Space Operas and Scale

So, I love Space Opera stories and interstellar settings, but I've been confronted with the fact that such settings are unimaginably huge.

Maybe an interstellar setting is a bit too much to handle in terms of size.

There is the issue of depth, since many planets are demoted monocultural nations or towns, with maybe two or three places of note on each one.

I get it's difficult to construct and entire diverse ecosystem like on earth, but I still want to avoid the Planet of Hats trope.

Then again, I wonder if the galaxy would feel a lot smaller once you have FTL travel and communications, like how earth feels a lot smaller now than it did in the past.

I have been working on an interplanetary setting confined to our own solar system, but I'm not really feeling it.

What are your thoughts on this and how would you handle scale?

For me, I went basically all out in terms of scale. The early parts of my project takes place on a universal scale, so stuff like population went well into the nonillions before the in-setting apocalypse, and megastructures like Dyson Spheres were common enough that every inhabited galaxy had at least several dozen billion of them. I wasn't really afraid of going for scale, since that was something I chased in that part of the setting. Things like FTL, though, tied the setting together more closely as it allowed events from different corners of the universe to interact with each other.

Edited by ericshaofangwang on Jul 8th 2020 at 11:28:15 PM

You run into scale problems no matter how you construct your sci-fi 'verse.

On the scale of a single solar system, the main question is, simply, how are these planets at widely varying distances from their star all habitable? Sure, you can say "terraforming", but unless you explain it that's no better an answer than "because I said so". It'd also have to be a honking huge solar system to plausibly have more than a handful of habitable bodies. Ours has no more than six depending on how you stretch your definition: Venus, Earth, Mars, Titan, and possibly some other Galilean moons.

You don't need FTL, strictly speaking, to have a working space opera within a solar system. Without it, you need at least a hand wave about how people get around in a reasonable time frame, and you are limited in how fast communication can occur. To get a message from Earth to Titan (a moon of Saturn that is potentially habitable) would take an average of an hour and fifteen minutes. To travel there at 1 g acceleration (a constant-thrust fusion drive or something like that) would take about nine days.

If you say "terraforming", then you have to consider that on any plausible tech level that would take thousands of years at minimum, and potentially millions. For an outer solar system body like Titan, it will never be possible to stand outside in the open air: the Sun simply isn't strong enough to heat the surface to a comfortable temperature at that distance. That said, a Type 2 civilization that has created a Dyson Swarm around its sun would have enough energy available to overcome most of these problems, but that would also make moot most of the conflicts you frequently find in space opera settings.

Without FTL of some sort, interstellar colonization on human time scales will never happen. We may send colonists out into the void, but they'll be on their own. There will be no reasonable way to maintain commerce with or governmental control of the colony worlds. So FTL is a prerequisite for any space opera involving interstellar travel.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 8th 2020 at 12:53:13 PM

You might not want to hear this, but it probably doesn't matter that much. The level of detail that the demographic you are going after is pretty much the same, regardless of the setting. So if you increase the scale, they will be able to absorb less detail regarding individual planets and such, and if you decrease the scale, then you have to correspondingly decrease the detail per location. So it depends on what type of story you want to tell. The Expanse is arguably a space opera set within the Solar System (at least for the first few books) and they are able to go into details regarding the socio-economic and ethnic background of different groups on a single asteroid. This moves the plot along, because social and cultural rivalry and politics is important to the story. For a story like Dune, even though the entire setting is interstellar in nature, the entire focus is on one planet, so Herbert could go into a lot of detail regarding the ecological conditions there, which served that story well. In the Foundation Trilogy, the story was about the fall and rise of galactic civilization, so Asimov couldn't focus on one location too much, even though much of the action occurs on Terminus. So it all depends on what type of story you are trying to tell and what thematic approaches you want to use to unify the narrative.

Also good points.

In Orson Scott Card's Ender series, the colonized worlds are monocultural because of self-selection. When humans spread into interstellar space, various cultures each decided to tell everyone else to get bent and do it on their own. This creates an internal justification for "one planet, one culture".

It's relatively easy to avoid Single-Biome Planet in your world building — just make each planet have a complex ecosystem like Earth's — but it can also be justified, especially early on in the colonial period of a civilization, since each colony will have a relatively tiny population compared to the homeworld and any terraforming that is being done may be on a very small scale.

It also depends on how hard you want to go on the scale. In reality, it's extraordinarily unlikely — billions to one against — that humans will find a planet nearby that we can hop out of our ship onto, breathe the air, drink the water, and start growing crops (or harvesting the local fauna for food). So you need to make a choice:

• Most worlds we colonize are basically like Earth with a few random differences (super soft).
• We terraform every likely world in a few hundred years, no problem (medium soft).
• Every world requires thousands or millions of years of effort to terraform to something even remotely like Earth; most colonies must have life support to survive (medium hard).

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 8th 2020 at 1:29:45 PM

Also, a planet's biomes will strongly depend on its properties. Earth has very diverse biomes but it's not a given that this is the default mode for exoplanets.

Right. The presence of "biomes" in the first place is predicated on the presence of life, which can diversify across the surface and come up with different evolutionary solutions to different climates. Mars could be said to be "single-biome" because it's a dusty, lifeless rock. It's a bit colder in some places and a bit wetter in others, but if you've seen one patch of barren rocks, you've seen them all.

A world in the process of being terraformed would initially focus on whatever biome the terraformers are most interested in developing, and presumably diversify from there, but it would largely be an intentional process. A world that has had billions of years to develop a native ecosystem, on the other hand, would likely be as diverse as Earth.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 8th 2020 at 1:48:36 PM

Eh, only if it has a diverse climate which isn't a given ... but it's probably better to discuss that point elsewhere.

(Sorry, but I really cannot resist temptations to discuss these aspects...)

Yeah, it's definitely going to be on the softer side. I tried to worldbuild a hard sci-fi setting and didn't know about the amount of research I'd be getting into.

So now, I've settled for softer science fiction, but I still try to make it seem plausible.

I do have one planet where it just so happens to have an atmosphere that is just right for humans from earth, and the plants and animals are safe to eat without any issues. It is slightly smaller than earth, closer to the size of Venus, but is a single-biome planet.

Softness and plausibility are on opposite ends of a scale. Just be clear where you're hand-waving things so you don't trip over trying to make up scientific-sounding reasons for them. As the writers of Star Trek understood so well, lean into your technobabble; don't spend a lot of time justifying it.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 8th 2020 at 2:45:13 PM

If you want a sense of scale without having to fully develop thousands of planetary ecosystems and cultures, one possibility might be to suggest scale, rather than to produce and render it down to the smallest detail.

For example, when a character finds themselves on a new planet, they might encounter a few new creatures, perhaps sharing a few basic traits to imply shared evolution. There needn't be a full ecosystem here—just enough to suggest the presence of one.

Similarly, when a character encounters a new culture, they might see scattered cultural practices, or even just mentions of such. They might further hear talk about neighbouring cultures. Once again, the full cultures needn't be present—just the impression of them.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Jul 8th 2020 at 9:17:51 PM

And yet amusingly enough, the nearest "Earth-like" planet in terms of insolation (solar radiation received) and geology currently circles Proxima Centauri just a "measly" 4 light years and change away.

There are also a number of Earth candidates we now know of within 50 light years or so of Earth. If interstellar travel ever becomes reality FTL or otherwise, we might find that proposition a lot closer than we think.

It is extremely unlikely that any of those planets have human-inhabitable atmosphere. If we were observing the solar system from Alpha Centauri, Venus would appear to be a near duplicate of Earth.

Not necessarily. A spectrograph would give you the differentiation from that far.

Though to do an accurate spectrograph measurement of a planet, we'd need direct imaging which most exo-planets lack at the moment. (Though we do have images of some and spectrography has confirmed water on at least three of them.)

Even if they aren't human habitable in their natural state, wouldn't they be easier to terraform?

Assuming we had the technology, that is.

Edited by Count_Spatula on Jul 8th 2020 at 10:19:07 AM

Just because a planet is roughly Earth's size and in its star's Goldilocks zone doesn't mean it has an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, liquid water, plants covering the surface, animals wandering around, etc. We have absolutely no way of knowing what the conditions are like without a much more in-depth survey.

We are deploying more powerful space telescopes that may let us perform spectrographic analysis of the atmospheres of such exoplanets — at least the close ones — but even that is a long-shot for determining what they are actually like.

It could have no magnetic field, or a runaway greenhouse effect. It could be covered entirely in sulfides. It could be sterilized by its sun's flares every thousand years (Proxima is a particularly likely candidate here as it's a red dwarf, which tend to be very unstable in their early lives). It could be bombarded constantly by asteroids. If it does have life, that life could be so chemically different from us that we can't eat, drink, or breathe anything.

The chances of it being sufficiently Earthlike for us to move in tomorrow are miniscule, but we literally cannot know unless we investigate further.

"Could we terraform it?" Given enough time and enough materiel we could terraform almost anything, but with the technology we possess today... well, we couldn't get there in less than ten thousand years, but if we did, it could take millions of years to achieve an Earthlike climate and ecosystem on something like a Mars or a Venus. If the planet already has an ecosystem, then we'd have to figure out if it's compatible with our life. If not, we face the daunting prospect of killing every organism on the planet so we can put ours on: playing God on a never-before-seen scale.

Or, we could take the Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan route and lob a magical terraforming grenade at the place, wait a few days, and voila!

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 8th 2020 at 10:28:10 AM

On habitation, it also depends on how far you want lean into the transhuman or even posthuman angle as well, though that opens another can of worms. After all, it's much easier to enhance humanity than to make a planet match the extremely specific and exacting conditions we need to survive. A lot more habitation options become available when your body is a lot more robust and able to handle more variable environments, or if you want to go for the digital uploading route, not even needing to worry about pesky biological needs like breathing, eating, drinking etc. Eclipse Phase, for example, has habitats everywhere due to the fact that many people lead digital lives as infomorphs, and for those that live more physical existences, they have the options of having much more robust and less needy bodies to use.

For something more large scale, things like the Culture and Orion's Arm come to mind. Both have rather stunningly different societies and cultures even with the abundance of post-scarcity utopias in them and the interconnectedness between all the major power due to the differences in thought between them.

Edited by ericshaofangwang on Jul 9th 2020 at 6:00:20 PM

Like I said before, in Space Opera, you can decide which rules of reality simply don't apply. You can have every Goldilocks Zone planet be a perfect analogue of Earth, ready to infect with the disease that is our species. You can give humans magical terraforming technology that fixes up any barren rock in a matter of decades or centuries. You can decide that most life in the galaxy can eat most other life in the galaxy, with only amusing or minor side-effects.

This is the ultimate prerogative of the author. The purpose of my posts is to remind everyone of the baseline reality, so we all know what we're choosing to deviate from.

The reason I brought all this up now is that, in a more realistic setting, there are reasonable justifications for Planetville and Single-Biome Planet: any recently colonized world is indeed likely to have a small population in a single biome with a fairly homogenous culture.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 9th 2020 at 6:35:20 AM