The allure of the hidden colony world
Apr. 19th, 2005 11:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
james_davis_nicollThis is what those two recent books had in common: Plucky freedom-lovers flee an oppressive government (in one case Pax, a world government and in the other a USA gone horribly Republican) to settle a world far enough away that the government probably will not be bothered to follow them. In both cases, the homeworld either never knew or forgot where the colony was. This is easier when travel takes centuries but if fast FTL is available, the colonists can try to hide somewhere in the 40 billion population one stars in the spiral arms.
This isn't an uncommon idea in SF: Anderson's STARFOG has the descendents of people who fled so effectively that their great great etc grand kids think they fled to another universe (Which as I recall the people in RAFT actually did do. This is not a recommendation to read RAFT). The later DUNE books have humans exploit new transportation technologies to spread out over a tremendous volume, far too large to be governed, turning human-space from a tightly regimented one to a collection of tightly-regimented regions (SF aint't where you look for pro-democratic fiction). The plucky would-be starfarers in one Alan Nourse novel hope to become a lost colony but will settle for dying if their example leads to reforms back home (The people in Walter Jon Williams's recent space opera -could- isolate themselves but so far nobody has felt isolation was better than the chance of being killed in the crossfire).
Hidden colonies very hard within the solar system, since even our rather puny rockets are clearly visible across the system. Some of the humans in _The Killing Star_ try to hide deep within one of the ice-giants. How successful this would have been is unclear, since the equipment they use turns out not to be up to the job. An alternative is to deliberately seek out some body that is inconvenient to get to from the bodies controlled by the oppressive government, sort of the opposite approach Hop David takes in his musings on settling the asteroids. Which body is best depends somewhat on technological assumptions but something in an inclined and retrograde orbit might be a good start. Mind you, even if you do find a place not worth following you to, heat will betray that you are there. You could hide in Jupiter: the 60 km/s escape velocity will make it hard for your kids to leave for the city and the thick atmosphere will probably protect you from attacks from above.
This isn't an uncommon idea in SF: Anderson's STARFOG has the descendents of people who fled so effectively that their great great etc grand kids think they fled to another universe (Which as I recall the people in RAFT actually did do. This is not a recommendation to read RAFT). The later DUNE books have humans exploit new transportation technologies to spread out over a tremendous volume, far too large to be governed, turning human-space from a tightly regimented one to a collection of tightly-regimented regions (SF aint't where you look for pro-democratic fiction). The plucky would-be starfarers in one Alan Nourse novel hope to become a lost colony but will settle for dying if their example leads to reforms back home (The people in Walter Jon Williams's recent space opera -could- isolate themselves but so far nobody has felt isolation was better than the chance of being killed in the crossfire).
Hidden colonies very hard within the solar system, since even our rather puny rockets are clearly visible across the system. Some of the humans in _The Killing Star_ try to hide deep within one of the ice-giants. How successful this would have been is unclear, since the equipment they use turns out not to be up to the job. An alternative is to deliberately seek out some body that is inconvenient to get to from the bodies controlled by the oppressive government, sort of the opposite approach Hop David takes in his musings on settling the asteroids. Which body is best depends somewhat on technological assumptions but something in an inclined and retrograde orbit might be a good start. Mind you, even if you do find a place not worth following you to, heat will betray that you are there. You could hide in Jupiter: the 60 km/s escape velocity will make it hard for your kids to leave for the city and the thick atmosphere will probably protect you from attacks from above.
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no subject
Date: 2005-04-19 03:40 pm (UTC)And rockets able to cross between stars are visible from light years away as long as the rocket is operating. This was one of many problems with Baxter's recent tale about stupid people who do stupid things who fail to reach the goals they knew could not be reached: his "stealthy" rocket should have been visible to _current day technology_ from about 10 light years but the first thing they did was race into the solar system to use Jupiter as a momentum booster. Morons.
I have run across a couple of books lately where the authors realised that telescopes work, something that appears to be something of a secret in SF. In both cases the authors exploited the fact that if you have FTL, telescopes can work as a time machine: if something occurred in the past that you don't quite understand, you can zip over to a location where the light from that event is only just arriving to get
a direct look at the event.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-19 03:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-19 03:53 pm (UTC)Of course, having won points by using a telescope, he then has someone examine a mysterious alien artifact by prodding it.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-19 04:18 pm (UTC)Stross' Iron Sunrise perhaps? (That one was memorable, but it's been almost a year since I read it, so may have dropped some details.)
no subject
Date: 2005-04-19 04:27 pm (UTC)His later books are better, if only because they are much, much shorter. For reasons I do not understand at present, there's a critical page count above which most SF authors will allow their stories to degrade into muddled twaddle, generally about 350.
Heinlein's Critical Page count was shorter but he learned his trade when there were quite short limits on page counts for SF novels. Even in the 1970s, Gordon Dickson was complaining in print that he could not write the books he wanted to because of arbitrary page count limits.
examine a mysterious alien artifact by prodding it
Date: 2005-04-19 04:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-19 04:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-19 04:07 pm (UTC)Rockets are different because they are bright and in most of the cases I am thinking about, they are in a fairly hard vacuum.
I saw an estimate of how far away a nuclear conflict could be detected from the EMR liberated. Unfortunately, I no longer recall what that distance was. Seems like a bad way to engage in SETI.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-19 03:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-19 05:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-19 05:53 pm (UTC)One of John Brunner's futures had humans discover something like a billion working starships, left behind by some industrious alien race. The cost of colonization fell through the floor but a lot of the experditions that set out learned later that the particular set of people they chose lacked the vital skills to make a go of the planets they picked.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-19 05:55 pm (UTC)The (something) Enemy
Date: 2005-04-20 09:33 am (UTC)But as to hidden colonies in the solar system: surely there are ways. Fire some small construction robots at an appropriately obscure asteroid. They build solar panels and a big ol' laser. Load a rocket up with colonists, blast off, then turn off the rockets and stealth your ship. (Stealthing in space is much easier -- that is to say, it's possible -- when you're not accelerating.) Then use the laser to brake and match velocities. Have the laser use the whole asteroid as a heat sink.
Too baroque? Okay, purloined letter. You have a society that exploits asteroid resources. Cargo freighters carry robot machinery to asteroids to mine, build accelerators, and fire the stuff back to Earth orbit. (Or wherever.) There's no magic self-replicating machinery, so the freighters are huge.
Plucky rebels empty one of these ships and fill it with colonists in cold sleep. Shortly after the ship arrives at the asteroid, its reactor goes critical. Boom. From Earth's POV, it looks like the very expensive ship full of machinery has been utterly destroyed, a complete loss.
If it's a typical asteroid in the main Belt, the colonists have just won about a decade of peace and quiet. (Assuming tech that prefers minimum transfer orbits.) Subsequent attempts may occur, but can be dealt with. Eventually the asteroid may gain a reputation for snakebite luck (rather as Mars missions have today). Or, the colonists can fake telemetry data... in its last moments, have the first ship beam back the news that the asteroid is surrounded by a cloud of gravel from a recent impact, or some other improbable but possible hazard.
So I don't think it's impossible. Just tricky.
Doug M.
Re: The (something) Enemy
Date: 2005-04-20 12:30 pm (UTC)Re: The (something) Enemy
Date: 2005-04-20 03:30 pm (UTC)Hidden in Plain Sight could work.
It seems to me that hiding in rocks puts a serious cap on economic activity, or else the waste heat will be detected.
Re: The (something) Enemy
Date: 2005-04-20 04:15 pm (UTC)Stealing from one of the Empire books, one way to hide in plain sight is to keep some basic aspect of the community's nature from the public (The Hidden Jews come to mind as a historical model). Everyone knows where your home community is but they have no idea of the significance.
Re: The (something) Enemy
Date: 2005-04-20 04:52 pm (UTC)Radiate your waste heat on the side of the asteroid away from the Sun/the Earth. You're good until there are large colonies further out from you.
Doug M.
Re: The (something) Enemy
Date: 2005-04-20 05:04 pm (UTC)P = FC
Where P is power, F is force and C is the speed of light. Mirrors get twice as much bang for their P buck as emitters but P is still going to be large even for small values of F.
The other problem is, even if the Oppressive Central Government is too cheap to scatter sensors around the system, that mirror is going to be huge and will reflect light on the sunward side. It will probably also heat up, which should be obvious against the thermal background of the galaxy.
Re: The (something) Enemy
Date: 2005-04-21 07:05 am (UTC)Question: is there *any* way to accelerate that's relatively stealthable? Low accelerations, down to ~0.5 cm/s^2, are fine. (1/200th of a gee doesn't sound like much, but it'll give you a km/s delta vee every two and a half days. Gets you around the inner solar system with trip times comparable to transoceanic travel a few hundred years ago... Earth to the inner asteroid belt in six months or so.)
Possible?
Doug M.
Re: The (something) Enemy
Date: 2005-04-21 12:20 pm (UTC)Power = sigma * effective radiating area * (temperature ^ 4)
and
Power = 1/2 * mass * exhaust velocity * acceleration
Of course, if you're past Earth's orbit, you will want some part of your spacecraft at ~300 K anyway. And inside Earth's orbit, refrigeration becomes interesting. But the rocket is going to be the power hog.
Carlos
Re: The (something) Enemy
Date: 2005-04-21 06:50 pm (UTC)If the sunward side is black, it will suck up visible EMR and re-emit it as heat.
The stealthiest way I thought of to move stuff is vie passive flybys but there you need to go near planets so sensors near planets will pick you up. You could try rotating tethers but they tend to have at least one large dimension and will limit you to a few km/s, probably.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-20 07:29 pm (UTC)It certainly doesn't seem to be, at least not American SF. I wonder why that it? Its not a reaction to tyranny, exactly, since we'll (Americans) put up with huge levels of tyranny from our employers. (We complain about it, but we seem to think its a just tyranny)