Colony World Frontiers

[fredtheobviouspseudonym]

Either it's a very new world or the culture goes ape on ZPG.

If you have a world that is very good to the people on it and lots of resources you'll wind up with lots of kids. A few generations and the population pressure will make being a frontiersperson pretty much a historical occupation.

Thomas Jefferson thought that it would take 1000 years for EuroAmericans to fill in the interior of the United States. It was pretty much done, the frontier declared closed, 54 years after he died in 1826. Even if you start with one city and an entire world that might add some 250 years (and I'm being generous) to the time needed to settle the whole planet so that there were no frontier areas left. Exception -- regions just too inhospitable for high-density human life (think the Gobi Desert and Antarctica -- and there are people living in the Gobi!)

Questions (and my views thereon)

1.) "What level of technology do they have access to?"

What level do they want? You may have some people today living like a Mountain Man & his kin on a ridgetop in Montana, nothing in their homes except reproductions from 1820 and before. But when their kid falls out of a tree they're going to want an up-to-date emergency room, complete with MRI.

So I'd guess that if your sophonts in the future are anything like humans even the most primitive abode will have SOTA (state of the art, i.e., TL 10) communications in case of emergency; also for communication with friends and family, immediate access to data, games, & education for their young-uns. They might not use it often but they'll have it.

Also -- emergency medicine at SOTA, with the ability to call in help ASAP. Someone may be willing to die to live up to their views on limiting technology, but they probably won't sacrifice loved ones to that obsession.

In these areas there's going to be major pressure to supply enough tech to the frontiersfolks, no matter what. In a capitalist society the $ rewards will be enough to ensure adequate levels of production; in a socialist one there will be massive political demand for it. Same outcome. And if the frontiersfolk can't get these basic elements, they probably won't be living on the frontier.

Remember also that at TL-10 (at least 3rd Edition TL 10) most "stuff" is going to be made by automated factories, which have the capacity to reproduce themselves very quickly. So the production plant will grow to meet the need PDQ.

2.) " . . . time spent maintaining it?" AGain, at TL-10, robot repairer/maintenance crews will cover most of this. You'll have a hard core of TL-10 tech experts who are called in to do the fixing the robots can't -- but that'll be a small percentage of the human population. By TL-10 the number of maintenance issues that a SAI or AI can't handle are going to be pretty few & far between, at least in run-of-the-mill production.

3.) " . . . rest of their time doing?" What do they do on Dallas? If you don't have to scrape around every day to survive you can create art, live like a Mountain Man if you want (and call for help on your iPad when something goes wrong), explore science, watch stars, whatever!

4.) " . . . trading with the main colony . . . " Depends on what the colony wants & needs. If you're living like a Mountain Man but still need to buy an iPad, pay for health insurance, and cover the datagrid costs, you'll have to find something in them thar hills that people in the city will want. Maybe they want free-range squirrel stew meat? Or pelts? Or paintings of the beauties of nature? Or a guide for their weekend getaway? I'd guess that at TL-10 most prospecting/natural resource discovery will be automated, have robot explorers (maybe microbot) searching for stuff.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by fredtheobviouspseudonym

Either it's a very new world or the culture goes ape on ZPG.

Thomas Jefferson thought that it would take 1000 years for EuroAmericans to fill in the interior of the United States. It was pretty much done, the frontier declared closed, 54 years after he died in 1826.

It was never 'done'. This is an important and oft-overlooked point.

North America's frontier was not closed because it was fully 'settled', in the sense that Jefferson meant. It's never come remotely close to that. Intead it was closed in the sense that the continent had been explored (by Americans) and mapped and conquered politically, and technology was rendering the Jeffersonian 'pioneering' model irrelevant.

Even today, North America is rather sparsely populated, overall, compared to much of the Old World. The population of the USA is concentrated east of the 100th meridian and on the West Coast, for the most part, if you look at satellite mosaics of city light, there are vast empty sweeps from roughly the middle of Kansas over into the Rocky Mountains. You don't start hitting dense population again until you're past the Sierra Nevada. (Salt Lake City is an exception.)

This is relevant to the OP world because much depends on the definition of 'pioneering'. With a solid TL10 industrial infrastructure behind them and a world friendlier than Terra, the frontier is likely to be 'closed' in the North American sense very quickly. Presumably they have very detailed space-borne observations of the whole planet, so mapping is not an issue. People/machines will still need to take close-up looks at many things to get the details, but we're not talking about vast unknown prairies and mountains.

At high tech levels, explored territory accessible to industrialized regions tends to be not so much 'colonized' as 'settled'. It's more like real estate development rather than pioneering.

(Now, if some special circumstances have limited the available knowedge, and for some reason space flight is not an option to the civilization in question, that would change things somewhat.)

[fredtheobviouspseudonym]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

It was never 'done'. This is an important and oft-overlooked point.

Polite disagreement; apples & oranges.

I was using the US Census Bureau's definition of 1890. (IIRC this was "more than 2 and less than 5 persons per square mile.)

Basically, while the Western US had and has very low population density, by 1890 all property was owned by "somebody" -- either private citizens or the states or the Federal Gov't -- and the property had been surveyed so that every square inch was assigned to some owner.

You can't just go out and raise a cabin on land you like -- there is now some sort of title transfer. You can still homestead (IIRC) but the rules for ownership have changed. (Among other things, I think there are limits on how much of the mineral rights you can claim.)