Star Society

[Asperion]

Imagine how society would develop if humanity never figures out how to travel FTL.  This will apply to both physical and communication. Physical travel will get upto 50% lightspeed and communication will be either physical restrictions or limited to the speed of light, depending upon if there are physical aspects or is purely energy. How would society hold itself together? Would society fragment into different groups? What are the advantages and disadvantages? How would things work? Any other comments are welcome. 

[DShomshak]

38 minutes ago, Asperion said:

Physical travel will get upto 50% lightspeed 

That isn't FTL. Still very fast and we have no idea how to reach such speeds quickly, but it isn't FTL.

 

40 minutes ago, Asperion said:

Icommunication will be either physical restrictions or limited to the speed of light, depending upon if there are physical aspects or is purely energy.

We have speed-of-light communication already. It's called radio.

 

Sorry to be snarky, but I think you need to rephrase your question.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Lord Liaden]

2 hours ago, DShomshak said:

That isn't FTL. Still very fast and we have no idea how to reach such speeds quickly, but it isn't FTL.

 

 

Slight misread, Dean. Asperion's topic is about never achieving FTL, and his premise is that 50% light speed is the fastest we'll achieve.

 

For the point about communication, I agree that rephrasing would be helpful. I can't really decipher the original sentence.

[DShomshak]

Oops, sorry, Asperion! LL is quite right: NEVER achieves FTL. Gotcha. Mea culpa.

 

The "Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur" series, linked to several times in the "SF Links" thread, discusses many possibilities in depth. At the "low end," humanity stays in the Solar System for a long time, until the population and resource base develop enough to make sublight interstellar colonization feasible. At the "high end," even with knowable technology and speeds only a few percent of lightspeed, we fill the Galaxy in a million years or so, send colonial ventures to every other galaxy within a BILLION light-years, and MOVE THE GALAXIES to merge with the Local Group before the expansion of space pushes them over the cosmological horizon. And after the last stars burn out in 100 trillion years, we switch to black holes for a span of time that makes those 100 trillion years of the "stellar era" look puny. Though we could dismantle those gathered galaxies (pulling stars apart is also within foreseeable technology -- no new physics, just known physics applied on a monstrous scale) and switch to black holes before then, since dropping matter down a black hole generates power more efficiently than stellar fusion does.

 

But how do you keep a society working to common purpose when communication times are in years, centuries, millennia? That's where, IMO, Arthur's high-end scenarios fall down. We still have plenty of factionalism here on Earth with communication in fractions of a second and physical travel in hours of days. Years between stars? Cultures will drift in decades, and political union will probably follow in some centuries, even if you assume major life extension. Add in possibilities such as genetic engineering or cybernetic alteration and enhancement, and in a thousand years a colony might not be human anymore. Or regard the folks back in the Solar System as human.

 

Well, hey, here's one of the more sinister approaches a polity might choose in order to prevent its mutant colonies from ever becoming a threat:

 

The Fermi Paradox: The Cronus Scenarios | Isaac Arthur

 

And sorry again for the misunderstanding.

 

Dean Shomshak