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Old 11-08-2017, 12:06 AM   #61
Johnny1A.2
 
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Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

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Originally Posted by johndallman View Post
Yes. There's no practical way to make it self-supporting, so that the population can grow without commensurate increases in the amount of supplies you have to ship there.
Actually, you probably just barely could, at fantastic cost. The same applies to space colonization for now, and many of the same technologies necessary to do one apply to the other as well.

But travel time to Antarctica (and most places on Earth now) is so low with modern tech that 'colonizing' it is meaningless. It would be like talking about England colonizing Cheshire in 1600, or a city being built in the Mojave Desert today and calling it a 'colony'. Meaningless.

Antarctica has very limited comparison utility for space, except in purely technological terms.
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Old 11-08-2017, 12:08 AM   #62
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Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

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Except for panspermic colonies there's no reason to colonize with biological organisms at all.
This is true, in the THS world. It's the same old issue, the existence of cheap effective SAI and uploads means that it's hard to see anything else doing anything, interstellar colonization makes no more or less sense than biologicals doing much of anything else, anywhere in-setting. Humans, bioroids, genetic uplifts, why bother? SAI/ghosts can almost always outcompete.
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Old 11-08-2017, 12:10 AM   #63
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Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

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Bio-people don't make sense for several existing things in the setting, notably in this case distributibuted swarm systems like Starswarm and transmission as data. Since these are the best available methods of interstellar travel in the setting, by significant margins in terms of speed, efficiency and cost, I think it is probably reasonable to expect that serious attempts might use them.
Biologicals are somewhat superfluous for most things in the THS world, including on Earth itself. It's a WSOD issue that the setting simply requires be ignored to function.
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Old 11-08-2017, 12:42 AM   #64
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Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

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Biologicals are somewhat superfluous for most things in the THS world, including on Earth itself. It's a WSOD issue that the setting simply requires be ignored to function.
There's a difference between "bio-sapients in spacecraft" and "bio-sapients in a microbot swarm" or "bio-sapients transmitted by radio".
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Old 11-09-2017, 03:04 AM   #65
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Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

There is a treaty against settling Antartica. It is probable that a settlement would not make economic sense but currently it is forbidden. Argentina stretches research as much as possible so if that treaty is ended or abrogated by someone they can claim a chunk. Their main research facility has a post office, a sortof local government and they have had married couples that have had children born there. Gives them a strong claim that it is their territory.
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Old 11-09-2017, 03:21 AM   #66
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Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

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There is a treaty against settling Antartica. It is probable that a settlement would not make economic sense but currently it is forbidden.
There is not, however, a treaty against setting Greenland. It manages to have the lowest population density of any country by a pretty large margin (the next lowest of any significant size is Mongolia, with more than sixty times the population density).
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Old 11-20-2017, 08:47 PM   #67
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Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

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There is a treaty against settling Antartica. It is probable that a settlement would not make economic sense but currently it is forbidden.
Yeah, but that isn't stopping anything that matters. The treaty is mostly honored because at the moment it suits the signatories to do so. When somebody with the power has a serious self-interested motive to ignore the treaty, they'll ignore it.

As Anthony notes, Greenland isn't treaty-protected and it's being mostly ignored right now, too. So for that matter are big swaths of the Great Plains in the USA and large parts of Asia.

Demographics is an interesting subject, and one that is by no means fully understood. If you read a lot of old classic SF by Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, etc., you see a looming Malthusian dread that never materialized, the 'population bomb' was visibly a fizzle by 1980, for those willing to admit what they were seeing.

But the assumption of steadily growing population was natural, since it fit what had been going on for quite some time up until then. Now there's a tendency to assume that wealthy societies and advanced technology equal low or negative female fertility rates, and that's not established with any degree of certainty. It's perfectly possible that population growth rates will kick back into high gear at some point. Since we have an imperfect idea of why they fell, we can't say anything with much confidence about future trends.

(And if nothing else, evolutionary factors tend to press in that direction over long periods.)
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Old 11-26-2017, 11:28 PM   #68
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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.
Decades? Antimatter? You're talking about real engines; the thread is about FTL, with turnaround time of weeks.

As for who'd want to go, isn't there a hidden cluster of xoxes/rogue AIs in the outer system? They've got reason to get far away from hostile humans, like the early ahumans of Orion's Arm. Whether they can get access to a drive/ship is another matter.
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Old 11-27-2017, 04:29 PM   #69
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Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

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Decades? Antimatter? You're talking about real engines; the thread is about FTL, with turnaround time of weeks.
Yes, I missed that, and acknowledged this.
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Old 11-28-2017, 09:32 PM   #70
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Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

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Decades? Antimatter? You're talking about real engines; the thread is about FTL, with turnaround time of weeks.

As for who'd want to go, isn't there a hidden cluster of xoxes/rogue AIs in the outer system? They've got reason to get far away from hostile humans, like the early ahumans of Orion's Arm. Whether they can get access to a drive/ship is another matter.
Along with them would be people who loathe transhumanism and the associated Fifth Wave ideologies and customs, they are canonically mentioned in text. They would actually be a good analog of the people who founded Massachusetts Bay colony, in terms of their relationship to their larger society.

As time passes, you might see some of the harder-core anarchocapitalists among the Duncanites want to get away, too. Over time, the Belt will inevitably get less free-and-easy, as populations grow, and later generations fall away from the founding vision and the 'winners' in the free-for-all grow in power. So there would be an outward pressure there.

The hardcore 'green' Duncanites would also want to find new environments to set up to ecospheres for its own sake, sort of like they do on Europa.

The TSA might want to set up some enclaves out-System too, just in case China ever really, completely loses patience with them.
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