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Old 10-28-2017, 01:47 PM   #1
Astromancer
 
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Default If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

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.
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Old 10-28-2017, 05:51 PM   #2
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Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

The Duncanites go first. Possibly Red and Green separately. They're the ones with the pantropic ideology.

Almost anyone has a rationale to explore but the Duncanites are the ones who want to spread humanity everywhere regardless of how much they have to change it to thrive or how long it takes to get there.

Nobody has any particularly sane economic motives. Radically important new knowledge could result from exploration but with the times involved 19th century style resource exploitation is going nowhere.

It's as bad or worse (generally worse) than TL4 sailing ships to the far side of the world and in economies where light-speed lag disadvantages the L-5 colonies in trading this is simply too far into the future for long-term planning.

Eve with an analogue to tea from China it's extremely unlikely that the TS tech couldn't synthesize it much easier than it could be shipped in months or years.
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Old 10-28-2017, 11:48 PM   #3
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Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

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? :)
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Old 10-29-2017, 05:11 AM   #4
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Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

The telephone sanitisers, of course.
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Old 10-29-2017, 09:18 AM   #5
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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.
The OP didn't ask just for going. He asked about a _colony.

Preservationist Europe might not even land humans on any Earth-like worlds it finds. Just totally decontaminated cybershells.
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Old 11-02-2017, 10:38 PM   #6
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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).
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Old 10-29-2017, 09:57 AM   #7
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Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
...

Nobody has any particularly sane economic motives. Radically important new knowledge could result from exploration but with the times involved 19th century style resource exploitation is going nowhere.

It's as bad or worse (generally worse) than TL4 sailing ships to the far side of the world and in economies where light-speed lag disadvantages the L-5 colonies in trading this is simply too far into the future for long-term planning.

Eve with an analogue to tea from China it's extremely unlikely that the TS tech couldn't synthesize it much easier than it could be shipped in months or years.
It's much worse for most stars. Even the slowest Age of Sail ships took less than a year to get halfway around the world, IIRC.

"It takes roughly half a month to travel a light year" - that sounds like something on the close order of 25c to me. I have various travel times worked out for 500c, so multiply those travel times by 20... Sorting the "interesting" stars (the really-really close ones, the really close ones that we used to think might have life-bearing worlds in the Goldilocks zone back before we started actually looking, and the subgiants) by distance from Sol, and rounding the travel time to the nearest day:

Code:
Star                Distance from Earth   Travel Time
                    in light-years        in days at 25c
Proxima Centauri            4.22                62
Rigil Kentaurus B           4.39                64
Rigil Kentaurus A           4.39                64
Barnard's Star              5.94                87
Wolf 359                    7.80               114
Lalande 21185               8.31               121
Sirius                      8.60               126
Epsilon Eridani            10.50               153
Ross 128                   10.89               159
61 Cygni A                 11.36               166
Procyon                    11.41               167
61 Cygni B                 11.43               167
Groombridge 34             11.7                171
Epsilon Indi               11.83               173
Tau Ceti                   11.90               174
Van Maanen's Star          14.37               210
Omicron (2) Eridani        16.45               240
70 Ophiuchi                16.59               242
Altair                     16.77               245
Sigma Draconis             18.81               275
Eta Cassiopeiae            19.42               284
36 Ophiuichi               19.52               285
HIP 99461                  19.74               288
82 Eridani                 19.76               289
Delta Pavonis              19.92               291
Gliese 581                 20.40               298
Beta Hydri                 20.98               307
Having reached the closest subgiant to Sol (and thus a reasonable place to go do some science up-close), I'll stop. Note that all of these interstellar distances would fit into a single Traveller subsector. (Galacticly speaking, lightspeed is slow.)

So, yes, nobody's doing this for economic reasons - it's easier to build a habitat somewhere in the Sol system (including the Oort Cloud). Ideology or bust!
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Last edited by robkelk; 10-29-2017 at 10:02 AM.
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Old 10-29-2017, 03:12 PM   #8
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Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

I assume those founding interstellar colonies will want space to grow in and privacy-isolation. If you have a utopian vision, you might want isolation to keep your followers ( or clones and biroids raising parahuman children) in a state of memetic purity.
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Old 10-29-2017, 03:20 PM   #9
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Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

Nanodynamics has the Starswarm technology and as Duncanites they have the ideology to use it.
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Old 10-29-2017, 09:52 PM   #10
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Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

Quote:
Originally Posted by sir_pudding View Post
Nanodynamics has the Starswarm technology and as Duncanites they have the ideology to use it.
I'm not sure the starswarms even have the ability to replicate themselves. Even if they do I'm not sure Duncanite pantropic ideology goes as far as colonizing the galaxy with self-replicating nanoswarms. Duncanites actually like flesh and don't seem to have that much interest in doing away with it.
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