Miscellaneous Terran question-and-answer thread

[Absalom]

Now this is accurate, while the other bits are off: the absence of FTL will shape how our civilization travels to the stars, but will not shape IF it does so.

What do you mean? Did you think I said we needed FTL to travel the stars? .

I mean this: Civilization != Empire.

To illustrate the difference, the Roman Empire was indeed an Empire, but it had too many unrelated nationalities within it to be a Civilization. Meanwhile, the ancient Greeks were at least one civilization, but until Alexander and his father they were not an Empire, but instead a collection of city-states, which could individually be considered empires.

I am saying that "our Civilization can travel to the stars without FTL", and mean exactly that. You are saying "our Civilization can only travel to the stars with FTL", but mean "our Governance can only travel to the stars with FTL", which bears important differences.

Civilization as we know it is highly interconnected, but before the American Civil War, most Americans hadn't been outside of their state, and many likely hadn't been outside of the area of their birth. The same goes for the ancient Chinese, Japanese, whatever those desert red-heads that lived north-west of China were, etc. Civilizations can span areas far wider than individuals cross in a lifetime, or even several.

not entirely correct, civilizations can span areas far wider than individuals WILL cross in a lifetime, or several, but CAN cross in a lifetime will not work, top limit for it to function is about a month single trip, do note that this is for information to cross that distance, for the army the number can be slightly higher.

do note that is for a single empire/political entity. but the same logic is actually true for civilization as a whole, without communication it is not a single civilization, it is several that do not connect with each other. western/asian/central america/australia before 1000 AD comes to mind, even if australian is questionable as civilization at all in that era.

A civilisation can probably be larger as long as it can keep enforcing it's power. The information halflife was probably a month or so in the british Empire I'd wager, but the time it took to London was most likely larger. Which is why so much power tended to be vested into governors, with constant movements of armies and forces.

Civilization != Empire. Both exist within the sociological domain, but they aren't the same. Civilizations are nations in the old sense: a group of people with a shared culture. Empires are nations in the other sense: a government with control over a given area and/or population.

Now, for any sort of Empire that we've ever seen (maybe with the exception of Hegemonies, but I'd question it even then) a distance that took over a lifetime to cross wouldn't work. However, for a culture, all that's needed is a workable round-trip time for information, and in a non-FTL setting that is much faster than the time required for physical movement. The historical limitation on the size of civilizations was that culture had to travel largely by foot: communication via light massively eases that restriction.

Civilization as we know it is highly interconnected, but before the American Civil War, most Americans hadn't been outside of their state, and many likely hadn't been outside of the area of their birth. The same goes for the ancient Chinese, Japanese, whatever those desert red-heads that lived north-west of China were, etc. Civilizations can span areas far wider than individuals cross in a lifetime, or even several.

No…. no civilizations were an individual has been unable to cross the territory in sufficient time has ever existed. In fact the speed of travel has been one of the major reason why our earthbound empire’s collapse they grew too large to manage this is the reason why it’s impossible to have a civilization of more than one star system if you don’t have FTL the distance become’s to great and the people will lose contact with one another and splinter becoming star faring nomads that may settle a bit of a system at a time but never two at the same time. I suppose in the broadest sense that is a civilization but not an interstellar one. They will be bound by one star at the time isolated and unable to maintain a homogenous presence in the galaxy. Meaning we will have many stellar civilizations but never one interstellar.

A civilisation can probably be larger as long as it can keep enforcing it's power. The information halflife was probably a month or so in the british Empire I'd wager, but the time it took to London was most likely larger. Which is why so much power tended to be vested into governors, with constant movements of armies and forces.

Good luck enforcing your power without proper communications and rapid deployment in sufficient numbers. The british, mongols, romans etc tried it and didn't succeed.

You are making the logical fallacy of equating a civilization with an empire. The Celts on the British Isles were undeniably a civilization, but they were not unified. Empire requires the ability to enforce loyalty, but Civilization requires only cultural communications, not authority or management. The physical bounds on a human civilization today are much wider than they were, not because we can move further in the same time, but because we can communicate further in that time. In two hundred years, the differences between Earth's cultures will almost universally be much smaller, and in many cases may be less than the cultural differences between fans of rival college sports teams.

junk: you could in 1890 travel from london to hong-kong in a bit over 20 days(quite possibly by civilian liner though military might be faster) although admittedly 30 was more likely, not to mention that radio telegraphy was up and running by then...might have been a reason for the increase in size of the British empire as ship speeds went up greatly during the latter half of the 1800.

so hong kong was ceded to te british in 1839(about as far away as you can get from london and still be inside the empire at the time) ship speed at the time could average about 10 knots. going around the cape would give a travel time for a single way trip of about 54 days.
not to forget the suez canal opened for business in 1869, making that particular trip about 30% faster and less likely to require repairs.

the more stable and powerful your system of government is the longer response times are allowable, in human history i do not think ANY empire has managed to keep it working with longer than 60 days response time, many outlying colonies where paying lip service and taxes to the british....basically "protection" money.

so two months is doable, barely, i just do not see how you are supposed to manage 50+ years.(assuming 0.1 light, which is REALLY hauling ass, and sol to alpha centauri, our closest neighbor)

just no.

By dropping all naivete of Empire, and recognizing Civilization is a separate (and cultural instead of governmental) thing. Conquest requires sufficient physical proximity, but communication is the requirement for culture, and thus the maintenance of a Civilization is reigned by different factors than the maintenance of an Empire.

If you go back and read those posts again, you'll see that it was entirely about commercial relevance. For FTL traffic to be commercially meaningful, you need relatively large volumes of materials that are profitable enough to worth going to the expense of transporting them with an FTL drive.

For precious materials that you simply can't duplicate this can be justified, but those will be purchased in fairly small amounts, since, you know, precious == expensive. They won't matter unless you've intentionally designed your setting to in some way need or justify large volumes of traffic for those materials.

For bulk materials, you need the FTL method to be cheaper than just obtaining it locally. If you discover a planetoid of mag-matter in some star system and it doesn't exist in Sol system then you could (especially longer-term, once you've figured out what to use it for) justify FTL to get at it, but iron? Aluminum? Titanium? Even the precious metals like gold? You're going to have to find a very cheap method of FTL indeed for those, for the simple reason that they're going to be cheap to obtain for any legitimately space-faring civilization.

I did read your post and i still don't agree with you... imagine that. Here's why:

Materials alone do not constitute all commerce. There is also intellectual capital that can be traded. Individual ideas and geniuses will become invaluable for high technological societies. Are they not of commercial value? Science is the engine of the economy in an modern civilization, ours included. Science creates jobs, opportunities, solutions etc and has ever increasing commersial value to our civilization. I belived you said that FTL has scientific value. Well trust my word on this one if it has scientific value, it has commercial value.

No. Scientific value != Commercial value.

Maybe we've gained commercial value in the search for the Higgs boson, but the commercial value won't be in the Higgs itself (we simply have no USE for it right now), it'll be in whatever had to be developed in the process. For example, the internet grew partially out of CERN, but the internet wasn't the scientific goal of CERN, it was just a tool to transmit information already obtained.

In comparison, the Higgs boson is of scientific value, but the individual tools used in the process are of lesser scientific value. Similarly, the ordinary hammer is of almost no scientific value because we already know most of what there is to know about it.

As for ideas, those can be transmitted as information. If we wanted to transmit space ship designs to Alpha Centauri we could do it today (well, not today-today, today as in with things that we could design, if we felt so inclined), without FTL. Scientists? To be honest, I see little genuine need to transport them over interstellar distances if there's an intelligent, capable, and cooperative local population. It isn't like they're some sort of magical unicorn; they aren't exactly factory-producible (at least in the sense of standardization: colleges do produce engineers and scientists in varying levels of quantity), but the number who will truly be "irreplaceable" is quite frankly very low, just like in every other field, and those people are almost entirely so because of ideas, which themselves can be transmitted as information.

It’s also important to note that on a local level the universe is not infinite if that was the case we wouldn’t have to leave the solar system at all we can all just sit here until the end of days. As our civilization grows so will our demands, internal conflicts, abilities, etc. sooner or later that pot is going to boil over and we’re going to have to move.

One sub-note to the following reply: these are all reasons to actually favor at most the bare margins of contactability, if that. E.g. "semi-regular attack with nuclear weapons" is a very valid reason to reduce the possibility of contact when you can, but not to maintain or increase it.

FTL allows for us to maintain ties over interstellar distances which are the basis for an interstellar market. That is the importance of FTL in our universe. If it’s available it produces opportunities to grow our civilization. If it’s not available it forces us to find alternative ways to grow. So its significance works both ways in my opinion but this could just be philosophical view of things.

The only basis required for an interstellar market, or any market for that matter, is something worth sufficiently much to justify the effort required to trade it. If you have an FTL wormhole network that requires almost zero time and energy to traverse, and some star system that's 5 lightyears away from the nearest terminus discovers some sort of infinite-energy matter, then that matter will likely be the single most valuable substance in interstellar commerce as soon as it can be sent anywhere, even if it causes the destruction of any wormhole terminus before it can even transit it. Why? Because such an unobtainium would be inherently valuable, particularly to any entity or organization with good foresight.

If FTL is irrelevant it wouldn't be so widely used in science fiction or so heavily debated in the scientific community. Entire universes are made up with this in mind and that includes their commercial aspect. If FTL was irrelevant than it's presence irregardless of how cheap and available could be ignored. This is in my opinion not the case

Honestly, all that any of that means is that most of us like the idea of going to other star systems in somewhat short periods of time. The only time that I've actually seen anyone write out an inquiry to the economics of FTL, it was mostly negative, due to the fact that shipping costs will almost always outweigh profit. And remember, profit is the one unavoidable requirement for continued commerce. This is why I'll be jumping through "absurd production scale" and "we were going there to keep an eye on them anyways, might as well sell some stuff too" hoops if I ever do anything with the "second stage" in my setting. Outsider is more affordable for small shipments, but you can rest assured that two hundred years down the line, most of Humanity's current colonies will only import expensive items from Sol system, because major manufacturers will have built or leased factories in all of the major systems. We're seeing this today with manufacturing, the future won't be able to just erase the economics of reality.

[discord]

absalom: so basically your only definition of 'civilization' is human(or other sentient species) capable of social interaction, not that these should communicate in any reasonable shape or form?

hate to break it to you, it's probably already out there, spreading OUR civilization however and keeping it our civilization requires at the least reliable long range speed of light communication, since we have serious issue with simple radio communication over the short distance of a single light hour away how are we to manage that over light years? inverse square law remember? gonna need some seriously good listening posts to pick up anything useful at those distances.

because without even a communication loop significantly shorter than expected lifespan of the inhabitants? it is not A civilization it is several different civilizations, with effectively no common ground.

[GeoModder]

because without even a communication loop significantly shorter than expected lifespan of the inhabitants? it is not A civilization it is several different civilizations, with effectively no common ground.

they still share a common biology.

[discord]

geo: not for very long.
social situations and impetus change, so does environment, humans are not immune to evolution, give that system a few thousand years and most of the splinters would not even be able to interbreed would be my guess

[Absalom]

absalom: so basically your only definition of 'civilization' is human(or other sentient species) capable of social interaction, not that these should communicate in any reasonable shape or form?

A collection of sentients (I spelled that exactly as I intended) with a shared cultural frame of reference, that is maintained as a shared frame despite cultural changes, yes.

hate to break it to you, it's probably already out there,

Aliens or alien-descended AIs, I assume. Not certain why you "hate to break it" to me, though.

spreading OUR civilization however and keeping it our civilization requires at the least reliable long range speed of light communication, since we have serious issue with simple radio communication over the short distance of a single light hour away how are we to manage that over light years? inverse square law remember? gonna need some seriously good listening posts to pick up anything useful at those distances.

I'll accept it as inherently difficult if we gain the ability to realistically send living, breathing, working humans of a viably large number over a distance between... let's say from the Earth to Saturn, and the technical challenges prevent the type of large transmitters and receivers that we will therefor be able to build in space and currently can't from working reliably for the job even after they've been built.

I can see having problems with the subject when we can't build Arecibo-sized transmitter and receiver dishes (or dipole antennas of comparable size, or whatever else), but after we can build those (which we rightly should be able to if we can transport meaningfully large populations to Saturn, much less another star system) is a different issue.

geo: not for very long.
social situations and impetus change, so does environment, humans are not immune to evolution, give that system a few thousand years and most of the splinters would not even be able to interbreed would be my guess

I wouldn't want to bet one way or another on a million years, but less than ten thousand years and I wouldn't bet a dime on incompatibility. Unless there was an absolute focus on obtaining as high of a population as possible, I just don't see the realism in it, particularly since the exodus from Africa of the proto-Neanderthals and early Homo Sapiens were separated by ~400,000 years. It's been suggested that the pre-chimpanzee and pre-human common ancestors were not only genetically compatible, but actually did once more successfully interbreed about a million years after they split. Do not look to the short timeframes, look to the long.

As far as the incompatibility issue in general, FTL could, in the long-term, actually make it worse. Without a cap on spread-speed you have a sufficiently exponential maximum population growth that could make it virtually impossible to guarantee genetic compatibility between all of the fertile human descendants that could theoretically reach each other (aka Ringworld speciation: speciation via simply swamping the ability of interbreeding to compensate). Realistically, I think that if a government ever produces a project to try to move humanity into an interstellar stage, the mark of how well they do the job will lay in not only whether they succeed at the obvious portion, but also how good of a job the perform in dealing with genetic drift via some sort of meta-genome (by analogy to the epigenome). If, to make up a nonsensical examples, the sub-sentient anemone-like Frondiks of Yuggoth 4 are not capable of interbreeding with the genetically-interpolated super-sentient Hydrogen Hermaphrodites of Yuggoth 6 by way of just adding an appropriate communal-radio-fertility gene to both, then maybe we, as the ancestral species, did not do a good enough job when we went on that first short jaunt away from home.

And yes, I realize that many of us would surely go screaming into oblivion if we actually learned that such things had sprouted of our descendants, but our ancestors from 300 years ago would probably not forgive most of us for liking random details of our current culture anyways .

[GeoModder]

geo: not for very long.
social situations and impetus change, so does environment, humans are not immune to evolution, give that system a few thousand years and most of the splinters would not even be able to interbreed would be my guess

It appears Neanderthals and our kind could interbreed back in prehistoric ages. For that matter, European colonists had no problem getting and giving children to their native 'spouses' in the America's. And how many millennia were those two groups unaware of each other?
Socially, there's even no record of an unchanged civilization on Earth keeping its mores the same over that timespan.

So, I don't buy that as an explanation.

[discord]

geo: no more than six thousand years according to some, seriously though there is a rather significant difference, the ability to change human DNA directly, that kinda changes the situation slightly.

absalom: sizes of antenna does not change the length of the information loop, admittedly it might change data density though from absolutely horrendous to merely bad...but bottom line, does not change the physics of trying to talk to someone light years away.

admittedly, total rewrite of the human genome into a more stable meta container....of some kind, might be a feasible solution, pretty similar to what the loroi are supposed to have.

[Jericho]

I mean this: Civilization! = Empire.

To illustrate the difference, the Roman Empire was indeed an Empire, but it had too many unrelated nationalities within it to be a Civilization. Meanwhile, the ancient Greeks were at least one civilization, but until Alexander and his father they were not an Empire, but instead a collection of city-states, which could individually be considered empires.

The Roman Empire was the name of the roman civilization. It crushed and integrated any other culture that dwelled within its borders. There were no other nations within the Roman Empire they wiped them out. You’re thinking of ethnic groups. The nations that were incorporated in the Roman Empire became provinces and their people became subsequently Romanized or exterminated.

I am saying that "our Civilization can travel to the stars without FTL", and mean exactly that. You are saying "our Civilization can only travel to the stars with FTL", but mean "our Governance can only travel to the stars with FTL", which bears important differences.

I think you’re mistaking civilization to be an aspect of culture, it’s not. Culture is however an aspect of civilization same as political system. They belong together and are affected by one another. I say our civilization will split and deviate when the distances between us become too great to maintain sufficient ties. This is a fact it has happened to every other major civilization before and will happen again, its human nature. It doesn’t even require distance just time as a culture can change radically with one generation alone. What you’re proposing is that two groups of peoples with little to no communications will have the same civilization as each other. We can send culture out in to the stars but local communities are going to produce far more internal culture than they consummate ultimately resulting in two separate civilizations forming. Biologically we could be identical but still share nothing else.

Now, for any sort of Empire that we've ever seen (maybe with the exception of Hegemonies, but I'd question it even then) a distance that took over a lifetime to cross wouldn't work. However, for a culture, all that's needed is a workable round-trip time for information, and in a non-FTL setting that is much faster than the time required for physical movement. The historical limitation on the size of civilizations was that culture had to travel largely by foot: communication via light massively eases that restriction.

This highlights the importance of FTL if you wish to have a civilization of more than one star system you need rapid communication and light still have to travel waste distances to reach their destination. Our closest star is four light-years away. Anytime you send a message you have to wait eight years for response during which enormous changes will occur internally and shape them on their own. Within time their culture, language; society will change until it’s no longer recognizable by the parent civilization.

You are making the logical fallacy of equating a civilization with an empire. The Celts on the British Isles were undeniably a civilization, but they were not unified. Empire requires the ability to enforce loyalty, but Civilization requires only cultural communications, not authority or management. The physical bounds on a human civilization today are much wider than they were, not because we can move further in the same time, but because we can communicate further in that time. In two hundred years, the differences between Earth's cultures will almost universally be much smaller, and in many cases may be less than the cultural differences between fans of rival college sports teams.

I do no such thing. It was Junk who wrote wrongfully and I didn’t bother to correct him because I knew what he probably meant , if you think he doesn’t know the difference tell him but please don’t attribute qoutes that aren't mine to me.

An empire is a political system. Politics are tools of civilizations to govern their people and is subject to cultural influences and ideals as you probably know. The reason why I mentioned our empires on earth is because each one of them was a civilization of their own and imperialism was a key to their success. They spread their civilization to the largest extends possible before their size caught up with them and they crumbled. Again size and the limits of communications made them ultimately unsustainable among many other reasons. And the reason why earth cultural differences are becoming smaller is because we can talk at push of a button we can’t do that at interstellar ranges.

No. Scientific value! = Commercial value.

Maybe we've gained commercial value in the search for the Higgs boson, but the commercial value won't be in the Higgs itself (we simply have no USE for it right now), it'll be in whatever had to be developed in the process. For example, the internet grew partially out of CERN, but the internet wasn't the scientific goal of CERN, it was just a tool to transmit information already obtained.

Right now yes but for the future it will be invaluable because it’s one of the most fundamental discoveries in the history of physics. Seriously from what I read it determines the mass of an object, am I the only one who’s sees the commercial value of manipulating it? Mass effect FTW!
I don’t see this as anything contradictory to what I wrote because it still shows how science is commercially beneficial even if it’s not its stated goal.

in comparison, the Higgs boson is of scientific value, but the individual tools used in the process are of lesser scientific value. Similarly, the ordinary hammer is of almost no scientific value because we already know most of what there is to know about

The hammer is of essential scientific value. It was one of the first metal tools we ever created. Understanding its construction and uses is the basis of early complex engineering. You can’t attribute scientific value to only a bunch of key discoveries. Science is built upon the knowledge passed on from the previous generation. The simple tools we take for granted today was hard science to the people who first made them. They had to think them out from the start. Science has humble beginnings but those small steps are necessary and can’t really be skipped.

Also the proper tools are of great importance to science in order to get the experiments done right for the best results.

As for ideas, those can be transmitted as information. If we wanted to transmit space ship designs to Alpha Centauri we could do it today (well, not today-today, today as in with things that we could design, if we felt so inclined), without FTL.

Of course we can but that doesn’t make FTL irrelevant. If it can do that faster is just better for us less time wasted more job done. That’s the effect of FTL. You’re mistaking relevancy for necessity.

Scientists? To be honest, I see little genuine need to transport them over interstellar distances if there's an intelligent, capable, and cooperative local population. It isn't like they're some sort of magical unicorn; they aren't exactly factory-producible (at least in the sense of standardization: colleges do produce engineers and scientists in varying levels of quantity), but the number who will truly be "irreplaceable" is quite frankly very low, just like in every other field, and those people are almost entirely so because of ideas, which themselves can be transmitted as information.

What if there isn’t an educated enough population?
The fact that we can’t make them in a factory only makes them more valuable. Low number and high demand usually increases prices. If we can send them over and they are willing to pay us sufficiently for their services why wouldn’t we do it?

The only basis required for an interstellar market, or any market for that matter, is something worth sufficiently much to justify the effort required to trade it. If you have an FTL wormhole network that requires almost zero time and energy to traverse, and some star system that's 5 light-years away from the nearest terminus discovers some sort of infinite-energy matter, then that matter will likely be the single most valuable substance in interstellar commerce as soon as it can be sent anywhere, even if it causes the destruction of any wormhole terminus before it can even transit it. Why? Because such an unobtainium would be inherently valuable, particularly to any entity or organization with good foresight.

Yes. Everyone knows that but that wasn’t what I was saying now was it? You still need FTL if you ever want an interstellar market that the whole point you can’t have it otherwise. FTL is the only way to connect people on meaningful level at interstellar ranges otherwise you just going to have to deal with humanity in a lot pocket civilizations scattered across the galaxy with barely any connection to one another and their own unique civilizations forming and being erradicated.

Honestly, all that any of that means is that most of us like the idea of going to other star systems in somewhat short periods of time. The only time that I've actually seen anyone write out an inquiry to the economics of FTL, it was mostly negative, due to the fact that shipping costs will almost always outweigh profit. And remember, profit is the one unavoidable requirement for continued commerce. This is why I'll be jumping through "absurd production scale" and "we were going there to keep an eye on them anyways, might as well sell some stuff too" hoops if I ever do anything with the "second stage" in my setting. Outsider is more affordable for small shipments, but you can rest assured that two hundred years down the line, most of Humanity's current colonies will only import expensive items from Sol system, because major manufacturers will have built or leased factories in all of the major systems. We're seeing this today with manufacturing, the future won't be able to just erase the economics of reality.

Honestly this just says to me that we are never going to see eye to eye on this one so I just going to call it quits. I don’t agree with you and I most certainly don’t think you’re right about FTL.
I don’t believe FTL is possible in our universe at all but I do believe if it was it would be at the very center of any meaningful voyage to the stars for our species and our civilization and ultimately would have paid any expenses for itself but thats just my opinion.

[Absalom]

absalom: sizes of antenna does not change the length of the information loop, admittedly it might change data density though from absolutely horrendous to merely bad...but bottom line, does not change the physics of trying to talk to someone light years away.

It does, however, change the values which influence antenna physics, such as the amount of directionality that you can get. The larger the effective radius of a telescope mirror, the more accurate the picture/focus, and the same thing goes for the non-visible portions of the spectrum as well. If this didn't have serious potential to work, then we surely wouldn't be able to image distant galaxies with Hubble.

admittedly, total rewrite of the human genome into a more stable meta container....of some kind, might be a feasible solution, pretty similar to what the loroi are supposed to have.

I was actually thinking something both more ambitious and more restrained: an addition to the genome (equivalent to the epigenome or the genetic material inside the mitochondria) designed to interface with "drivers", such as for unfamiliar genetic encodings (even of the meta-genome itself). It would have enough framework to try to parse distinct genes out of it's associated genome (suffice to say, this would need to be tested first), detect "compatibility/advertisement viruses" broadcast from other meta-genomes (great need for analysis there), package gene-sets up into forms compatible with all of the meta-genomes that it has compatibility information for, and be capable of handling both the case of one parent having the meta-genome, as well as both parents having the meta-genome. Probably it would need to associate each compatibility-set with a timer, so that the total size could be constrained. Still, if you abstract the idea enough, then I'd expect it to genuinely work.

I mean this: Civilization! = Empire.

To illustrate the difference, the Roman Empire was indeed an Empire, but it had too many unrelated nationalities within it to be a Civilization. Meanwhile, the ancient Greeks were at least one civilization, but until Alexander and his father they were not an Empire, but instead a collection of city-states, which could individually be considered empires.

The Roman Empire was the name of the roman civilization. It crushed and integrated any other culture that dwelled within its borders. There were no other nations within the Roman Empire they wiped them out. You’re thinking of ethnic groups. The nations that were incorporated in the Roman Empire became provinces and their people became subsequently Romanized or exterminated.

The Roman Empire was a government. Ethnic groups and nations are (particularly within the context of the old meaning of "nation" which is what I specifically called out a few posts ago) the same thing. The term "nation-state" basically came into being in the last 100 years, and it refers to a specific thing: the merger of a government (state) and a people (nation). City-states are called that because the state revolves around control of/by a city, nation states are named that because they revolve around control of/by a nation. Nations == ethnic groups, contrary understandings are reflective of a misunderstanding of the actual meaning of the word nation. It doesn't refer to a territory or government, except by inference. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, for example, contained multiple nations within it, as did many other traditional empires (e.g. the Ottoman Empire). I'm not certain that this is part of what it means to specifically be an empire, as opposed to e.g. a hegemony, but I wouldn't be surprised.

I am saying that "our Civilization can travel to the stars without FTL", and mean exactly that. You are saying "our Civilization can only travel to the stars with FTL", but mean "our Governance can only travel to the stars with FTL", which bears important differences.

I think you’re mistaking civilization to be an aspect of culture, it’s not. Culture is however an aspect of civilization same as political system. They belong together and are affected by one another. I say our civilization will split and deviate when the distances between us become too great to maintain sufficient ties. This is a fact it has happened to every other major civilization before and will happen again, its human nature. It doesn’t even require distance just time as a culture can change radically with one generation alone. What you’re proposing is that two groups of peoples with little to no communications will have the same civilization as each other. We can send culture out in to the stars but local communities are going to produce far more internal culture than they consummate ultimately resulting in two separate civilizations forming. Biologically we could be identical but still share nothing else.

Our civilization could split when we become interstellar, but when you look at e.g. the US Republican and Democratic parties do you really think that you see the same culture? I've read that the US actually has five major sub-cultures, distributed geographically (north, south, mid-west, south-west, and west), instead of one. Liberals and Conservatives currently tend to live separate lives, as can be seen from the traits of the neighborhoods where they live: a neighborhood with the surroundings dominated by e.g. schools will most often be conservative, while a neighborhood dominated by e.g. pet spas will most often be liberal, even within regions that would in general lead you to believe the contrary, due to local political trends. The reason is pretty simple: conservatives are more likely to have children, so they tend to live where those services are convenient, liberals are more likely to treat their pets like their children, so they tend to live where those services are most convenient.

Physical distance has a limited influence on cultural interchange, communications distance is what matters. When you've got a 50 year physical separation but a minor light-speed one, you're likely to be no more culturally separated than two villages on opposite sides of France in the middle ages: there will be some differences, but those differences will tend to lay within a greater unifying context. The current effective distance between two Earth cultures that both have meaningful access to the internet is measured in terms of language barriers and where they visit, whereas traditionally it has been measured in both that and additional physical barriers. Returning to some physical barriers with very few information barriers won't produce as extreme of changes as you seem to think.

Now, as we move past the Centauri triad things will certainly start to ratchet up, but to be frank, if we engaged in a thousand-year program of building orbital colonies and growing the population, then at some point we'd reach a population level where it would be impossible for civilization to absorb all of the cultural mutations going on in Sol system. We could hopefully reach and move beyond Alpha Centauri before we reached that population tipping-point, but as my Republican-vs-Democrat example shows, we have the potential to get there with our current population, and as the demographic concentrations of liberals and conservatives shows, it's distantly possible that we may have sufficiently distinct cultures within multi-generationally American families already. If we don't move to a more unifying view as a culture soon, then we'll possibly go down the cultural split, assuming that we aren't long past it anyways.

You are making the logical fallacy of equating a civilization with an empire. The Celts on the British Isles were undeniably a civilization, but they were not unified. Empire requires the ability to enforce loyalty, but Civilization requires only cultural communications, not authority or management. The physical bounds on a human civilization today are much wider than they were, not because we can move further in the same time, but because we can communicate further in that time. In two hundred years, the differences between Earth's cultures will almost universally be much smaller, and in many cases may be less than the cultural differences between fans of rival college sports teams.

I do no such thing. It was Junk who wrote wrongfully and I didn’t bother to correct him because I knew what he probably meant , if you think he doesn’t know the difference tell him but please don’t attribute qoutes that aren't mine to me.

An empire is a political system. Politics are tools of civilizations to govern their people and is subject to cultural influences and ideals as you probably know. The reason why I mentioned our empires on earth is because each one of them was a civilization of their own and imperialism was a key to their success. They spread their civilization to the largest extends possible before their size caught up with them and they crumbled. Again size and the limits of communications made them ultimately unsustainable among many other reasons. And the reason why earth cultural differences are becoming smaller is because we can talk at push of a button we can’t do that at interstellar ranges.

Disease (for the Romans) and nativization (for the Ptolemys, Mongols, etc.) are actually what do in the civilizations that create empires. If you create a structure where the subject population gains more by staying than by successfully leaving or revolting, then you keep the empire. When that structure collapses, such as by destroying the advantage in unity, the empire eventually collapses due to the suddenly increased cultural/emotional, economic, military, or whatever-else weight. Lightspeed links will always be cheaper to maintain than the equivalent FTL links, for any foreseeable FTL link.

As for politics, they are influenced by the cultures that they're in contact with, but also by the individuals that they're in contact with. Empires have traditionally been created when a subset of the group drags as many as necessary of the rest into an expansionist role. Anyone who tells you that the "Great Men" of history is spewing hot air, for just as they couldn't obtain their results without the assistance of all their subordinates, their subordinates couldn't obtain the results without the leader(s). Someone might have created the Roman Empire if Julius Caesar had died of some disease after his last triumph, but it most certainly wouldn't have been the same if Augustus had died of a disease after defeating Mark Antony. The culture, however, wouldn't have radically changed. The path it later went down? Maybe, but Roman (or rather Latin) culture didn't depend on the form of the government any more than American culture depends on American-style democracy (in fact, at the moment the severe partisanship means that we're almost Parliamentarian in some ways). Politics are not the tools of civilization, but instead one of the tools of culture-to-individual exchange. Politics are performed by individuals, and aimed at groups.

Now, for any sort of Empire that we've ever seen (maybe with the exception of Hegemonies, but I'd question it even then) a distance that took over a lifetime to cross wouldn't work. However, for a culture, all that's needed is a workable round-trip time for information, and in a non-FTL setting that is much faster than the time required for physical movement. The historical limitation on the size of civilizations was that culture had to travel largely by foot: communication via light massively eases that restriction.

This highlights the importance of FTL if you wish to have a civilization of more than one star system you need rapid communication and light still have to travel waste distances to reach their destination. Our closest star is four light-years away. Anytime you send a message you have to wait eight years for response during which enormous changes will occur internally and shape them on their own. Within time their culture, language; society will change until it’s no longer recognizable by the parent civilization.

A mayor of London supposedly said sometime in the 60s or 70s (at least I think that's when it was), "People from the north can't understand people from the south, and that's in London". Mail would take eight years, but no sensible court is going to expect someone in another star system to even report why they can't attend to the jury summons. Actual cultural communications, such as movies and music and the latest, greatest political controversies will all be as relevant in the four years it took them to cross from the origin to the recipient as if they had traveled instantaneously, because they are relevant only within the context of the information that preceded them. If someone were to successfully develop FTL travel after Alpha Centauri had been colonized for a century or two then they would arrive to find that it was Earth through a fun-house mirror, and vice-versa. Cultures contain magnitudes, and there's plenty of room for synchronized drift, which is what you would get for anything where you can sensibly hope to main cultural continuity in the first place. We're talking about massive populations, not two or three villages.

No. Scientific value! = Commercial value.

Maybe we've gained commercial value in the search for the Higgs boson, but the commercial value won't be in the Higgs itself (we simply have no USE for it right now), it'll be in whatever had to be developed in the process. For example, the internet grew partially out of CERN, but the internet wasn't the scientific goal of CERN, it was just a tool to transmit information already obtained.

Right now yes but for the future it will be invaluable because it’s one of the most fundamental discoveries in the history of physics. Seriously from what I read it determines the mass of an object, am I the only one who’s sees the commercial value of manipulating it? Mass effect FTW!
I don’t see this as anything contradictory to what I wrote because it still shows how science is commercially beneficial even if it’s not its stated goal.

in comparison, the Higgs boson is of scientific value, but the individual tools used in the process are of lesser scientific value. Similarly, the ordinary hammer is of almost no scientific value because we already know most of what there is to know about

The hammer is of essential scientific value. It was one of the first metal tools we ever created. Understanding its construction and uses is the basis of early complex engineering. You can’t attribute scientific value to only a bunch of key discoveries. Science is built upon the knowledge passed on from the previous generation. The simple tools we take for granted today was hard science to the people who first made them. They had to think them out from the start. Science has humble beginnings but those small steps are necessary and can’t really be skipped.

Also the proper tools are of great importance to science in order to get the experiments done right for the best results.

I should be more clear: Scientific Value == the ability to learn something (hence why the common hammer has very little scientific value: we've learned most of what we can from it), Commercial Value == the ability to gain economic resources.

If you can find a way to use the Higgs to gain economic resources, then by way of whatever allows it to be used, it can gain economic value. We can't currently do that to any meaningful economic extent, hence it currently has no economic value. We've only just discovered it, so it should still have plenty of scientific value.

There's also engineering value, of course, but the fact that the Higgs at least doesn't currently have any of that is the reason why it doesn't have any economic value.

As for ideas, those can be transmitted as information. If we wanted to transmit space ship designs to Alpha Centauri we could do it today (well, not today-today, today as in with things that we could design, if we felt so inclined), without FTL.

Of course we can but that doesn’t make FTL irrelevant. If it can do that faster is just better for us less time wasted more job done. That’s the effect of FTL. You’re mistaking relevancy for necessity.

Time is money, but this doesn't mean that it's always worth taking the faster route, just that you can calculate the costs if you have the needed information. Maybe you'll find enough economic value in FTL from raw data transport, but I suspect that any time that a company wants something engineered they'll try to get a local to design it for a simple reason: cheaper to pay someone decent who's convenient than to pay massive shipping fees for the designs for random doodads. Logistics say that supplies make you or break you, and it's a lot harder for them to break you if they're close by than far away.

Scientists? To be honest, I see little genuine need to transport them over interstellar distances if there's an intelligent, capable, and cooperative local population. It isn't like they're some sort of magical unicorn; they aren't exactly factory-producible (at least in the sense of standardization: colleges do produce engineers and scientists in varying levels of quantity), but the number who will truly be "irreplaceable" is quite frankly very low, just like in every other field, and those people are almost entirely so because of ideas, which themselves can be transmitted as information.

What if there isn’t an educated enough population?
The fact that we can’t make them in a factory only makes them more valuable. Low number and high demand usually increases prices. If we can send them over and they are willing to pay us sufficiently for their services why wouldn’t we do it?

What if there is an educated enough population? The ignorance required to not be able to do basic investigation is usually indicative of a resistance to learning in the first place. It's essentially a turtling-up of someone in response to some external stimulus, which itself was usually applied by someone other than the "turtle", who themselves either intended the effect, or just didn't know what they were doing.

At any rate, if you genuinely need a scientist or engineer on-site that the locals can't provide, then most likely it's going to require multiple people instead of just one on-site, and most of those multiple people will not have such high requirements, because they're needed only to do field work. If you're competent enough to be trusted with the job in the first place, then you're almost guaranteed to be competent enough to tell any sensible person how to do the job. You just need the "scientist" and someone who really understands the behavioral quirks of HR, and you'll be able to separate the wheat from most of the chaff, leaving you with a pocket of scientists and a larger number of minions.

At any rate, this particular problem is rather facetious anyways. It's basically the same as saying that the locals are incompetent, so we have to go in and fix things for them. You may not like the way that the locals do things, but most of the time you'll actually be wrong (a colony mission that went somewhere and didn't have the ability to deal with their problems? why did you let them go without demonstrating the capacity to improvise? an alien species in need of our superior ways of life? haven't we heard that before, European Imperial Powers?), and just make them stubborn if you try to "fix" it. In comparison, the chances of getting them to "do it right" are much higher if you just propose a couple of decent ideas that they should be able to implement.

"The Star Trek Way", where every problem can automatically be solved by the crew of a single ship despite the much larger number of natives who really are competent enough to survive the conditions that they've survived for however many generations not being able to is simply unrealistic. What do the various Enterprises have that the others they encounter don't? Transport, weapons, and sensors, and often enough whoever needs help will have those in the real world too.

The only basis required for an interstellar market, or any market for that matter, is something worth sufficiently much to justify the effort required to trade it. If you have an FTL wormhole network that requires almost zero time and energy to traverse, and some star system that's 5 light-years away from the nearest terminus discovers some sort of infinite-energy matter, then that matter will likely be the single most valuable substance in interstellar commerce as soon as it can be sent anywhere, even if it causes the destruction of any wormhole terminus before it can even transit it. Why? Because such an unobtainium would be inherently valuable, particularly to any entity or organization with good foresight.

Yes. Everyone knows that but that wasn’t what I was saying now was it? You still need FTL if you ever want an interstellar market that the whole point you can’t have it otherwise. FTL is the only way to connect people on meaningful level at interstellar ranges otherwise you just going to have to deal with humanity in a lot pocket civilizations scattered across the galaxy with barely any connection to one another and their own unique civilizations forming and being erradicated.

I was saying that if you have a resource that's worth enough, then you don't need FTL for an interstellar market. You may have to spend quite some effort to actually trade, but you'll expend that effort, because for whatever reason you've decided that it's worth it. Meanwhile, 90+% of everything will either be transportable via light (assuming that it's even worth that much), or stuff that it makes more sense to move in your own system via solar sail than to do anything else with. I don't think that 3d printing will take over all production, but it'll take over a lot of prototyping (and already has), and in an interstellar civilization it'll be the bedrock of commerce, since you can use it to configure your local factory.

Honestly, all that any of that means is that most of us like the idea of going to other star systems in somewhat short periods of time. The only time that I've actually seen anyone write out an inquiry to the economics of FTL, it was mostly negative, due to the fact that shipping costs will almost always outweigh profit. And remember, profit is the one unavoidable requirement for continued commerce. This is why I'll be jumping through "absurd production scale" and "we were going there to keep an eye on them anyways, might as well sell some stuff too" hoops if I ever do anything with the "second stage" in my setting. Outsider is more affordable for small shipments, but you can rest assured that two hundred years down the line, most of Humanity's current colonies will only import expensive items from Sol system, because major manufacturers will have built or leased factories in all of the major systems. We're seeing this today with manufacturing, the future won't be able to just erase the economics of reality.

Honestly this just says to me that we are never going to see eye to eye on this one so I just going to call it quits. I don’t agree with you and I most certainly don’t think you’re right about FTL.
I don’t believe FTL is possible in our universe at all but I do believe if it was it would be at the very center of any meaningful voyage to the stars for our species and our civilization and ultimately would have paid any expenses for itself but thats just my opinion.

As far as agreeing with each other, I think you're right.

As far as FTL, spinning white dwarfs have been observed to force the space-time around them to also spin, and we know that the universe is expanding. The idea of at least a "space road" doesn't strike me as too horribly impossible, just likely to be very expensive. I do not, however, think that it will be able to justify itself economically. It'll be something that we do because we want to, not because there's a lot of money in other star systems. Get to an exotic star system (e.g. a binary pair nova with some distantly orbiting planets to get blasted with stuff every once in a while) and you might be able to justify the expense on economic grounds, but it just doesn't seem sensible otherwise. The new world was economically viable because it was cheaper than the alternative, which was helped by the lack of a need for energy to fuel the trip, but another star system isn't likely to have either of these going for it. If we go, it'll be because we want to, not because the economics say to do it.

[discord]

absalom: i'll just respond to one thing, antenna and communication speed, since the rest sort of your arguments hinges on massive communication.

do you know how long it takes to send a simple frickin picture from saturn to earth(or the other way)? not a movie, not music, not an encyclopedia update or scientific library update, a single frickin picture? i'll give you a hint, it's not measured in the fractions of a second you are used to seeing over the internet, that time lapse view you always get with real space photos? it's not something they engineer because it looks cool.

basically it's a matter of physics, over long distance fine tuned high density data would bleed together and become white noise, here to alpha centauri? you be lucky to get much better then manual telegraphy transfer speed, do note MANUAL, the speed you can send and receive by human hand. sure with humongous antenna of doom you might be able to get something like old school telephone modems, somewhere around 14400 might be possible(that is 14kiloBIT/s) which boils down to about 2kilobyte/s....okey, might get a little more doing broad spectrum transmission over a multidude of frequencies, but still would probably not amount to more than what your average high speed home internet is capable of, which is fine and dandy for a single person but might be a little choke point for a whole bloody solar system.
</edit>
do note those speeds MIGHT be possible with advances, not possible now.
<edit>

bottom line your 'transfer data to solve connectivity issues' falls apart just a little, to do a library dump like you talked about would require a frickin ship to transfer it.

[Arioch]

The LADEE spacecraft currently in Moon orbit just last month tested a new laser/optical data transmission system, achieving 622 Mb/s.

[GeoModder]

geo: no more than six thousand years according to some, seriously though there is a rather significant difference, the ability to change human DNA directly, that kinda changes the situation slightly.

DNA tinkering? Yes, that could change the continued interbreeding possibility.
But I maintain that in the normal course of evolution we'd still be compatible with 'cousins' on exoplanets for millennia to come.

[Absalom]

absalom: i'll just respond to one thing, antenna and communication speed, since the rest sort of your arguments hinges on massive communication.

do you know how long it takes to send a simple frickin picture from saturn to earth(or the other way)? not a movie, not music, not an encyclopedia update or scientific library update, a single frickin picture? i'll give you a hint, it's not measured in the fractions of a second you are used to seeing over the internet, that time lapse view you always get with real space photos? it's not something they engineer because it looks cool.

basically it's a matter of physics, over long distance fine tuned high density data would bleed together and become white noise, here to alpha centauri? you be lucky to get much better then manual telegraphy transfer speed, do note MANUAL, the speed you can send and receive by human hand. sure with humongous antenna of doom you might be able to get something like old school telephone modems, somewhere around 14400 might be possible(that is 14kiloBIT/s) which boils down to about 2kilobyte/s....okey, might get a little more doing broad spectrum transmission over a multidude of frequencies, but still would probably not amount to more than what your average high speed home internet is capable of, which is fine and dandy for a single person but might be a little choke point for a whole bloody solar system.
</edit>
do note those speeds MIGHT be possible with advances, not possible now.
<edit>

bottom line your 'transfer data to solve connectivity issues' falls apart just a little, to do a library dump like you talked about would require a frickin ship to transfer it.

The crux of my "it should be possible" argument is that if it wasn't possible, then I think the same thing that made it impossible would also make it impossible to image object as far as e.g. the Andromeda galaxy. I'm not an RF engineer, and I don't claim to have checked into the formulas, but I do know that the details of interaction between photons and matter depend on both the traits of the matter, and the frequency of the light. I can see how extreme distances might provide enough space for signal degradation if you're trying for the theoretical maximum bits-per-second for the frequency, but choosing the correct frequency should help a lot, and using big enough antennas for them to focus on a remote target, thereby allowing you multiple data channels on the same frequency, should help transmission rates quite a bit as well. Add in interferometry/phased emitter arrays, and you should be able to obtain very good signal shaping, even with the remote transmitter (realistically, the biggest reason for a physically large antenna on the Sol-system side would actually be to pick up the small resulting signal: sending a strong signal from Sol system shouldn't be as much of a problem).

Still, this would all remain theoretical right up until the point that someone actually tested it. I can tell you why the basic system should work, but I can't be certain that there isn't something that I'm genuinely missing.

geo: no more than six thousand years according to some, seriously though there is a rather significant difference, the ability to change human DNA directly, that kinda changes the situation slightly.

DNA tinkering? Yes, that could change the continued interbreeding possibility.
But I maintain that in the normal course of evolution we'd still be compatible with 'cousins' on exoplanets for millennia to come.

That bet's a bit rich for my blood, but I wouldn't want to bet against it either.

[discord]

absalom: the best instruments they got can barely see planets at any distance, a planet is a rather small thing at interstellar distance, but still it is VERY huge compared to an EM signal.

arioch: the moon is pretty close by by space measurements, but still impressive considering what that distance does to simple laser.

[junk]

I mean this: Civilization! = Empire.



The Roman Empire was the name of the roman civilization. It crushed and integrated any other culture that dwelled within its borders. There were no other nations within the Roman Empire they wiped them out. You’re thinking of ethnic groups. The nations that were incorporated in the Roman Empire became provinces and their people became subsequently Romanized or exterminated.

Actually there were multiple culture streams as well as languages within the roman empire. While some romanisation was attempted a lot of it was a natural process. But overall there were distinct cultures certainly.

[Grayhome]

Do the Terran possess the "Creative" advantage as listed under Master of Orion 2's race design options? Or are they just the Democratic/Charismatic standard we know and love (to pass up since diplomacy is useless in hard AI or player campaigns).

[Grayhome]

What are the personality and strategy settings for the Terrans and the other races? Just curious.

Diplomacy/Aggression
There are six settings for personality, which determine the diplomatic style of AI-controlled races.

1) Ruthless: Ruthless leaders attack with little or no provocation and will sacrifice starships and people to achieve their goals.
2) Erratic: Erratic leaders are unpredictable. One year they may be peaceful, the next year they will go to war over any excuse.
3) Aggressive: Aggressive leaders will attack any time they reach a favorable position.
4) Pacifistic: Pacifistic leaders are eager to maintain peaceful relations. They rarely attack. When at war, they will sue for peace more rapidly.
5) Honorable: Honorable leaders will not attack those they are on good terms with. They react twice as strongly to unprovoked attacks and sabotage.
6) Xenophobic: Xenophobic leaders distrust everyone, halving the effects of positive diplomacy and doubling the diplomatic penalties of hostile actions.

Production Emphasis
There are six settings for strategy, which determine the production emphasis of AI-controlled races.

1) Diplomats: Diplomats concentrate on trade with allies and espionage with enemies. They seek a balance between military buildup, ecological maintenance, and technological research.
2) Militarists: Militarists seek to develop weapons technology. They will build and maintain a large star fleet at all times.
3) Technologists: Technologists focus resources on research, seeking to advance their knowledge in all areas.
4) Ecologists: Ecologists emphasize improving their environment. They concentrate research on planetology and construction, while prioritizing terraforming projects.
5) Industrialists: Industrialists emphasize factory construction. They prioritize research into areas that will increase production capacity.
6) Expansionists: Expansionists hunger for territory. They emphasize propulsion and planetology technology and the building of colony ships. They tend to be aggressive in border disputes over recently settled lands, but hold less interest in attacking well defended worlds.

[Arioch]

The MOO2 Creative/Uncreative attributes were a bit gamey and not terribly realistic. Normally, at each tech tier, you'd be given a selection of technologies for that tier and you could only choose to research one; the other techs that you didn't choose could never be researched. The Creative attribute gave you all the techs in a tier for the price of researching just one. (Uncreative meant you couldn't even choose which tech in a tier you researched.) I don't think this mechanic very accurately describes the way real technologies are researched, and I've never seen it used in any similar style of game; in addition to being unrealistic, the Creative attribute was notoriously overpowered.

In terms of personality, Humanity is not a single polity, and so is not of one heart and one mind about anything. I think most of the powerful human nations of 2160 will be democratic and (mostly) free-market, and primarily seek peaceful relations and trade. A few human nations are more paternalistic and aggressive, but these are in the minority. However, any human nation can turn hostile when its interests are threatened. Some nations are expansionist and some are isolationist. Some seek to preserve natural environments at all costs, and others couldn't care less about the well-being of native microbes.

[Grayhome]

Excellent, thank you for the reply.

[Grayhome]

I still do not understand why the Terrans would even consider sending out scout vessels instead of using all their available resources to research and develop new military technology. Someone break it down for me. Why is sending out scouts a good idea again?

Seems like covering yourself in barbeque sauce, walking into a den of lions and ringing the dinner bell, considering their tech disadvantage, territorial desirability and lack of a real military experience.