How would a colonized galaxy work?

I'm asking what a colonized space would be like, how would everything work? I need some suggestions for this, because I have this idea but I'm not sure how everything would be done.

Here are the specifics:

One of my stories is sci-fi set over 250 years into the future. The story goes is that in the 2050s, a combination of pollution, overpopulation, and massive natural disasters, lead to Earth working across culture and creed by forming the Federation. It's an organization dedicated to peacekeeping, scientific research, and most importantly, colonization of other planets. The purpose was for humankind to spread out across the last frontier that is the galaxy and find new homes to combat the issue. It started with our own solar system, and has expanded very far into space. There are five systems that have been colonized, the fringe of it being the Delta System, where the current story starts.

There are over 30 billion people spread across the galaxy, and many humans have never been to Earth. While the Federation serves as the de facto military force of the cosmos, space is a very big place and even a military organization as large as the Federation cannot possibly hope to combat everything. The galaxy has become home to metropolitan population centers, government, research, and corporate outposts as well as some of the largest criminal organizations known to mankind. To combat this issue, the bounty system from the old west has been reinstated, so those looking to seek riches can hunt down notorious outlaws for a handsome payday, making the idea of the space cowboy real.

There are two other races in the galaxy, but neither of them are aliens technically speaking. There are Metas and Bionics. The former are mutated humans with blue, purple, green, or red skin colors that originated from the Metavirus from the early days of colonization. They sometimes have special abilities on top of being immune to diseases and generally being more physically capable by default. The latter are sentient machines that come in many different shapes and sizes, named after the company that initially manufactured them: Bionica. Originally, they were made to serve, but through self-improving algorithms they learned to think for themselves.

But I'm just trying to imagine how this would all work, because space is really, really big and there's tons of factors involved. Would anyone be in charge of it all, like a galactic president? Would planets have their own laws, and would there be different countries inside those planets? Does the concept of "nationality" still exist, or has it been largely replaced with planetary terms? Is 250+ years enough time for people to form their own cultures and traditions, because that's how I imagined it.

What suggestions would you guys have for this?

edited 22nd Aug '17 8:00:30 AM by StrangeThoughts

I'm not so idealistic that I can believe we're even capable of putting aside enough differences to agree on the time of day, much less put together a Federation.

The work necessary to do the colonizing might well be done by the Metarandi and the Biomic Soldiers (eg: they were created solely to do the colonizing, then established themselves as separate species).

The concept of nationality would be irrelevant across enough distance; we care more that someone is an Outsider or stranger or something like that.

That's pretty much what nationality is about - dividing people into local and foreigners. Now, ethnicity is another story... though chances are people would develop local traditions pretty fast, and any physiological adaptation to their new homeworlds would result in visible changes in phenotype.

Government, economics and all other infrastructure would stem from the specifics of space travel, particularly duration. I reckon casual interstellar travel would solidify inter-system relations somewhere around how nation-states exist today. An average of about a week's worth of travel between relatively nearby systems would give you a space western. Months or more, and you have a new age of sail. (To that effect, bounty licenses might also include letters of marque concerning system-states that aren't too fond of each other.)

Yes, but only as far as shouting "Delta System, fuck yeah!" and bragging about single-handedly winning the Second Interstellar War.

It's interesting to think about because I can only imagine how different things would be with a colonized galaxy. For example, the premier Girl Group is 9ine, a K-Pop idol band that goes on sold-out intergalactic tours every year to stadiums all across the stars. Instead of saying things like "We love you Seattle!", they might say "We love you Kafka!".

For reference, Kafka is the biggest metropolitan planet in the Delta System, with New Prague being the biggest city by far in the system. Both were named as such because it was settled by Czech immigrants.

This is just one little thing I'm thinking about. Even a group as big as 9ine, with a popularity level being that of the Spice Girls at their prime, certainly can't go to every planet. They certainly won't go to perform in a planet like Horizon, which is basically a lawless wild west desert world full of cowboys, low-lives, criminals, and bounty hunters. It would be way too dangerous for any celebrity to go there. And that's just one place. Would people from other planets in the Delta System fly to New Prague for example, just to see 9ine? That's a pretty big concert trip, I must say.

Yeah, I know this is an odd question, but it helps me creatively with world building, or in this case, galaxy building. It's these little things that help me imagine what life is like in this setting.

Whenever I'm doing something space-related, I normally default to the look and feel of Spore, Startopia and Freelancer, the last of which perfectly exhibits the idea of modern nations developing across an entire star sector. Meanwhile, the other two gave me the notion of colonized worlds as mostly limited to a number of self-contained cities rather than sprawling nations, and the idea of space stations as trade and social hubs in their own right. There's also the way certain technologies like Teleporters and Transporters can make a ginormous space donut function as a busy city street. That's the great thing about technology - it can enable the mores and trappings of one age to blend seamlessly in another.

To that effect, the 9ine might not perform directly on Horizon, but rather deploy their mobile space hall in orbit, and the concert itself would be more like a drive-in with the audience hooking up to the installation in either personal spacecraft or group shuttles. New tech, same experience, even on a much larger scale.

Also, we see how easily, in even our modern society, Blakanisation can happen - why would whole planets be "united" - heck, systems wouldn't be entirely uniform, especially if there isn't a particularly unified military or colonial force to hold it together. How agitated are the populace; what's the sort of governance?

What may be interesting is who set the colonies up - were they established by interest groups (Corporations; extra national groups; independent settlers) or are they extensions of nations - after 250 years are they STILL tied?

So, a colony set up by a mining firm - like old Coal towns in the UK or USA - do they hold onto that industry / tradition? Is it system wide?

That's a lot into the weeds, but as you say a lot of these people don't know Earth except from history books - so they would likely identify to the thing closest. If it's easy to get between planets then the balkanisation may be easier to avoid.

Everything depends on the type of technology they are using to travel between systems. How long does it take, how expensive, and how dangerous?

This. If you assume no ftl period. Then even local interstellar organizations will depend on a lot of cultural engineering to keep different systems identifying with each other let alone on the same basic course. Trade would be limited to bulk information trade, where you hope that enough of it is still of interest and use by the time it gets there. People living long enough that you can expect them to still be around for a couple rounds of back and forth would help a ton.

In the long run different cultures having different genetic and mental adaptions might make most information exchange even harder, or might make the information novel enough to be worth wild.

Any organization on the galatic scale would be so loose as to be invisible to anyone but the specialized systems maintaining it.

Interestingly enough when the universe in mostly cold and dead, if anyone is still around they would be running on very slow but very very efficient computers, and might might not care about the objective time time delays.

FTL Travel is the crucial factor. With it, colonization of our local stellar neighbors is possible in less than a hundred years, but population growth would be extremely slow until all the terraforming and other infrastructure could be built. Having a functioning interstellar government with FTL is certainly possible but the colonies would be way too busy scratching out a living and way too dependent on the homeworld for technological support to have any kind of substantive independent agenda for quite some time.

Further, genetic intermingling would be possible with FTL, as one would expect more or less continual interstellar travel for transport, colonization, and whatnot. Speciation would definitely happen but much more slowly — it would depend greatly on the environmental factors of the colony worlds. It's more likely that you'd have "Centaurians" and "Pegasans" or whatever as racial/cultural divides than as species gaps: a species like homo sapiens takes tens of thousands of years to drift substantially even under conditions of total isolation.

250 years is barely enough to imagine that they'd start actively participating in politics, never mind fighting wars or anything major like that. Not unless you've got Space Opera tech that can move people between planets by the tens of thousands.

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Without FTL, the story changes. Travel between star systems takes place on scales of dozens or hundreds of years, depending on the technology used to get there. If ships can travel at a significant fraction of the speed of light, time dilation starts to show up, so a journey of ten or twenty years from Earth might seem like five or fewer years to the travelers, increasing psychological isolation. Colonists would have to take everything with them, and if they fail to carve out a habitable place for themselves, they're just plain dead. Communication with home is essentially impossible on any meaningful scale.

In this scenario, there is no "interstellar civilization". Each planet would develop almost entirely independently of the others, with genetic drift and resulting speciation. They'd keep tabs on each other, to be sure, but with a latency measured in years or decades. I don't have a good estimate of how long it might take a completely new colony world to build enough population and infrastructure to begin sending out its own ships, but anything less than five hundred years is probably grossly optimistic, and it'd be way longer than that before any conceivable population pressure might impel them to spread further.

Under conditions of total isolation, I'd imagine that genetic engineering would come back into fashion to help successive generations adapt to their new homes. This would increase genetic drift substantially; otherwise you're still talking about hundreds of generations before interbreeding would no longer be possible. (Note that these factors would make successive waves of colonization tricky, to say the least.)

250 years is barely enough to have colonies at all, and there would be no interstellar politics — possibly ever. War is right out. It would be like trying to form a world government if every nation were on a tiny island separated by hundreds of kilometers of ocean and the fastest way to get people or messages from place to place is a canoe.

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Smart interstellar colonization (with or without FTL, but I'm mainly talking about without) wouldn't involve hurling ships full of colonists into the depths of space, but would instead be done by sending advance teams, possibly manned (but see Interstellar for some of the pitfalls of this), with the capability to build manufacturing facilities for Von Neumann style terraforming robots, which would do the majority of the gross preparatory work. This would also give time for signals to return to Earth to indicate which worlds have the potential for being habitable, to avoid wasting time and lives.

The second wave would be the pioneer colony ships, with the hardy (and willing to die alone) volunteers who would finish the robots' jobs of making things ready for large-scale immigration. Then they'd be followed by ships with the bulk of the colonists.

It'd be a one-way trip for all involved in those early efforts, and a one-way trip pretty much forever without FTL.

edited 20th Feb '18 2:17:33 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

With interstellar ships and the tech they imply a planet might not be needed. You can get living space by building rotating habitats out of asteroids and comets, instead of building domes on a planet. And an interstellar ship is such a habitat, except that it can also get around faster. It was probably also built in space out of asteroids, instead of lifting all of that material off of Earth.

You send a ship that at least crewed has von neumann and self repair capabilities. It makes more of itself, minus a few features only needed for interstellar travel, but plus any new breakthroughs that have been signaled out from Earth along the way.

In general if you don't have being able to go outdoors without a space suit someday as a requirement, you have a lot more potential targets, and it isn't like the people who get there won't be used to the idea of spending their lives on a spaceship or habitat, even if the original crew wasn't drafted from one to start with.

Supermerlins' right: there's a way to do it with STL-though you have to think outside the box. Colonizer ships essentially become permanent, multigenerational habitats, that spend 99% of their lifetime traveling between star systems. This isolates them from stellar systems pretty decisively, but it doesnt isolate them from each other. Put enough of them on the trade route, say a month travel time by inter-ship shuttle, and they can develop their own civilization which will be quite independent of any planetary body (literally an "interstellar" civilization). I use this set up as the basis of some of my own stories.

edited 20th Feb '18 7:43:01 PM by DeMarquis

I wasn't considering the idea of eschewing planets altogether, but there are a whole raft of other problems to deal with if you do that. The nice thing about planets is that you have a huge geological and ecological system that buffers against sudden, massive change. Not so much in a generation ship or asteroid base. On a large enough scale, the attrition rate is close to 100%. (Well, the same is true of planets, but the scale of planetary extinction is quite a few orders of magnitude larger.)

edited 20th Feb '18 9:38:42 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Yeah, they need a planetary system to anchor to, at least at first, but it can be done. In my verse, interstellar civilization consists of hundreds of STL ships strung out in a long line between here and Epsilon Eridani, where an alien civilization has been contacted. The cost is worth it to get the tech, With ships passing each other every couple of months en route, and being about a month ahead and behind, and what with stationary space stations along the way, they aren't isolated at all. Of course, these ships are more habitats than "ships" in the classic sense, and anyone on board at departure has long since passed away by the time the ship arrives at the destination (and begins the long trip back).

Interesting. Epsilon Eridani is 10.5 ly away from us, and if your ships travel at an average speed of 0.1c, the trip would take 1,260 months to complete. To have any given ship along that route pass a "stationary" point once per month, you'd need 1,260 such points, or an equivalent number of ships transiting back and forth continually. Sort of. I'm pretty sure the math could be done more accurately with some effort, but I'm not willing to put that in.

This doesn't take into account the movement of the two systems relative to one another, of course, but that could be corrected for. You also imply that these folks would like to have conversations with each other with a relatively small degree of latency each month, but obviously they could have longer-latency communications on a regular basis. Another way to put it is that you want every ship to be within a 1 month communication latency from some other ship at all times.

The most intriguing thing is that you'd get some weird effects from the different messages arriving at different times. A ship 0.1 ly ahead of you and a ship 0.1 ly behind you would send messages that you'd get simultaneously. Keeping track of that would get complicated. It'd be like the most impressive game of Chinese whispers ever.

The engineering, construction, and personnel challenge of building, crewing, and maintaining that many ships would be quite large.

edited 4th Mar '18 4:43:52 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Not to mention the people needed to maintain the population while avoiding inbreeding...

Life's too short for being hectic.

Yeah, I know, its a fascinating idea. I wish I had the time to really develop it. I take the approach that it would somewhat resemble the way overseas colonies were managed during the Age of Exploration. Goods, people and information took months to travel from point to point, but they managed it. One thing that became very clear to me is that not all of these habitats would survive tbe journey. The failure rate is probably reasonably stable, and would need to built into the design of the system. As STL, it turns out you dont want the ships to move too fast-that makes interchange with stationary wayports and habs going back toward Earth too expensive and difficult. I figured 5% of C was about right.

edited 4th Mar '18 4:12:34 PM by DeMarquis

Every halving of the average velocity doubles the number of ships you'd need to maintain the maximum communication interval. I assume 0.1c because that's sort of the yardstick that our astrophysicists use to measure interstellar transit times against, and there is achievable technology to accomplish it given our current understanding of physics.

I assume that the ships would keep going all the way. Slowing down to dock with a supply base would use so much delta-V that you'd need to either pack quadruple the fuel (or more) or completely refuel at each stop. I can't imagine how that's practical, at least not in the short term while you're trying to set up the system.

edited 5th Mar '18 6:44:11 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

You're right, they use shuttles for that. The habitat ships dont even slow down, but do a flyby—meaning that anyone who gets off isn't getting back on again. Still, that also means there are plenty of other ships to join—not to mention the wayports. It's not uncommon for single young people to switch habs once or twice. And of course, there are often people and goods coming the other way—so population slowly turns over and remains more or less stable over time. The various "crews" (really residents) originate from different nationalities on Earth, so gradually they are blending into a new genetic population. Naturally, by the time their descendents have completed a round trip, they have lost all sense of identification with their nation of origin (or Earth itself, for that matter).

I'd like to point out that, at 0.1c, a trip to Epsilon Eridani is possible to achieve in a human lifetime, with good technology and some luck from genetics. On average, though, you're right — the colonists who arrive would be the second, third, or fourth generation descendants of the ones who leave. One wonders what effects that would have on their culture.

... Or physiology, for that matter. Would someone who grew from infancy in a starship be fit to drop onto a planet and live there?

If human hibernation technology is feasible, you'd want most of the passengers using it, especially if it suspends the aging process. This would reduce the need for supplies as well, which would help a heck of a lot. Every resource would be precious.

Also, those are some damn spiffy "shuttles" to carry 0.1c worth of delta-V, never mind the 0.2c that would be needed to make intercept with a starship traveling in the opposite direction, plus all the supplies you'd need to stay alive for the trip. Hades help them if they miss... Worth noting is that you'd need quite a bit less delta-V to catch up to (or decelerate to meet) a ship going in the same direction, a month ahead or behind, as long as you could handle the months or years required to make the transit.

edited 5th Mar '18 8:15:34 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Right you are again Fighteer, people in my verse have to pay for passage, and moving up or down the line is much cheaper (and more common) than stopping or changing directions (generally a two stage manuver involving changing shuttles at a wayport). They use fusion, so delta v is cheap. They also use a rotational design to maintain gravity, and magnetic protection from cosmic rays. Still, few of them ever expect to live on a planet again, or want to.

You grow up in a small, tightly knit community of a couple hundred people, who value adherence to procedure above all else (while creative probllem solving is a close second). Yet they are aware of a larger community including potentially tens of thousands of people in ships up and down the lines, plus the wayports. Long distance intership friendships, even romance, are not uncommon. They have pretty much lost their national identity by the time a ship makes a round trip. Yet the cargo legally still belongs to whomever funded them at departure (typically their national gov of origin, or a corporate partnership). I think you can see the potential for dramatic conflict, both large and small scale.

edited 5th Mar '18 10:42:31 AM by DeMarquis

Revisiting this thread — yes, I can see some conflict there, but it's kind of toothless IMO. I don't see any way to enforce ownership of property from Earth at such distances. Such enforcement implies the ability to arrest or prosecute offenders, and the police would have to make the same trip as everyone else. I doubt that the children of the children of the children of the original cops would retain any interest in pursuing the legal agenda of the homeworld, nor that the children of the children of the children of the people who sent the cops would still care, nor that the children of the children of the children of the offenders would be liable for their forefathers' "crimes".

Without FTL, you can kiss the idea of centralized interstellar government (or commerce) goodbye. It's simply not practical, even if you can get ships moving at ridiculous velocities like 0.9 c, and no rational government or commercial interest would attempt it. Anything sent to a colony is inherently a write-off.

Even if law enforcement authorities at the colony can somehow maintain loyalty to the homeworld, if it takes 21 years to get an enforcement order relayed to the destination planet (10.5 to report the crime and 10.5 to transmit the response), wouldn't the statute of limitations have expired by then?

Now, local enforcement is certainly fine, but it would be of local property ownership. It's all but inconceivable that anyone would regard materiél from Earth as anything other than the property of the colony upon arrival.

edited 9th Apr '18 11:25:37 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

"Not to mention the people needed to maintain the population while avoiding inbreeding..."

That depends whenever or not genetic engineering exist. If it does, the recessive genes that make inbreeding a bad idea can be removed.

When life gives you lemons, burn life's house down with the lemons.

You can also keep dna samples (physical or digital) so that your gene pool can be orders of magnitude higher than the population.

And you can also, as I pointed out, provide for an exchange of personnel between the ships.

As for contract enforcement, it applies because all of these ships are eventually turning around and going back to Earth, because that was the original arrangement with the aliens who arrived at Epsilon E. The point of the entire thing is to bring Terran resources to EE in exchange for alien tech that is being sent back. Hence, each ship is expected to release the tech they are carrying when they arrive back at Earth 200 years later. Since this tech will easily determine the balance of national power within the solar system, the children of the children of the children of the original cops still want it. They are willing to use force to take it if they have to (the plot to one of my stories).

But otherwise, Fighteer is right about law enforcement. The "Star Cities" (really small towns) govern themselves entirely independently, although there is a slowly developing tradition among the ships that produces a consensus on what the best way of doing that is (observing contract law within and between ships is very important).

So part of the transit contract is shipping tech discovered on this alien planet back to Earth? I guess that's fine, at least as long as everyone involved has the political foresight to realize that welching on that deal will result in consequences for their descendants a century or two later. That implies a psychology quite different from anything we have today.

Honestly, it surprises me that anyone on Earth would even try to impose such a deal in the first place, given that they wouldn't see any results from it for at least 115 years (10.5 to transmit the orders and 105 to wait for the first return shipment).

Welching on the deal could conceivably have immediate consequences if the departing ship transmitted the news to the nearest arriving ship, which would then abort its mission, and so on back down the line. That seems unlikely given that the courses of these vessels are pretty much fixed; the cost to turn around and head back to Earth without delivering their cargo would be astronomical, if it's even possible.

Again, you're talking a minimum of four generations per leg of the trip, unless the crew are kept in stasis for the majority of that time. What sort of indoctrination would make people willing to carry out such draconian orders after that long?

Edited by Fighteer on Nov 7th 2018 at 12:04:15 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"