Spacefaring empire to scattered tribes, can it work and how?

So, for my Science Fantasy I have a race of beings that used to voyage across the stars(is that the right trope? I'm relatively new here.), but are now a tribal culture living on a single planet. The thing is, I'm having trouble thinking of a good reason for this, and will have to toss it if I can't. Any help, please?

edited 3rd Jul '17 2:20:37 PM by TotallyNotAnAlien

Do you plan for all of the members of the species in existence to live on that single planet? (i.e. there's no other colonies, not even ruins, in other star systems). Or for that to just be the surviving former colony (or homeworld) that the story focussed on with the possibility of other survivors to be out there among the stars?

Rather than painting you a scenario myself, I'll instead recommend you look at some of the reasons why civilizations on earth are theorized to have fallen and taking inspiration from that. (And then translating the one you like most it to an interstellar science fiction reason or, of course, coming up with your own). That way what you end up using will be what you made yourself rather than what someone else told (or suggested) you to use.

Here's a couple of videos on the Bronze Age collapse to start you off.

Empires that grew collapsed across THIS planet usually collapsed under their own weight because it got too hard to enforce the law and respond to farther-off territories. Everyone needs to refuel supplies and keep their transportation in good shape, after all. Just scale the "farther off colonies across the sea" to "farther off colonies halfway across the galaxy."

This is just one colony. There is a possibility for former colonies elsewhere. I'll look into real life examples (don't no why I didn't think of doing that before coming here...)

Same thing I told the other guy.

Also, I was wondering more of how spacefarers would revert all the way to tribal civilization and technology, with the only remaining evidence of their past being in their mythology. If I can't explain THAT, I may as well scrap the idea.

edited 3rd Jul '17 4:50:39 PM by TotallyNotAnAlien

The easiest way I can think of is that all the heavy, high tech manufacturing was done elsewhere in the Empire and when the Empire collapsed they just didn't have the infrastructure to maintain their high-tech society.

If it was a lightly populated, relatively recent colony world they might not have the population density (or the know how) to develop larger, more complex societies. Especially if something like a disease or natural disaster took out the major remaining population centres.

Alright, that makes sense. Now I just have to figure out all the details.

Oh yeah. Check out the American South and how they fared after the Civil War. Their biggest draw was producing huge amounts of raw goods (cotton infamously so), and then they'd ship it off to the factories in the North.

Very broad-strokes summary: The South did just fine when relations with the North were good, but after the Civil War happened, they had tons of unprocessed goods that they couldn't actually USE because their own factories weren't nearly enough to handle the load. And now they're stereotyped as "poor and rural" a couple hundred years later.

Well, a Mass Effect-style galaxy-wide culling comes to mind.

How long ago did the collapse occur?

You could have the one tribe that your story focuses on to be an exploratory mission that ventured too far out, got cut off from their homeworld, and devolved into a primitive society over a few generations.

As an example, in Doctor Who, the character Leela (companion of the Fourth Doctor) was a warrior of the "Sevateem" — a corruption of the words "Survey Team."

David Weber's Empire from the Ashes books had an interstellar empire fall to ruin from a combination of a bioweapon virus and a teleportation network between planets. Depending on how advanced your galactic empire was, something like that could be an option.

Another option could be that whatever phlebotinum runs their faster than light technology ran out or stopped working, and the individual planets were highly specialized and relied on imports for most of their needs.

I've mentioned this in other topics about galactic civilizations: it hinges on one crucial question — do they have FTL Travel? If no, then there's very little hope of having a centralized interstellar government at all since getting anything anywhere — even communications — takes years at a minimum. Any given colonization effort could have failed or fallen apart, leaving the survivors reverting to a more primitive state, and the homeworld could have collapsed due to its own problems.

With FTL Travel, space is still very big, and colonies still need support. If there's some political or existential crisis back at home, then they might get cut off from resources and left to fend for themselves, and developing a high-tech, spacefaring civilization is pretty hard. You see a variation of this in Dragonriders of Pern, where a group of colonists deliberately chose to abandon their high technology, Space Amish style, although there's every indication that their parent civilization is alive and well.

Now, if you postulate that they once had a sprawling empire with highly populated and technologically advanced worlds, Casual Interstellar Travel, and all the other perks of a Space Opera Type II civilization, then having them fall back into primitive status en masse is harder to justify. There aren't many catastrophes that could wipe out civilization on all occupied worlds at the same time across thousands of light years, yet still leave survivors to scrape through the ashes. Some do come to mind, however...

• An interstellar war that grinds down to a brutal contest of attrition, with worlds blasted into ruins on both sides until there's not enough technology or industry left to sustain it, at which point everything sort of falls apart.
• A horrible plague capable of catching rides on FTL ships (or moving FTL by itself) that eradicates life — this is an element of the backstory of the Humanx Commonwealth universe. (Actually, it's a combination of both this and the previous one: two species fought a war and one developed a bioweapon to kill their enemy. It worked too well and killed themselves, too, plus a bunch of other species.)
• Some sort of cultural shift that is so memetic and so compelling that it sweeps over a civilization, making them all decide to tear down their technology and go live in straw huts or something.
• Alternate scenario: they go off to live in matryoshka brains or become energy beings or something similarly transcendental, and abandon their physical bodies, save for a few left behind who are too backwards or too dull to make the leap.
  • This one reminds me a bit of The Dig, except that, after crossing over to become transcendental beings, the aliens get stuck and can't return, leaving it up to the humans to figure out how to reverse the process.
• An astrophysical catastrophe, like a supernova or a quasar, could blast worlds for hundreds of light years, rendering them totally or partially unfit for life.
  • There's a slight problem with this in that it would, by necessity, move at the speed of light, and if they have FTL they could get ahead of it and warn or prepare.
• Their species evolved near and colonized other high-mass, short-lived stars that ran out of fuel and died, leaving burned out husks of planets in their wake. The few survivors took shelter on moons and other safe havens, but lacked the resources to rebuild their civilization.
  • This one has the problem that it's extremely unlikely that all their stars would die within a short window, and that they wouldn't be able to anticipate it and move away given their technology.

edited 28th May '18 7:35:11 PM by Fighteer

This is actually typical of most human-inhabitable planets that get colonized by disparate missions and settlement efforts over my 40,000+ year-spanning intergalactic history. A common term for it is "chain colonization." Society spreads like links in a chain but particular colonies get more and more distant from each other as civilizations spreads. Space travel is dangerous and energy-expensive, so most people don't leave the planet or moon they are born on, unless they are military (except for small subcultures of "Starfarers," some of whom don't even really interact with the rest of humanity). If they do travel in space as a civilian, for more than a sub-orbital flight or trip to a nearby moon, it's typically on a one-way colony mission.

More than 90% of these settlement efforts involve significant technological regression because in the initial days of colonization it's hard for a small group to maintain a technological infrastructure and they tend to give up tech that isn't useful for daily survival. How much they lose, how much knowledge and tech becomes "lost" and has to be rediscovered or reinvented, depends on the colony and its particular circumstances. Some have specialized ships and hardware and don't regress or recover much quickly. Others might never fully recover, and could possibly be in a state of arrested development for a long time. Individual circumstances dictate how far the extent of regression or stagnation goes, with some groups reverting to quasi-medieval conditions or even further, into quasi-neolithic hunter-gatherers who might possibly have certain advantages in knowledge, like coldsmithing, that hunter-gatherers on Earth lacked until they came into contact with other societies with more advanced metal working. Some of the stories I write imply that regression and stagnation is extremely common, and it's relatively more rare that societies redevelop all the lost technology of their ancestors, but out of millions of human-colonized planets, it does happen. It might be something like 50/50 (half get to the point of redeveloping faster-than-light travel, half don't, and that could mean anything from "hunter gatherer" to "space travel but not FTL"), but that's only a snapshot in time, not a prediction, from the "modern" future era where the stories typically take place.

It's even more rare that a civilization retains faster-than-light technology after they settle a world anew and doesn't have to start over again from more primitive conditions. This happened more frequently when there was a central colonizing initiative operating out of Earth, in the Ancient Times, than it does in the "modern" era 40,000 years (roughly) after Earth invented faster-than-light drive and started exploring and colonizing. The older civilizations tended to result from more organized colonization efforts, so these are typically located in the Milky Way Galaxy and have thousands of years of development behind their backs; they stand on the shoulders of giants and look down on many of the scattered tribes and feudal kingdoms that came of later colonization efforts in the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies.

I never quite buy the "technological regression" trope, particularity when it goes from modern or futuristic all the way back to pre-industrial. We've seen examples of countries on Earth cut off from modern contrivances and more or less keep themselves running. If they have any capacity for self-sufficiency the technological regression is minimal, and can be limited to certain fields.

Countries on Earth aren't the same as far-flung outposts in a spacefaring empire. Those outposts could be anything from colonies with millions or billions of people to tiny research stations that aren't intended for permanent occupation and don't have sufficiently healthy, large or diverse breeding populations. And that's not even going into terraforming or other environmental quirks or availability/unavailability of particular resources. If your jump drives malfunctions and you end up in the wrong star system, and the only habitable planet is significantly lacking in heavy metals, certain tech might not be feasible the first couple of decades or centuries after the initial landing of settlers.

It also depends on what technology is available at the time of colonization. Lots of stories in many fictional universes include spacecraft that are disassembled to build living structures and salvage useful components. But other stories have return-trips or much larger ships that can colonize multiple planets and remain intact and mobile, return to home base, and check up on those colonies later.

One presumes that a colony site would be selected very carefully for the presence of local resources needed to keep everything running.

Either way, though, in this sense there's not too much difference between a cut off country and a cut off colony. Not all countries have rare earths or other resources. When cut off, below a certain point you'd provably see the colonists die before devolving culturally, and above that point they're able to maintain their technology. Perhaps not to the same standard as before, but we've seen some fairly remarkable examples of technological self-sufficiency here and it's hard to believe those feats couldn't be replicated, especially with the advantage futuristic technology gives.

^ I see the points you are making, although I think there are many in-story ways one can explain why a colony site was a letdown in terms of resources or a ship went astray on its course and took the colonists somewhere they didn't mean to go. Or, like Firefly did, with quirks in the terraforming process.

For all we know, a theocratic civilization that privileges dogma over evidence but nonetheless has inherited a technological infrastructure to take them to other planets might launch a colony mission toward an unsuitable planet for similar reasons as explorers have sought out mythical lands for centuries. Or perhaps a freedom-seeking group from a very oppressive homeworld decides they'd rather rough it on a marginally habitable planet than live in a gilded cage.

Maybe their technology doesn't work for some reason by the time they get there, like it's damaged en-route or there's some unaccounted quirk of the planet that prevents it from working.

There's so many ways the O.P. could justify this in-universe.

I should add that, in the above poster's scenario, the moment in time where it's scattered tribes could be at the point between "fall of civilization" and "everyone will be dead in a few generations, probably."

Obviously you can always engineer a reason to have a savage or pre-industrial civilization on a firmly advanced colony. As far as a natural devolution, though, that’s just not how civilizations collapse. Particularly over short timescales you’re more likely to see everyone just die before any cultural or technological devolution occurs.

The OP's question wasn't about individual colonies, which could of course devolve in a variety of ways, but about an entire spacefaring civilization. As I said in my previous post, without FTL, it's extremely unlikely that an entire civilization would fall apart together, since communication latency would be measured in years and travel times in decades. Indeed, you have to redefine what you mean by "a civilization" at such scales.

With FTL, you more or less remove the latency, so being isolated from resources (involuntarily, at least) is no longer an issue, and there's a ton of redundancy so that even if half the empire falls apart, there's still the other half doing just fine. Such a civilization could be more susceptible to political or social collapse, though.

Considering the time it should take a fictional future civilisation of our own species to reach some sort of FTL technology, not all our settlements far away and hard to reach if not beyond reach, would be able to preserve the tech level they came with.
Think of our own past, when boats of settlers with knowledge of metal-working, farming and animal domestication reaching Terra incognita, then reverting to hunting and gathering and simpler tools because that was more adapted to the local conditions.

Then, after FTL becomes commonplace in some “core worlds” and some of those settlements are discovered by some more advanced interstellar civilisation, with the ensuing possibilities for all kind of tropes to roam the screens.

Then there’s always the possibility the more advanced civilisation collapses by its own inadequate mismanagement, or that some newly discovered, socially-retrograde earldom, reverse-engineers some of the advanced civ’s tech and wreaks all kind of havoc…

Well, the most obvious thing that comes to my mind is the sudden collapse of an interstellar portal system. To the extent that each individual human settlement had been dependent on access to trade routes with other settlements, even the major population centers would be challenged to maintain their tech levels (perhaps esp the major population centers, as they would be less likely to be able to feed and support large populations entirely on local resources). A very heavy die-off of the total human population could easily be justified. Cut off from civilization and its knowledge base, a regression of technology is probably inevitable.

You would have to invent a reason to justify a civilization wide collapse of the portal network, of course. Perhaps it could be due to an attack by a hostile species, or a natural catastrophe near the central network hub, or something similar.

That's not a bad idea. Robert A. Heinlein wrote a novel about a group of travelers who are cut off from their interstellar Portal Network on an alien world and devolve to near-savagery before being rescued, and I'm sure he's not the only author who explored that idea.

As you say, the challenge is figuring out what destroys the portal network across the entire civilization all at once. Unless they're really arrogant or there's some hand-wavium technical reason, you'd expect any such network to have heavy redundancy.

"Empire from the Ashes" trilogy takes that approach complete with the collapse of an interstellar empire. Basically the human population is a mix of local natives and survivors of a failed mutiny that occurred just before the Empire Collapsed effectively cutting everyone off. An emergency forced them to evacuate their massive space ship to the Earth and they were not really able to bring much in the way of tech with them. Their descendants and survivors, long story, had to make do with the tech that naturally evolved on the world. Which is 20 minutes into the future kind of technology.

The empires furthest settlements cut themselves off from the empire due to a rapidly spreading disaster and in order to ensure they would survive abandoned a chunk of their tech. Which slowly broke down or went dormant as fewer and fewer knew how to use the tech. This was for the far flung colonies. The Empire proper is simply gone with it's remnants lingering long after it's demise.