Quote:
Originally Posted by Agemegos
...A little later they "privatised" the colony by selling off the settlement rights to a tycoon. The tycoon in question spent a fortune on subsidising a large number of well-equipped and highly skilled pioneers to go and then, with the last gasp of his resources, went there himself with a battalion of mercenaries. ... That fellow established a monarchy, which under the usual tendency of monarchies without divine sanction engendered an aristocracy. With the population growing and transport and comms failing to keep up that developed into a feudal government and then balkanised into a multitude of local monarchies. That was the state that explorers found Navabharata in in the age of piracy.
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I would expect that particular scenario to result in only one settled pole, as it seems low tech would set in long before population pressure made colonizing the other pole attractive. Maybe some clever TL4 application of the colonial high biotech allows them to build and crew boats that can cross the equatorial oceans?
As for:
Divine monarchs: the history described above seems ripe for bizarre founder effects, so I can swallow it. I'm betting that the apparent monarch sacrifices are mostly staged (unless something has gone very very wrong). Rich aristos with TL10 knowledge and equipment are not going to routinely auto-immolate, they'll burn a convincing facsimile and take one of many high-tech-high-wealth escape hatches from the problem. (
Some might out of religious duty, but most or all stretches my credulity.)
10,000 competing micro-states exposed to the Empire and the Suite in cultural and technological stasis: er, um, I don't understand. You give historical examples, but the high tech contacts those historical examples had were not the Empire, they were colonial Empires out to make a quick buck. The Flat Black Empire will be applying it's TL10 social science to the colony looking for cracks and crannies to drive wedges of human misery reduction into, and with something so huge and balkanized there's going to be a lot of cracks. Since the Empire has really good social science, they aren't failing due to incompetence. Since they are inhumanly moral, they aren't failing due to corruption. Since this place is over 10^9 people and in the Core, it stretches credulity that they are unwilling to spend the resources. I suspect politics.