If we treat a population‑linked, license‑to‑expand regime as the default gatekeeper for permanent off‑world settlements, how should its core metrics (health harm per resident, self-sustainment, domination risk, environmental non-degradation, class‑justice indices) be weighted or lexically ordered in practice, and what explicit stress‑test scenarios (e.g., major accident, governance coup, supply‑chain cutoff) are needed to reveal where these weights would systematically favor unjust but technically resilient architectures?

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Answer

Proposed ordering and stress tests:

  1. Lexical / weight structure
  • L1 (hard veto, lexicographic):
    1. Health harm per resident (safety floor; no architecture with >X expected serious harm per 1e6 person‑years, except in time‑limited emergencies).
    2. Domination risk (non‑domination floor; no designs whose default contracts/institutions make exit or contestation effectively impossible for most residents).
  • L2 (constrained optimization, weighted): 3) Environmental non‑degradation. 4) Class‑justice indices. 5) Self‑sustainment.

Rough practical weights within L2 (conditional on passing L1):

  • Env: 0.3
  • Class‑justice: 0.3
  • Self‑sustainment: 0.4

Rationale in brief:

  • Health and non‑domination are basic rights; they should not be traded off for resilience or wealth.
  • Among second‑tier metrics, higher self‑sustainment can support long‑run justice and survival, but only if it does not drive planetary damage or caste‑like stratification.
  1. Core stress‑test scenarios Use a small standard set, run ex ante on each proposed architecture before population bands increase.

A) Major accident / system shock

  • Examples: habitat hull breach, reactor or power failure, major epidemic inside the settlement.
  • Test questions: • Does the design ever incentivize keeping residents in harm’s way (e.g., to preserve capital or meet self‑sustainment quotas)? • Are harm burdens pushed onto least‑powerful classes (e.g., maintenance workers living in riskier modules)? • Does emergency governance concentrate unchecked power that can persist after the crisis?
  • Red flags: models where architectures with strong self‑sustainment and weak exit consistently keep poorer residents in high‑risk roles to protect production.

B) Governance coup / charter breakdown

  • Examples: local authority suspends charter; corporate or military takeover; key external overseers lose access.
  • Test questions: • How quickly can external law re‑assert control (legal hooks, sanctions, evacuation capacity)? • Do life‑support chokepoints enable a small group to dominate others indefinitely? • Do high self‑sustainment and physical remoteness make domination effectively irreversible?
  • Goal: expose architectures where domination risk was underweighted because normal‑times indicators (elections, ombuds) looked good while emergency leverage was ignored.

C) Supply‑chain cutoff / embargo

  • Examples: multi‑year launch stand‑down, trade embargo, major conflict on Earth.
  • Test questions: • Who loses air, food, medical care first under rationing rules? • Are class‑justice and non‑domination protections preserved or suspended "temporarily"? • Do designs that score well on self‑sustainment do so by accepting permanent underclasses or bonded labor in normal times?
  • Purpose: see when high self‑sustainment + weak justice metrics lead to stable but unjust "siege societies."

D) Demographic lock‑in

  • Examples: birth boom, long‑stay population, declining return options.
  • Test questions: • Do later cohorts inherit residency without real exit rights? • Do class‑justice indices track mobility of low‑status groups over decades, or only short‑term flows? • Does the license regime ever reward architectures that are demographically sticky but slow to improve health or justice?

E) Risk‑export / regulatory‑haven shift

  • Examples: growth of high‑risk AI/bio/finance sectors enabled by self‑sustainment and legal autonomy.
  • Test questions: • Does the weighting scheme treat added global risk as an externality, letting high‑self‑sustainment havens pass bands despite undermining Earth regulation? • Would tightening class‑justice and non‑domination thresholds in these scenarios block such drift?
  1. Where current weights tend to fail
  • Self‑sustainment is often overvalued relative to non‑domination and class‑justice, favoring: • Remote, high‑closure sites (especially Mars) with weak exit and strong life‑support leverage.
  • Class‑justice metrics are usually thin and easy to game, favoring: • Corporate or elite enclaves that share little technology or surplus with Earth and import a narrow band of workers.
  • Environmental non‑degradation is often treated as a one‑time planetary‑protection hurdle, not a continuing check, favoring: • High‑impact heavy industry (e.g., polar lunar hubs) as long as they are "out of sight."
  1. Adjustments suggested by stress tests
  • Keep L1 truly lexicographic: do not allow higher self‑sustainment or survival claims to compensate for systematically worse health or domination scores.
  • Tie self‑sustainment scoring to justice conditions: • Award full self‑sustainment points only when gains are achieved without worsening class‑justice and domination indices under stress scenarios.
  • Make class‑justice partially lexical within L2: • For example, require that no income decile’s risk or deprivation increases across bands; if it does, expansion freezes regardless of aggregate self‑sustainment.
  1. Example patterns to flag as "technically resilient but unjust"
  • Architectures that: • Maintain life support for centuries with minimal resupply. • Centralize power in one operator with control over air, housing, and employment. • Permit only limited, highly selective exit. • Show good average health stats but concentrated hazards in a low‑status group.
  • Stress tests that trigger on these cases: • Coup + embargo combined: if simulations show that a narrow elite can entrench for >20 years with no realistic external intervention, the design fails non‑domination under stress, even if all other metrics look strong.

Overall: a population‑linked license regime should treat health and non‑domination as non‑tradeable floors; let self‑sustainment compete with environmental and class‑justice goals within those floors; and use a small, standard stress‑test set to detect architectures that look efficient in normal times but lock in domination or caste structures under crisis.