Colony World Frontiers

[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.)