Steve Jackson Games - Site Navigation
Home General Info Follow Us Search Illuminator Store Forums What's New Other Games Ogre GURPS Munchkin Our Games: Home

Go Back   Steve Jackson Games Forums > Roleplaying > Transhuman Space

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 10-30-2017, 11:06 AM   #11
Dr. Beckenstein
 
Dr. Beckenstein's Avatar
 
Join Date: Sep 2013
Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

I think if it becomes possible, it would be the result of research at the Shezbeth black hole.

So, Vosper - Babbage, in partnership with Hawking Industries would go out first, with heavy support by Great Britain, the EU (yeah ...) and South Africa. "Spacecraft of the Solar System" states that there are nationalists in GB's space fleet. They could try to make the interstellar expeditions "pure British" enterprises, which would raise the wrath of the rest-EU.

IMO, the main opponents would be the preservationists. They would not be happy that transhumanity will spoil the rest of the universe.

Other conflicts would depend on what it is out there.

Virginia (the planet) would probably visited by an international expedition ("look, but don't touch. At least not until we are sure there are no intelligent natives"), but Green Duncanites like Avatar Klusterkorp would probably try to get their hands on it. This could trigger a conflict between the Duncanites and the forces of order (everyone who is no Duncanite).

If there is no life, other stars are just orbited by lifeless rocks and gas giants that contain probably the same stuff found in the solar system. Nothing worth to fight about. Every crack cult could claim it's own star system to live happily by their own memes.

The exemption would be stars with "strategic" value, like when the star drive uses jump lines or worm holes that could be blocked.

Thoughts?
Dr. Beckenstein is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-30-2017, 11:15 AM   #12
Anthony
 
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Astromancer View Post
So, who's sending a colony out first? Who'll try to stop them? Will this delay the final war? Or bring it on?
Probably no-one, at least for a fairly extended period; there aren't likely to be any resources out there that are meaningfully different from what's available in the solar system, and there's still plenty of unclaimed stuff in the solar system.
__________________
My GURPS site and Blog.
Anthony is online now   Reply With Quote
Old 10-30-2017, 03:34 PM   #13
Astromancer
 
Astromancer's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: West Virginia
Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

Colonies are more likely to be founded for ideological than ecconomic motives.
__________________
Per Ardua Per Astra!


Ancora Imparo
Astromancer is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 11-02-2017, 04:34 PM   #14
Astromancer
 
Astromancer's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: West Virginia
Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

Which religous groups most want total memetic purity? They'd go out. Wouldn't they?
__________________
Per Ardua Per Astra!


Ancora Imparo
Astromancer is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 11-02-2017, 05:53 PM   #15
Mehman
 
Mehman's Avatar
 
Join Date: Apr 2016
Location: Texas
Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

I don't know economic terms but here are my thoughts.

I would think there could be economic reasons for starting a colony instead of every colony being filled with idealogical cultists. (Not saying the latter won't be common - they just need the funds to get out of our orbit.) An economic colony would probably be best designed for a slow-benefit economic idea: the people that put money into the project could expect returns after a large amount of time has passed like, say, 50+ years.

Say it's a mining colony whose main mined ore is one of our rare metals on Earth (take your pick as I'm not going to be very specific). They'd probably have other elements or naturally-occuring alloys that they dig up, but their main focus is on this rare metal.

After however many years, they have all this ore ready to be shipped back to Earth. A ship comes and gets the ore all at once, takes it back to Earth, and profit, which ends up bottoming-out prices for the rare metal ore and leads to another global depression. Nothing stops them from hoarding it like DeBeers' diamonds and trickling them into the market slowly. That way they could inflate the price of the material. Or, you know, ships could visit the colony every ten years, fill up their cargo holds, and return back to Earth to profit along the years.

I hope that makes sense.
Mehman is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 11-02-2017, 06:00 PM   #16
sir_pudding
Wielder of Smart Pants
 
sir_pudding's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ventura CA
Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

You would just mine it in the asteroid belt which has all the rare earth metals in reasonable abundance.

The costs of an interstellar colony are ridiculous, as are the costs of interstellar shipping (and at best you will have a turnaround time measured in decades if not centuries). If you need a significant fraction of GWP in antimatter to make the trip once, selling some ore after a couple of centuries isn't going to be profitable.
sir_pudding is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 11-02-2017, 06:23 PM   #17
Mehman
 
Mehman's Avatar
 
Join Date: Apr 2016
Location: Texas
Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

Quote:
Originally Posted by sir_pudding View Post
You would just mine it in the asteroid belt which has all the rare earth metals in reasonable abundance.

The costs of an interstellar colony are ridiculous, as are the costs of interstellar shipping (and at best you will have a turnaround time measured in decades if not centuries). If you need a significant fraction of GWP in antimatter to make the trip once, selling some ore after a couple of centuries isn't going to be profitable.
Fair enough.
Mehman is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 11-02-2017, 10:26 PM   #18
tshiggins
 
tshiggins's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Denver, Colorado
Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Astromancer View Post
Which religous groups most want total memetic purity? They'd go out. Wouldn't they?
Mormons are an obvious choice, which is why they got picked for it in The Expanse. Maybe Zoroastrians, as well, especially if they play a significant role in India's rise, or the Kalash if they last that long (which, unfortunately, they probably won't).

Another option is a stateless national group, that wants a place of its own, far away from obnoxious neighbors. Yazidis might be such a group, as could the Zoroastrians who live in India, or even Palestinians or Rohingya.

Any of those options would require a massive organizational structure of people who were both affluent and alienated enough in their current circumstances to want their own world, far away from anyone.

Not sure how practical the notion is, but as long as the group has a lot of money, and several thousand people willing to go, the notion is at least somewhat plausible.
__________________
--
MXLP:9 [JD=1, DK=1, DM-M=1, M(FAW)=1, SS=2, Nym=1 (nose coffee), sj=1 (nose cocoa), Maz=1]
"Some days, I just don't know what to think." -Daryl Dixon.
tshiggins is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 11-02-2017, 10:38 PM   #19
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

Quote:
Originally Posted by tshiggins View Post
The people who go first are the ones who develop the drive, and that's most likely an advanced nation on Earth.

Why do I say that?

In THS, the vast, vast majority of intelligent beings -- people, AIs, uplifted animals -- live on Earth. And, since economic power ties directly to population (freshman-level macroeconomics, here, people...), Earth produces and controls the vast majority of the wealth, in the solar system.

And that means Earth is the center of technological innovation, although some work gets done, elsewhere (frequently, in biotech research by corporations who don't want to obey the laws of any particular nation).

In fact, I'd say that Earth is so dominant, that the only reason to have FTL discovered anywhere else is that the GM wants it to be, for reasons of his or her own. Logically, it would be highly unlikely that it take place, anywhere else.

I'd say Europe is most likely to be the first to discover it, although the U.S. and other advanced nations might have a good shot. The French Arm, anybody? :)
That's all true, but there's one caveat. If the physical conditions that enable FTL are such that they are hard to detect or recognize from Earth, but more clear somewhere else, then the breakthrough might happen somewhere else simply because that's where it can happen.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Astromancer View Post
Like it says.

Assume a FTL drive is developed. It takes roughly half a month to travel a light year. Given the structural and supply limits of the ships, anything within 50 Lys is in easy reach. Anything with in 70Lys is in practical reach.

So, who's sending a colony out first? Who'll try to stop them? Will this delay the final war? Or bring it on?

Explain your ideas.
It depends in part on who has access to it first. Once the idea is known others will eventually duplicate it, how long that takes depends on how hard it is to duplicate (or steal, or both).

The major fifth wave nation-states have the resources...but not necessarily the motivation. They're awfully comfortable and most of them are pretty internally peaceful (unrealistically so, in fact). There are small groups that might be minded to found their own version of Massachusetts Bay, but whether they get to or not depends on how cheap and available star flight is.

Probably nobody would actually try to stop them, at least not in 2100. Who knows what things look like in 2125? Things can change very quickly sometimes.

The poorer people in the less advanced states might be more interested in moving, if an opportunity looked to exist. The nanosocialist alliance might be interested in founding colonies for ideological reasons, and as a fall-back in case China comes after them again.

You might see groups of bioroids or disfavored genemod people looking for a place where they can be surrounded by their own kind (of whatever kind that is).
__________________
HMS Overflow-For conversations off topic here.
Johnny1A.2 is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 11-02-2017, 10:43 PM   #20
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
Probably no-one, at least for a fairly extended period; there aren't likely to be any resources out there that are meaningfully different from what's available in the solar system, and there's still plenty of unclaimed stuff in the solar system.
That's the sort of assessment that's basically guesswork, though. Nobody can possibly know what will be found until somebody goes, or sends a machine. It might be that something unexpected and useful would be found only near one star in 1 million, say. 0.000001 stars are the site of something unexpected and useful. That's still 1000-4000 stars in the galaxy that fall into that category.

The other factor is that 'unclaimed stuff' turns into 'claimed stuff' pretty fast, once things get going. It's slow at first but it accelerates as more and more people gain access to the resources in question. Given the state of the Solar System that we see in 2100, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if just about everything is claimed and owned (if not yet in use) by 2150.
__________________
HMS Overflow-For conversations off topic here.
Johnny1A.2 is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Fnords are Off
[IMG] code is Off
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -6. The time now is 04:10 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.9
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.