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james_davis_nicollNot hard SF. Space opera.
So it turns out there is a handy way to get both propulsion and FTL out of a single doohicky, which in the spirit of homage we will call a geodyne, and while this basically turns the Solar System into our backyard, it's crappy FTL, 10C. People can go to other systems but it takes a long time. It also does not improve quickly (or rather, all the easy advances got made early on); in the centuries since it was developed, geodynes can hit 40C.
While it is a kind of Hal Clementian universe, habitablish worlds are not that uncommon but the best ones tend to be a year or two in cold sleep apart. The best places attract the most people so generally there are fewPlanets of Hats. You do find communities of isolated loaners who deliberately sought out hell-worlds for their own; technology is advanced enough people can live in a lot of very challenging places if they care to (The Green Lantern model very nearly applies) . Frequent contact is therefore not a common feature for, oh, lets say five hundred years to give the various places time to diversify.
With little contact, there isn't a lot of trade between the important places. Think China and Rome circa 100 AD; some information, some goods do go amazing distances, but contact mostly limited to minor cultural exchanges. There are places about which the Solarians know nothing.
As a side effect of the lack of trade, people who head out are not being driven by the sort of economic motives seen in Westerners headed to the New World or Asia after 1500. People are heading out to stay and with little expectation of contact with Earth. A reasonably high fraction of the colonists range from "charmingly eccentric" to "hateful wackaloons".
During the centuries that pass, the Earth falls into a nightmarish trap of prosperity, peace, improved health, reasonably low gini coefficients and a grotesque acceptance of a cosmopolitan society. People live a very long time by our standards; one side effect is the population did actually keep growing past 2100 (because the death rate fell through the floor) and another is that the average age is stupidly high, in the low centuries, and young people are a small fraction of the population. Solarians tend to take the long view because it has personal consequences for them.
(You'd think potentially being able to live a thousand years means hopping in the space flivver to take a five year journey would be more acceptable but this is balanced by an unwillingness to get too far from modern amenities and modern medical resources. That said, there's at least one person on their way to the galactic core at 40C and there have been quasi-immortal anthropologists sending back reports of varying accuracy from distance worlds for centuries.
Earth circa 2600 isn't utopian: any Solarian can bend your ear for hours about ways in which things fall short of expectations. It is, however, as much better than now than Earth now is over Europe in the 1600s.
Most Solarians have no interest in interstellar affairs and if they do think of the other inhabited worlds, it is as a collection of lunatics living needlessly hard lives. Five centuries of isolation on unearthly worlds allowed some interesting cultural evolution and adding to that an impressive biotech tool kit means there are some very odd people out there, some of whom did not have hominids in their ancestry. Nowhere known is near as well to do as the Earth but there are places that are respectable economies (there are also some places that should just be glassed from orbit). Some places are technologically advanced. Others have the misfortune to live places where losing parts of the toolkit won't kill you and so they've become rather backward.
In 2550ish, the big game changer came along: it's possible to build what are colloquially called hyperspacial tubes, inside of which a standard geodyne is far more effective than it would be in regular space. The Solar system becomes even tinier. If you are willing to pony up the horrifyingly large amount of money, you can string them in pairs between stellar systems.
At this point contact times between adjacent rich systems potentially drops from a year to a couple of weeks. Suddenly modes of contact that were out of the question before become quite possible.
The Solarians are stinking rich and also the ones who came up with the idea in first place. Because of this the Sun is at the center of one expanding network of connections. Other highly developed systems get their hands on the technology and they too begin stringing their own HST networks.
The Solarians are also kind of naive about the ranges of conflicts that are possible and not nearly as well informed as they think they are. They tend to assume when people do things differently, it is because nobody has pointed out how superior the Solarian way is*. Solarians are generally quite happy to help backward people become civilized and become sad when harsh words result.
HST links have an effect a bit like rail lines in the 19th century, in that having one or not having makes huge difference in the amount of contact with the outside world. Some groups desperately want the contact; others fear it. It would be nice if the people in the first group and the ones in the second lived in different places but often they don't.
(I'm thinking you cannot easily exit an HST at mid-point but it is possible. Also, they are narrow enough you don't want traffic going both ways)
A couple of vague ideas:
Even if a system is not in a network, being near another system that is can mean more curious tourists zooming out to the linked system and then taking a geodyne ship over. Or the other way round: someone could book a trip over to the connected system to kick around the Solarian network.
HSTs require constant upkeep. With hundreds of civilizations, someone somewhere will experiment with cutting maintenance budgets, on and on until they find out what level is too low. Others will simply build sub-par HSTs. Still others will turn out not to be worth the cost of maintaining the HSTs. There are places that were connected that are not any more.
(happily this plays out more like Black Horse Corners than the Banqiao Reservoir Dam)
Another idea is that there's a well developed network that would really like to be connected to the Solarian one. The gap between the well developed network and the Solarian one is kind of a long stretch but happily there's an intermediate stellar system both sides could meet at and the local government's representatives have assured both sides they'd be happy if this happened. What the local government's representatives have not mentioned is there are roughly two hundred other governments on that world and none of the others are even aware the negotiations took place. Also, the government that does know is actually the government-in-exile of a place that got occupied by an expansionist government.
Some ambitious group headed off for the Hyades on the grounds that its peculiar mass distribution means there will be a lot of habitable worlds** (for values of "habitable" equal to the anoxic Precambrian Earth) around sun-like stars in a very small volume; all of the worlds will have to be terraformed but this is a culture that takes the very long view. They have lots of contact within their cluster, have a crapton of developed economies in a very small region of space and being four years away from Sol at a flat run are so poorly known as to be mythical.
* Your average Solarian, for example, will pride themselves on the diversity of their system without ever thinking about the fact that some niches not compatible with a rich, peaceful world of 30 billion were selected out. There are examples of societies composed entirely of niches like that within reach (not just AxeCrazyManlyMan World. There are some perfectly nice places that will react to sustained contact as well as the birds of Guam did).
** The possibly related Beehive Cluster is known to have planets around its stars.
So it turns out there is a handy way to get both propulsion and FTL out of a single doohicky, which in the spirit of homage we will call a geodyne, and while this basically turns the Solar System into our backyard, it's crappy FTL, 10C. People can go to other systems but it takes a long time. It also does not improve quickly (or rather, all the easy advances got made early on); in the centuries since it was developed, geodynes can hit 40C.
While it is a kind of Hal Clementian universe, habitablish worlds are not that uncommon but the best ones tend to be a year or two in cold sleep apart. The best places attract the most people so generally there are fewPlanets of Hats. You do find communities of isolated loaners who deliberately sought out hell-worlds for their own; technology is advanced enough people can live in a lot of very challenging places if they care to (The Green Lantern model very nearly applies) . Frequent contact is therefore not a common feature for, oh, lets say five hundred years to give the various places time to diversify.
With little contact, there isn't a lot of trade between the important places. Think China and Rome circa 100 AD; some information, some goods do go amazing distances, but contact mostly limited to minor cultural exchanges. There are places about which the Solarians know nothing.
As a side effect of the lack of trade, people who head out are not being driven by the sort of economic motives seen in Westerners headed to the New World or Asia after 1500. People are heading out to stay and with little expectation of contact with Earth. A reasonably high fraction of the colonists range from "charmingly eccentric" to "hateful wackaloons".
During the centuries that pass, the Earth falls into a nightmarish trap of prosperity, peace, improved health, reasonably low gini coefficients and a grotesque acceptance of a cosmopolitan society. People live a very long time by our standards; one side effect is the population did actually keep growing past 2100 (because the death rate fell through the floor) and another is that the average age is stupidly high, in the low centuries, and young people are a small fraction of the population. Solarians tend to take the long view because it has personal consequences for them.
(You'd think potentially being able to live a thousand years means hopping in the space flivver to take a five year journey would be more acceptable but this is balanced by an unwillingness to get too far from modern amenities and modern medical resources. That said, there's at least one person on their way to the galactic core at 40C and there have been quasi-immortal anthropologists sending back reports of varying accuracy from distance worlds for centuries.
Earth circa 2600 isn't utopian: any Solarian can bend your ear for hours about ways in which things fall short of expectations. It is, however, as much better than now than Earth now is over Europe in the 1600s.
Most Solarians have no interest in interstellar affairs and if they do think of the other inhabited worlds, it is as a collection of lunatics living needlessly hard lives. Five centuries of isolation on unearthly worlds allowed some interesting cultural evolution and adding to that an impressive biotech tool kit means there are some very odd people out there, some of whom did not have hominids in their ancestry. Nowhere known is near as well to do as the Earth but there are places that are respectable economies (there are also some places that should just be glassed from orbit). Some places are technologically advanced. Others have the misfortune to live places where losing parts of the toolkit won't kill you and so they've become rather backward.
In 2550ish, the big game changer came along: it's possible to build what are colloquially called hyperspacial tubes, inside of which a standard geodyne is far more effective than it would be in regular space. The Solar system becomes even tinier. If you are willing to pony up the horrifyingly large amount of money, you can string them in pairs between stellar systems.
At this point contact times between adjacent rich systems potentially drops from a year to a couple of weeks. Suddenly modes of contact that were out of the question before become quite possible.
The Solarians are stinking rich and also the ones who came up with the idea in first place. Because of this the Sun is at the center of one expanding network of connections. Other highly developed systems get their hands on the technology and they too begin stringing their own HST networks.
The Solarians are also kind of naive about the ranges of conflicts that are possible and not nearly as well informed as they think they are. They tend to assume when people do things differently, it is because nobody has pointed out how superior the Solarian way is*. Solarians are generally quite happy to help backward people become civilized and become sad when harsh words result.
HST links have an effect a bit like rail lines in the 19th century, in that having one or not having makes huge difference in the amount of contact with the outside world. Some groups desperately want the contact; others fear it. It would be nice if the people in the first group and the ones in the second lived in different places but often they don't.
(I'm thinking you cannot easily exit an HST at mid-point but it is possible. Also, they are narrow enough you don't want traffic going both ways)
A couple of vague ideas:
Even if a system is not in a network, being near another system that is can mean more curious tourists zooming out to the linked system and then taking a geodyne ship over. Or the other way round: someone could book a trip over to the connected system to kick around the Solarian network.
HSTs require constant upkeep. With hundreds of civilizations, someone somewhere will experiment with cutting maintenance budgets, on and on until they find out what level is too low. Others will simply build sub-par HSTs. Still others will turn out not to be worth the cost of maintaining the HSTs. There are places that were connected that are not any more.
(happily this plays out more like Black Horse Corners than the Banqiao Reservoir Dam)
Another idea is that there's a well developed network that would really like to be connected to the Solarian one. The gap between the well developed network and the Solarian one is kind of a long stretch but happily there's an intermediate stellar system both sides could meet at and the local government's representatives have assured both sides they'd be happy if this happened. What the local government's representatives have not mentioned is there are roughly two hundred other governments on that world and none of the others are even aware the negotiations took place. Also, the government that does know is actually the government-in-exile of a place that got occupied by an expansionist government.
Some ambitious group headed off for the Hyades on the grounds that its peculiar mass distribution means there will be a lot of habitable worlds** (for values of "habitable" equal to the anoxic Precambrian Earth) around sun-like stars in a very small volume; all of the worlds will have to be terraformed but this is a culture that takes the very long view. They have lots of contact within their cluster, have a crapton of developed economies in a very small region of space and being four years away from Sol at a flat run are so poorly known as to be mythical.
* Your average Solarian, for example, will pride themselves on the diversity of their system without ever thinking about the fact that some niches not compatible with a rich, peaceful world of 30 billion were selected out. There are examples of societies composed entirely of niches like that within reach (not just AxeCrazyManlyMan World. There are some perfectly nice places that will react to sustained contact as well as the birds of Guam did).
** The possibly related Beehive Cluster is known to have planets around its stars.
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no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 10:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 02:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 07:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 09:30 pm (UTC)Andy
no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 03:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 03:35 pm (UTC)This is why I miss Usenet
Date: 2012-09-27 11:43 am (UTC)Doug M.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 01:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 01:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 02:08 pm (UTC)magicamazingly effective sociological manipulation to follow the ideals of the colony's founders. Thus when contact is established, no one is surprised that Sparta Colony is full of militaristic pederasts.And one of the points of the series was that everyone was indeed seriously prejudiced about other cultures.
I don't really recommend the series. Like most of Barnes's work, it varies dramatically from book to book in quality. E.g., between the first book and the sequel he managed to forget most of the protagonist's defining character traits.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 02:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 03:27 pm (UTC)Given that New England went from being overrun with mean religious extremists to touchy feely liberals in a few centuries, I'd be at least a little surprised if every Hat colony remained the same.
In any case, in this setting Hat communities exist, Hat colonies are rare and Hat worlds almost unheard of.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 05:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-28 11:19 am (UTC)magicmanipulation also mean that in 300 year nobody will have an original idea? I can see this being a sticking point for some potential colonists, a great selling point for many others: "My kids will have to have the same opinions I do!"no subject
Date: 2012-09-28 07:36 pm (UTC)One of the two specific examples was that landscape painting was a popular thing to do, but painters had always painted as if the terraforming was complete-- i.e. they would include forests that weren't yet there. Only post-recontact did someone start a fad of painting the existing terraforming equipment and the dwarf trees.
This being Barnes, the other example was about what kind of pornography was being produced.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-29 04:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 02:54 pm (UTC)"I go to fix dinner."
"Roll."
"8."
"The humanoid restrains you lest you burn yourself."
"I go anyway."
"Roll."
"19."
"You can't get past the humanoid."
"I go outside."
"Roll."
"16."
"The humanoid tells you its dangerous outside and makes you sit down."
etc.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 03:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 03:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 04:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 05:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 07:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-28 01:02 pm (UTC)The independent search after truth, unfettered by superstition or tradition; the enforced oneness of the entire human race, the pivotal principle and fundamental doctrine of the Faith; the basic unity of all religions and suppression of those which reject these principles; the condemnation and removal of all forms of prejudice, whether religious, racial, class or national; the harmony which must be required between religion and science; the enforced equality of men and women, the two wings on which the bird of humankind is able to soar; compulsory education; the required adoption of a universal auxiliary language; the enforced abolition of the extremes of wealth and poverty; the institution of a world tribunal for the adjudication of disputes between nations and the establishment of a body to enforce its decisions; the exaltation of work, performed in the spirit of service, to the rank of worship [and thus compulsory]; the glorification of justice as the ruling principle in human society, and of true religion as a bulwark for the protection of all peoples and nations; and the establishment of a permanent and universal peace by force when necessary ....
How's that? - aside from being the opposite of the spirit of Baha'i as I've heard or encountered it.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-28 02:08 am (UTC)Bruce
no subject
Date: 2012-09-28 03:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 03:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 04:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-29 01:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 05:53 pm (UTC)http://phys.org/news/2012-09-slow-moving-odds-life-earth-space.html
no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 05:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 05:31 pm (UTC)Still other groups lived somewhere where discarding parts of their tool kit turned out to fatal or where the base tool kit was insufficient; there are once-populated, currently empty worlds all over the place.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 07:01 pm (UTC)Can you describe an example of such?
no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 07:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 07:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 07:41 pm (UTC)In very deep space, tidal forces are low (stellar tidal forces dominate vs. galactic tides out to a few light years). So if for some reason you want to be enormous featherweight structures, out there is the place to be.
Or the old Poul Anderson idea of a free planet being heated up until it has an atmosphere, to act as a giant low cost radiator of industrial waste heat (or, just using mass quantities of ice as a heat sink until it's all melted.)
Mars-sized planets in interstellar space could hold 3He in their atmospheres, and we all know how valuable that isotope would be. ;)
no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 09:45 pm (UTC)Leads to a Planet of Hats where everyone is an astronomer. What is this like? A mirror-polishing caste? Sacred vaults filled with photographic plates? Darkness worship? Red lighting indoors?
no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 09:59 pm (UTC)At 40c it would take generation ships. I imagine they'd periodically drop out of FTL to take observations, then transmit them back.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 10:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-28 08:35 pm (UTC)Of course, it's really just Anderson's Kith stories with a bit more plausible science.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-28 07:11 am (UTC)At that point a "parsec" -- a second of parallax against the deep background -- is now ~80 Million LY. (Yes, really. Right now we have a one au baseline, and a parsec is about 3.1 ly or ~200,000 au.) So, we'd be able to do very precise astrometry for our Local Group, and get reasonably precise measurements out to half a billion LY or so. None of this "standard candle" stuff.
Also: in round numbers, the galaxy is about 1000 ly thick, and the Sun is currently more or less in the middle of it. (Though this changes over time.) So, it would be a 10-15 year trip to get outside the galaxy.
Doug M.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-29 03:44 pm (UTC)If anything, that's about two orders of magnitude too low; assuming only a factor of ten improvement in astrometric accuracy over what GAIA should achieve, you would nominally be able to measure parallax distances with a precision of ~ 10% or better out to about 20 billion parsecs (60 billion LY).
Of course, that's assuming a static, perfectly Euclidean universe; long before that point you have to take into account GR and cosmology, because the Euclidean approximations that are fine for parallax within our galaxy won't exactly hold any more...
no subject
Date: 2012-09-28 03:52 am (UTC)
Date: 2012-09-27 07:43 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2012-09-28 11:30 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2012-09-28 01:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-28 07:42 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2012-09-29 10:21 am (UTC)So far (fingers crossed) access to greater wealth has generally caused birthrates to fall, not rise. What's special about asteroid wealth that would make this different?
Doug M.
Re:
Date: 2012-09-29 07:40 pm (UTC)As for birthrates falling... wealth is acting as a kind of pesticide (ignore the insult implied there). Pesticides ultimately cause resistance. Wealth, over a long enough period, will select for people who use that wealth to reproduce more. This selection will be both cultural (think Amish) and genetic (think multiple births, earlier onset of menarch, and predisposition to behaviors that lead to pregnancy.)
no subject
Date: 2012-09-29 04:38 pm (UTC)For that matter, asteroid colonization would make it easier to tell a story involving smaller populations. If you're in a major city you've got millions of folks right there; even in a small town the characters could pull out a celphone at any time and potentially call any of billions of other people. On a remote asteroid there might only be a few thousand inhabitants, with the rest of humanity minutes or even hours away by radio; suddenly people are socially isolated again.