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Old 11-07-2017, 01:56 AM   #51
johndallman
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Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

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Originally Posted by Flyndaran View Post
There's no settlement colony in Antarctica now for a reason.
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.

For an interstellar colony, that depends on a whole lot of things that can't be known until you look at the site, and try some experiments. You can presumably live in space by similar means to how it's done in Sol system, but does that cut down your need for supplies enough to make it practical? If there's an ecosystem, can we actually add our preferred food sources to it and have them be productive without collapsing it? Will humans be able to live in that ecosystem without dying of allergies?
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Old 11-07-2017, 10:33 AM   #52
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Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

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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.

For an interstellar colony, that depends on a whole lot of things that can't be known until you look at the site, and try some experiments. You can presumably live in space by similar means to how it's done in Sol system, but does that cut down your need for supplies enough to make it practical? If there's an ecosystem, can we actually add our preferred food sources to it and have them be productive without collapsing it? Will humans be able to live in that ecosystem without dying of allergies?
Except for panspermic colonies there's no reason to colonize with biological organisms at all.
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Old 11-07-2017, 10:37 AM   #53
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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.
If you're not interested in a place of organic beings to live there's no reason to set up anything but scientific outposts and/or mining areas (if you can find anything worth transporting back to your civilization).
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Old 11-07-2017, 10:46 AM   #54
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Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

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If you're not interested in a place of organic beings to live there's no reason to set up anything but scientific outposts and/or mining areas (if you can find anything worth transporting back to your civilization).
  • Military installations if what you find is either of value to anybody else or represents a security threat on its own.
  • Shell tourism operations. The transit time is light-speed and the clients are long-lived.
  • The infrastructure to support all of the above: power, shells, maintenance, communications, in-system transport, refueling, and at least virtual spaces for off-duty infomorph relaxation. Ultimately the only thing you don't need is farming (and you might even need that, if you are using biosynthetic pathways for any production).
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Old 11-07-2017, 03:11 PM   #55
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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.
I think that ship of logic has long since sailed for THS. The lack of sense for biologicals sent to space at all has already been shoved under the rug.

If people make sense in space, for "reasons", then one could just as easily use such "reasons" for sending people to the next star system.
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Old 11-07-2017, 03:35 PM   #56
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Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

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I think that ship of logic has long since sailed for THS. The lack of sense for biologicals sent to space at all has already been shoved under the rug.

If people make sense in space, for "reasons", then one could just as easily use such "reasons" for sending people to the next star system.
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.
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Old 11-07-2017, 03:43 PM   #57
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Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

The very first post supposes FTL, so I don't think the more plausible means of extrasolar transport of THS R.A.W. really fit.

(Would R.A.W. be the right word to use or should it be S.A.W. for setting as written?)
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Old 11-07-2017, 03:56 PM   #58
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Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

Good point. With FTL the security concerns become much more important, and the Great Filter starts looking pretty menacing. I think you might see an international alliance in respect to defense and exploration in that case.
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Old 11-07-2017, 04:22 PM   #59
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Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

Note that dumb ideas can still make for interesting campaigns. One campaign I considered (though never actually ran) a time-forward version of THS called Posthuman Stars. Basic idea is that people using the Shezbeth black hole came up with a way to generate one way wormholes (no return trip unless you found your own black hole at the destination and built a station, though they did verify via radio that it worked), and a bunch of people decided that colonizing the stars was the right thing to do.

Queue warfare and loss of records in the Solar System, and then rebuilding and improving the tech to allow recall. Some of the extrasolar colonies did eventually phone home. Others didn't. Clearly some adventurous types need to go out there and find out what happened.
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Old 11-08-2017, 12:01 AM   #60
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Default Re: If interstellar Colonies become possible, who goes first?

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The highlands of Scotland are crap land, full of more advanced and technically Christian savages, and you can't grow tobacco there. There were economic motives for Virginia. Guys like Raleigh and Frobisher had every reason to think that it would make them personally wealthy.
And sometimes it did and sometimes it didn't. The exact same logic applies to interstellar colonization, once the technology to do it becomes cheap enough. There will be people who see, or think they see, opportunities. Often they'll be wrong, some will turn out to be right. Probably 20 people who go bust for every 1 that makes money, but the 1 is the one that matters.

Some would prefer to invest in the Solar System instead, many will invest in both. Some of the same people who hoped to make money in Virginia (on Earth) and Carolina also invested in the East India trade and domestically too.
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