Regarding sustainability, Charles Stross has a fun thought experiment over here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/designing_society_for_poste

Regarding sustainability, Charles Stross has a fun thought experiment over here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/designing_society_for_posterit.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/designin... > We humans are really bad at designing institutions that outlast the life expectancy of a single human being. The average democratically elected administration lasts 3-8 years; public corporations last 30 years; the Leninist project lasted 70 years (and went off the rails after a decade). The Catholic Church, the Japanese monarchy, and a few other institutions have lasted more than a millennium, but they're all almost unrecognizably different. > So. You, and a quarter of a million other folks, have embarked on a 1000-year voyage aboard a hollowed-out asteroid. What sort of governance and society do you think would be most comfortable, not to mention likely to survive the trip without civil war, famine, and reigns of terror?