-sufficient/self-reproductive unit of OUR current civilization is. It seems to be the entire planet. (The First One to Orbit Wins game idea is part of this interest/investigation). Given some restructuring of power infrastructure, I bet it could be reduced to the USA level (maybe?). Where things get really interesting is if we ever got to a level where our civ is reproducible/holographic on a city, or a village level.
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There's some things that are well-explained by the interior of a starship being something like a simulated environment - holodecks, replicators, beaming, everyone is roughly human-shaped except possibly for a polite ancestry-marker on their forehead, people are often interested in sex with people from other species (memes are promiscuous).
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