Lets think about this on an even smaller scale: Individual abusive relationships. Given the degree of individual suffering they inflict and the degree of societ

Lets think about this on an even smaller scale: Individual abusive relationships. Given the degree of individual suffering they inflict and the degree of societal harm and crime caused when children grow up in an abusive environment, I strongly suspect that it is worth investing significant resources. Also, it may be that the same principles of justice and conflict resolution that apply to this problem can then be scaled up to larger problems. On Earth, when we see someone in an abusive relationship, our solution is to provide them with resources that allow them to exit the situation. As this essay explains, that is not an option in space. How then can we prevent long-running abusive relationships (romantic or otherwise) in space? Some lines of thought: 0) More clear-cut definitions. One problem in conversations around verbal/emotional abuse is that it is not very well-defined. You can easily find lists of "signs that a relationship might be abusive", but it is hard to have a discussion around the trade-offs to make in preventing a phenomenon when not everybody can agree on when something is actually an instance of that phenomenon. 1) Filtering: It may be that the most effective thing we can do is just to screen for people who have habits of abusive behavior. Given that both false-positives and false-negatives are costly, what are some good classifiers with a low error rate? 2) A conception of abuse-adjacent (or reckless) phenomena: Drunk driving does not directly kill or injure anyone. However, it has such a high risk of causing traumatic injury that the law punishes people for it nonetheless. Are there habits that have such a high probability of developing into abuse that we should prohibit them under some category of interpersonal recklessness? 3) Better tools for detecting and changing situation-triggered habits: A person's habits can be dramatically different in different physical settings and in different dyads of people. This makes doing #1 before a mission more difficult. It also means that if a crew notices #2 (and using #0, convinces the person it is a problem), the person can work on training different habits in one simulated situation and then copying those over to real life.