Modern and Modern-ish Settlement/Colony

I have a setting where magical portals between worlds are possible, though they can only target a handful of universes and the "aiming" is terrible (up to chance).

In the past century or so, efforts to colonize the different worlds have been made, and I am curious: what does a colony with 20th century technology would be like? How about one with 21th century technology? What sort of population numbers are we looking at here?

(There are more details to the setting, including other kinds of magic, but I want to start from a mundane stand point and extrapolate from there.)

Edited by Bluelantern2814 on Jan 16th 2019 at 7:59:49 AM

I mean, define “colony”. Are we talking a base, a city, a whole country? How long has it been in place for? Since it’s portals, are they in instantaneous contact with the homeland?

Depending on the circumstances it could look like anything from a prefabbed military base to a minor country.

The colonies have two types/purposes Resource extraction: basically an outpost meant to take away a resource, these are mostly the mining sort.

Claim: basically, the various nations want to lay claim to the new land and expand their territory. Lately, it also became fashionable to solve refugee crisis by just shipping them to a new settlement.

Smaller efforts to settle different worlds have been around for a couple of centuries, but it only got really serious 30 years ago (give or take a decade).

Close enough? Most of them have constant contact, but due to finicky magical portal reasons and war-related trauma they don't do things like putting portals in the middle of a city and generally prefer avoiding situations like "Wake up in a world and then go to work on another".

Alright

The way I envision there is likely at least a few minor countries around, but made of a lot military bases?

Edited by Bluelantern2814 on Jan 17th 2019 at 3:08:21 AM

Well, if they’ve existed for anything close to a century many of them will probably be countries/states/cities in their own right at this point. Maybe not massive countries, I’m thinking along the lines of Hawaii or Guam as a broad comparison. Not self-sufficient, but big enough that they’re more or less their own polity, even if they’re subordinate to a government “back home”. Guam in particular is a nice example since it’s basically a small country built around a military base, with almost all enterprise in said country going towards supporting the base.

Even if the portals are fidgety they’re inevitably going to creep closer and closer to population areas. Moving people around is the least of what they’ll be used for, freight transfer is going to be their main task. Oil/minerals/whatever out, food/supplies in. Having such a critical point far away from everything is trouble for a lot of reasons.

Edited by archonspeaks on Jan 17th 2019 at 3:13:37 AM

That said, I think I will revise the idea because it sounds more interesting if we have a couple of scrappy independent nations in otherwise empty worlds who had to fight tooth and nail to survive.

This is excellent information.

Fair point on the getting closer, though I didn't mean that they are "far away" more like "outside, but commuting distance". In the past, attacking portals was such a common tactic that even today they are viewed too much as potential targets. I think the different incentives balance out as "new portals just outside city centers, slowly being surrounded as the city grows".

Edited by Bluelantern2814 on Jan 17th 2019 at 4:23:55 AM

Guam is pretty much exactly what I’m basing my idea of one of these colonies off of. It’s technically part of the US but it’s a territory so it’s a little more distant than a state, and other than tourism its economy is basically entirely purposed towards supporting the military installations literally covering (29% of the surface) the island. It’s not self sufficient since its industry isn’t really focused on things like agriculture, so it needs constant imports to keep everything going. I doubt these colonies would be self sufficient for the most part.

Getting a proper nation set up on the far side of a portal would just be a matter of time and properly revolutionary politics. If a large territory on the far side of a portal had a long string of politicians all promoting things like energy and agriculture independence eventually they could get enough infrastructure built up that they wouldn’t need their home country and could start thinking about splitting off. This split could be as clean or messy as you like for the purposes of the story, here on Earth we’ve seen it both ways.

If the portals are being attacked on the regular you’d probably want them as close as possible to your holdings so they could be defended easily. There’s also going to be 24/7 freight traffic through them, as well a stationary objects like communications relays built through them, so they’re going to be the center of a fairly large facility, which means lots of supporting infrastructure. I imagine they’d be placed somewhat like an airport or port is placed, in that they’re zoned to their own area for security and convenience but are still centrally located.

Edited by archonspeaks on Jan 17th 2019 at 4:40:25 AM

Guam is a really good starting point! Thank you so much for pointing me at it!

Actually "placed like an airport" is basically the thing I was going for (including supporting infrastructure), though I am getting that I shouldn't isolate the portals as much I have been doing. Thank you.

Edited by Bluelantern2814 on Jan 17th 2019 at 4:57:57 AM

As far as the distance, keep in mind that the portal is basically going to be serving the same role as a port or airport, but even more important since it’s not just a main entry point to the area but the only entry point to the area. Imagine if the only way to get into your local city was through its airport. Now imagine all the imports your local city needs to sustain itself trying to squeeze themselves through its airport, and then be distributed out from there. Larger colonies would probably require multiple portals, especially if they’re exporting a lot as well as importing.

Since it’s going to be a busy industrial site it probably won’t be smack in the middle of a residential or tourist area, but you’re going to want to have it nearish to the action.

I should point out that if the portals are under "constant attack", that implies a nation (or nations) on a more or less permanent wartime footing, with lethal threats a part of daily life for its domestic citizens. There aren't really any historical comparisons to this scenario. Historically, if a nation is dealing with continuous combat in its own ports and cities, it's losing and doesn't have the time or resources to maintain and supply colonies.

What I'm getting at is that it's not a stable situation. It's a catastrophic one: like an existential crisis of sovereignty. Even terrorism would be horrendously disruptive if targets were being attacked or bombed on a daily basis — just ask nations where it's happening today.

Now, there are some interesting fictional comparisons. The kind of portal technology you suggest implies that people can, with a little advance effort, basically move from place to place in the universe instantaneously, and without complicated ships, life support, etc. Robert A. Heinlein envisioned a future like that (albeit with Time Travel thrown in to make things extra confusing) in his novel The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. Instantaneous long-distance teleportation technology completely changes warfare, since anyone can attack anywhere at any time. Enforcing basic elements of sovereignty like military borders becomes all but impossible.

Another thing to point out is that instantaneous mass transit would revolutionize civilization to a degree not seen since air travel. Today, it takes hours to get to a distant place on Earth, and the average person can't afford to do it every day. If you can literally wake up, get dressed, go to the transit station, and be in Germany, or Alaska, or Alpha Centauri, then distance ceases to be a factor in national and cultural identity.

To suggest that people would still retain the same concepts of identity in such a scenario is to miss out on a fantastic storytelling opportunity.

A way to deal with all of these issues is to make the portal tech cumbersome, difficult to set up, and expensive to maintain. This would provide a built-in scarcity to its use and a reason why everyone can't install a teleporter in their front hallway.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 17th 2019 at 12:39:17 PM

Attacks are not constantly attacked today, but the major (world-spanning) conflict where the tactic was used happened 30 years ago so it is very fresh in the public consciousness, with a lot of horror stories of the effect "colony got cut off, mad max chaos happens".

It's not portal technology. But portal magic. And it's finicky to the point where you can't really aim the other end of the portal beyond "right universe, specific planet, not on the sea or too hot".

Is terraforming not a thing in your universe? There are squillions of perfectly habitable planets just waiting for someone to drop a portal on, walk out and start building farms and houses? Seems unlikely, but if it's what you're going for, you'd definitely need a small infrastructure team to set things up before you'd move people and materiel en masse.

In general, the limiting factor is how quickly the supplies and personnel can be shipped over and how quickly they can set up livable space at the destination. That's largely dependent on technology.

Compare Sufficiently Advanced Technology with Post-Modern Magik. Whether it's magic or machines is largely irrelevant to the average person who just wants to go to work, eat dinner, play with their kids, etc. Does someone have to go to the destination to scout it out first, or is this a case of firing portals into the universe and taking your chances? Seems like the first portal that opened onto a Venus-like planet or one with an atmosphere composed of hydrochloric acid would teach people caution... or at least inform the survivors of the event.

Edit: I missed your statement that the magic is discriminatory enough not to open portals into an immediately dangerous environment. Still, you can't expect there to be an infinite number of perfectly Earthlike planets with atmosphere and biosphere exactly suitable for unprotected humans to step onto and start growing crops. Well, not in science fiction... Space Opera and space fantasy live on this trope.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 17th 2019 at 4:42:26 AM

Okay, I am bit busy and I can't give you a full answer.

But bit of clarification:

Portals work by targeting connections and you can't just "open a portal to Venus", you need to have something or someone from that planet. I am undecided if you can put a portal through a spaceship.

Edited by Bluelantern2814 on Jan 17th 2019 at 2:44:16 AM

Okay, so they work a bit like sympathetic magic. "Like calls to like", and such, so someone has to find a suitable world, land on it, and bring a bit of it back home so the portal wizards can do their thing. Fair enough. I assume these portals are semi-permanent, so that you aren't constantly rotating through shifts of mages as they deplete their personal mana supplies and have to go recharge. That would be a huge limiting factor to their availability.

By point of reference, the Heralds of Valdemar series includes mages, the most powerful of whom can create Gates from place to place (that they are familiar with) but this is incredibly draining and even lethal if maintained too long. A lost art involves the creation of permanent Gates: anchored to a node or ley line in order to remove the need for a living mage to power them.

The question hanging out there is how you get to these planets to bring back bits of them to use as foci. This implies space travel of some sort, and 21st century technology (we're in the 21st century right now) seems unlikely to produce manned interstellar craft. I guess you could have magic space travel, in which case there's little point in talking about it from the point of view of technological accuracy.

Anyway, I think that we're a little past your original question, which has to do with the economics and social dynamics of a colony sustained by such portals. What I said before stands: upon the establishment of a portal, the limiting factors in how quickly a colony could develop would be, roughly:

• How fast personnel and materiel can be transported through the portal.
• How much work needs to be done to prepare the environment at the destination for habitation.
• What sort of training, equipping, acclimatization, and other forms of preparation are demanded of the people going.

Beyond that, unless there's a cultural paradigm of developing self-reliance due to the unreliability of the portals — something you suggested due to the remembered fear of a past conflict in which many portals were cut off — then there's no real reason why these colonies would diverge socially or politically from the homeworld.

This type of cultural divergence relies on two main factors: the speed of travel and communication, and the difference in environments. When it takes months, weeks, or years to transmit messages and travel back and forth, the local culture diverges rapidly. But when people can travel a kilometer to the portal site, pop through, and be back home for lunch, there might as well not be any lag at all. Indeed, there isn't even any need to maintain a stable population at the colony, although many people will probably want to stay. It's no more remote than my local shopping mall is from my suburban home.

The environmental factors come into play if significant physical adjustment is needed to survive in the other world. If you need very special skills, equipment, or adaptations to be able to live and work at the colony, then there's an enforced divide between the colonists and the homeworlders. In these cases, travel is much less frequent and so the culture would have the opportunity to diverge.

As for political independence, I don't see there being any significant drive for that. Borrowing my comparison earlier, it'd be like the suburbs declaring independence from the city. The major threat would be to cut off the portal, but that is far more harmful to the colony than to the homeworld. Even if the colony is completely self-sufficient and thriving, severing their communication and supply lines would be a step to be considered only as the most extreme possible last resort and the shock would be intense.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 18th 2019 at 8:23:40 AM