The Civilization Game.

I'm typing this on my iPad on a flight to Prince Rupert to collect more content for training material (the fact that I'm typing it on a 3/8 inch slab of circuitry is probably a post all of its own) and I'm playing a little mental game that I sometimes play on flights when my book doesn't really interest me: the What-If Game.

The game is very simple. What if aliens* decided to conduct an experiment by scooping our airplane out of the sky, sticking it into a stasis bubble, and dropping it onto the surface of Alpha Centauri A?**  (This game can be played with any form of bulk transportation, but buses generally have too small a gene pool for a viable colony, and cruise ships diminish the challenge by being too big and safe - rather as they do in real life, come to think of it.)

We'll assume that our new home is at least generally liveable - the air doesn't contain deadly microbes, and we can drink the water and digest the alien proteins - or most of them, anyway.***. The wildlife occupies the same range of carnivore/omnivore/herbivore niches as Earth's, and as a result we have to worry about being digested ourselves.

Okay, is everyone playing along? Look around the plane - these are our fellow colonists, what do you think? Is there an adequate male/female mix? Let's see...12 pairs of seats on one side, 13 on the other, the plane is full, so 50 people, plus the flight attendant, pilot and copilot for a total of 53. Ages range from an apparent 12 year old to a possible 65 or 70. And we have ... one, two, three...I think I can see 13 female heads. Hmmm...our colony is off to a rough start with three times as many men as women.

What are our resources? It's a relatively small plane, going to a relatively small community in northern British Columbia, so it's unlikely that anyone has brought a month's worth of clothing and possessions - for example, I've packed for two nights. On the up side, it's a destination for fishing vacations, and although I think that generally the boats would provide the gear, with any luck we have a fishing rod, or at least some hooks - and a couple of fishermen, not a bad asset. Not as many lighters as there would have been 20 or 30 years ago, so eventually firemaking will become more of a struggle - ever try to make a fire bow? Anyone?

I doubt that we have the collected works of Shakespeare on board, although frankly I'd rather have a really good book on building log cabins or delivering babies. In addition to a bunch of tablet readers (like my iPad) that will be useless in three days when the batteries die, there's probably three Dan Brown books, the most recent Stephen King, and maybe a Tom Clancy novel, plus newspapers and magazines - not exactly the library of Alexandria, but you take what you get.

The plane itself is a gold mine, of course. Cables, wires, panels, windows, hinges, gasoline, cushions, industrial carpeting to unravel, and lots and lots of metal in various forms - handy stuff, metal, so that's good.  Down side, the only food is some pretzels and various hot and cold beverages.

Initially the plane is shelter as well, but 53 people cannot live in a Dash 8 for very long. Sooner or later we have to move out of the plane and begin to build shelters, cannibalizing the plane for tools and hardware.

Inevitably we will lose individuals. People will eat things that disagree with them; people will disagree with things that eat them.  People will fall off cliffs or have heart attacks, or, sad to say, get in fights over women or men and kill each other.  But will we survive as a group, would we go on and create a tribe, a society, a civilization?

My instinct is to say no. Normally I play this game on bigger planes, and I have to think that small numbers and the unbalanced male/female ratio would be our undoing. On the other hand, there's historical precedent:  Pitcairn Island was settled by nine mutineers from the HMS Bounty, six Tahitian men, 12 Tahitian women, and a (female) baby in 1790, and by 1856 the island's population had grown to 193.

The astute reader will notice that I've omitted a parameter:  what if there are already aliens on the planet?  We'll level the playing field and assume that they're pre-industrial - and now we've started a whole new version of the game.

I welcome your opinions as to how that version of the What-If Game plays to its conclusion.  Personally, I'd like to hope that it all works out peacefully, but experience says that when humans play that particular game, we play for keeps - and sometimes we cheat.

Sad, that - takes the fun out of the game.

- Sid

* Or time travellers, or highly evolved beings/demigods -feel free to insert your own favourite group of advanced meddlers here.

** Or Earth 50 million years from now, or an alternate dimension. As above, use your favourites.

*** Which, come to think of it, is probably less likely than being kidnapped by little green men. Far more likely that the alien ecosystem would kill us just for breathing its air.  Recommended reading in this area is Bios, by Robert Charles Wilson.