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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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Date: 2012-09-28 03:52 pm (UTC)