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ISDC

2013 International Space Development Conference 2013 May 23-27, 2013 Hyatt Regency La Jolla San Diego, CA ABSTRACT TITLE:

What Can Maori Culture Teach to a Future Starfaring Civilization?

The careful design of appropriate memetic components can maximize the fitness of cultural units in long term isolation. Keywords: Maori, Culture, Long Term Planning, Identity, Heritage, Robustness, Tolerance Author: David Orban CEO, Dotsub Advisor & Faculty, Singularity University david@davidorban.com 917-657-1928 http://www.davidorban.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Orban Abstract: The challenges of designing interstellar travel and colonization are manyfold. To the unknown unknowns of the engineering problems that we are going to face, certainly we have to add those represented by the conditions of long-term isolation under which space travelers will find themselves. Thousands of years ago during the period of the human colonization of the Pacific islands, another civilization found itself under similar evolutionary pressures, which shaved its culture. The islands would call New Zealand were some of the last to be colonized by the

Maori people, who then inhabited them for hundreds of years before the arrival of western explorers. The Maori faced immense challenges during the original colonization process, planning, executing, and succeeding in projects that were analogous in their proportional effort and scope to the ones that our future technological civilization will face in planning interstellar travel. Their culture, mythology, resilience, and the complex adaptations needed to preserve their cultural identity, form useful lessons that can be applied to the design of missions for the long-term human exploration of space. With input and interviews with a native Maori expert, this talk will analyze these lessons, and indicate design principles of memetic components, that maximize the preservation of cultural units under extreme conditions of variability. As the long-term evolution of humanity will impact rapidly our body shapes, senses and sensory experiences, goal sets and goal seeking algorithms, what are the invariants going to be? What is our duty today to create components in our planetary culture, which will preserve our humanity as humanity radically changes? Our empathic capacity to identify with our descendants, however far removed from us in time, will in turn shape if not even define their level of tolerance for cultural variations that might occur in their radius of influence.

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