I'm sure I touched upon this in my latest dystopians and interstellar travel article (part II I think). In that for a dystopia to be sustainable it needs to achieve world domination.
So the real test of believability is to simply ask, 'is it possible for one ideologically uniform social group on a multicultural planet to achieve world domination'? I think it would be a very foolish person who says no, it's impossible. Of course we would logically get into what the powers-that-be (for their own propaganda reasons) call 'conspiracy theories', but it boils down to basic social group psychology. When you have a xenophobic culture/ideology, it will only be satisfied once it's eliminated all its rivals. There are multiple ways of doing this, well within the parameters of humanity's current state of technological progress. The most obvious being biochemical weapons.
The longer-term strategy is a sort of subversive brainwashing of the rest of the species, even if that requires millennia. But these sorts do think long-term.
Anyway, as I said in my Part II, if that happens, then they get interstellar travel, the question is either FTL or not FTL. Without FTL each colony size is limited, and it takes aeons - and social psychology and evolution (which includes brain evolution) being what it is, by the time you get to galactic empire stage you're not talking about the same species anymore - each colony or sector will have evolved into something else, maybe even fundamentally forgotten the old ideology, or changed culture completely. So ultimately it's not sustainable.
But when we talk about galactic empires we are inevitably talking about dystopias. And dystopias are immature. Why? Because it's a far more beneficial, evolutionary trait to be friends with other intelligences, not to try and conquer everything in sight.
Even FTL, though, has its limits. This strikes me as one aspect of it which a lot of people ignore. Like 'how much faster than light'? Star Trek has a good idea with that one though, effectively limiting it. Even warp factor 10 (1000 times lightspeed) still takes multiple lifetimes to travel vast distances.
And as far as I am aware, no one has made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs yet.
I think you *can* get Planet of Hats situations, but it depends on travel speed, with ease of travel correlating with ease of sorting. The frontier, wherever it is, I expect to be a bit more focused on survival than ideological or civic conformity/harmony/etc.
This is fascinating. I’ve never heard the term “novum” expressed in this context, but it’s a concept I’ve thought about but haven’t found a good name for. I don’t know if you’ve read RF Kiana’s Babel. It’s a great book with an interesting plot and a cutting commentary on imperialism, but one thing that bothered me was its magic system, in which people inscribe different translations of words on silver bars, and the nuance between the translations provides a source of magic. (It’s hard to explain. Just bear with me.) But what bothered me was that the way Kuang explained it, the magic didn’t need anything we didn’t have in our world to work. To me, it needed some extra element to explain why we can’t carve translations into silver bars and create magic out of it. It needed dragonblood ink or arcane runes or something. Anyway, that’s a tangent, but it goes along with the concepts you explain here.
The prospect of governments scaling up to cover planets or entire star systems is one thing, and I agree this is plausible if the technology is there to back it up. Human history shows a tendency of nation-states to expand, both geographically and in population, as their technological capabilities grow.
What I struggle with is what you might call the Empire of Everything: All people everywhere united under a single state -- be it a single world government in a society that has yet to colonize space, or the Galactic Empire of (Foundation/Dune/Star Wars/take your pick). When humans don't have external threats, we manufacture internal ones. I just can't imagine such a state holding together more than a generation or two, unless a) humans change in some fundamental way or b) technology reaches the point where a ruler no longer needs the support of other humans to rule.
AI raises scary possibilities around b), but Empires of Everything seem to make very limited use of AI, even the ones without a Butlerian Jihad in their past.
> " Well, yes. Mostly. It certainly doesn’t seem likely that Earth could unite under a single planetary government (at least, not any time in the next few millennia or so). However, I don’t think it’s implausible that other planets could be politically united. " <
The Holy Roman Empire had roughly 300 voting entities until being unified into the country of Germany under Bizmark and Kaiser Wilhelm.
Earth had tens of thousands of tribes and national entities and is down to 200-ish nations plus hundreds more tribes though definitely less than in 1000AD, which in turn had fewer than 2,000 BC.
This process appears to be speeding up, it is not linear, especially as culture globally consolidates via online media and global trade. It is not at all implausible to assume a global unification in less than two thousand years.
That's a very good point, though I think that even in a millennium or two, the cultural differences between, say, the US and China, will make true political unification impossible. At most, I would expect the consolidation of different cultural blocks into "civilization states"
"However, if FTL does exist... I don’t think an interstellar empire is implausible.... the current “meta” of military technology strongly favors the defender in a conflict. That may not be true forever."
Truncated quote, but somewhat amusing that you don't even consider a peaceful unification... but not unreasonable. I think I mentioned in a discussion of the article you address that the power to colonize another planet by necessity brings a commanding military position over it.
Another point worth considering is just how complete we want that unification. Does 90% with occasional flare ups in the remainder count as unification? I'd accept that, and that doesn't seem impossible, though it may be *unstable* over the long term, at least with humans in charge.
You also mention that colonies would likely start centralized. This seems valid, though it depends on the distribution of travel capability and the availability of alternate colony sites. That is, if there's enough habitable exoplanets out there for a Chinese sector, an American sector, etc. (like in many Sci-fi settings) then they will probably start with a single colonization authority. But if there are few, we could see competing attempts at founding settlements, replicating Earth's divisions. Whether they'd stay in a cold war, unify against the home world, or reflect Earth's geo politics depends on factors like self-sustainability and logistical expense, but would certainly make an interesting story.
That's a very good point. In practice, we see parallels to both scenarios in history. The Americas were carved up between Spain, France, England, Portugal, etc., while the entire continent of Australia was taken by the British Empire wholesale. In practice, I would expect to see both planets with a single colonial authority and planets with multiple sovereign states. That's all assuming FTL exists. If not, I would expect star systems to be settled mainly by a single arc-ship expedition and to therefore be relatively politically homogeneous.
'if the modern US equipped with only 21st century technology is able to maintain global deployment of its military' - discuss with reference to interplanetary Iranians (or Taliban, or ...)
I actually think the Taliban is a good example in favor of my point. The US managed to capture Kabul in 40 days, then occupy Afghanistan, a landlocked country halfway around the world with essentially zero loyalty or cultural similarity to the US whatsoever, for two decades.
One World Government, and all the benefits it entails, has been an accepted science fiction trope since at least H. G. Wells (maybe longer?). Although it wasn't really the point of either one of these articles, I've often wondered how ideal a one world government would be in practice? Throughout history persecuted people have been able to move to avoid persecution, but where would they move if the government was the same everywhere? Where would they move to be free?
When Wells proposed his "Open Conspiracy" he expected to have to use some coercive means to reach his one world goal. In other words, restrictions on freedom. Would the one world dream be an improvement over the factious, competitive, deadly present-day world if its establishment led to more restrictions on personal freedom? Every person probably has a somewhat different answer to that question, and currently there are countries where people can give their different answers, and there are countries where they can't. I wonder which type one world would be?
Specifically, about this article, I like the idea of different worlds under a galactic government being one world governments. Different governments with different tradeoffs between safety and freedom and maybe the right of a galactic citizen to emigrate to the one that fits their desire to be more safe or more free.
Very interesting comment! I have to think that humanity's expansion into space (whether interstellar or not) will have increase the amount of political diversity we see. That could have positive and negative effects, but hopefully positive on the whole, since like you say, people would be better able to pick a government that suits them
Thanks for this! A very thoughtful critique.
You're welcome!
I'm sure I touched upon this in my latest dystopians and interstellar travel article (part II I think). In that for a dystopia to be sustainable it needs to achieve world domination.
So the real test of believability is to simply ask, 'is it possible for one ideologically uniform social group on a multicultural planet to achieve world domination'? I think it would be a very foolish person who says no, it's impossible. Of course we would logically get into what the powers-that-be (for their own propaganda reasons) call 'conspiracy theories', but it boils down to basic social group psychology. When you have a xenophobic culture/ideology, it will only be satisfied once it's eliminated all its rivals. There are multiple ways of doing this, well within the parameters of humanity's current state of technological progress. The most obvious being biochemical weapons.
The longer-term strategy is a sort of subversive brainwashing of the rest of the species, even if that requires millennia. But these sorts do think long-term.
Anyway, as I said in my Part II, if that happens, then they get interstellar travel, the question is either FTL or not FTL. Without FTL each colony size is limited, and it takes aeons - and social psychology and evolution (which includes brain evolution) being what it is, by the time you get to galactic empire stage you're not talking about the same species anymore - each colony or sector will have evolved into something else, maybe even fundamentally forgotten the old ideology, or changed culture completely. So ultimately it's not sustainable.
But when we talk about galactic empires we are inevitably talking about dystopias. And dystopias are immature. Why? Because it's a far more beneficial, evolutionary trait to be friends with other intelligences, not to try and conquer everything in sight.
Even FTL, though, has its limits. This strikes me as one aspect of it which a lot of people ignore. Like 'how much faster than light'? Star Trek has a good idea with that one though, effectively limiting it. Even warp factor 10 (1000 times lightspeed) still takes multiple lifetimes to travel vast distances.
And as far as I am aware, no one has made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs yet.
I think you *can* get Planet of Hats situations, but it depends on travel speed, with ease of travel correlating with ease of sorting. The frontier, wherever it is, I expect to be a bit more focused on survival than ideological or civic conformity/harmony/etc.
https://veraetor.substack.com/p/random-ftl-three-diasporas
This is fascinating. I’ve never heard the term “novum” expressed in this context, but it’s a concept I’ve thought about but haven’t found a good name for. I don’t know if you’ve read RF Kiana’s Babel. It’s a great book with an interesting plot and a cutting commentary on imperialism, but one thing that bothered me was its magic system, in which people inscribe different translations of words on silver bars, and the nuance between the translations provides a source of magic. (It’s hard to explain. Just bear with me.) But what bothered me was that the way Kuang explained it, the magic didn’t need anything we didn’t have in our world to work. To me, it needed some extra element to explain why we can’t carve translations into silver bars and create magic out of it. It needed dragonblood ink or arcane runes or something. Anyway, that’s a tangent, but it goes along with the concepts you explain here.
The prospect of governments scaling up to cover planets or entire star systems is one thing, and I agree this is plausible if the technology is there to back it up. Human history shows a tendency of nation-states to expand, both geographically and in population, as their technological capabilities grow.
What I struggle with is what you might call the Empire of Everything: All people everywhere united under a single state -- be it a single world government in a society that has yet to colonize space, or the Galactic Empire of (Foundation/Dune/Star Wars/take your pick). When humans don't have external threats, we manufacture internal ones. I just can't imagine such a state holding together more than a generation or two, unless a) humans change in some fundamental way or b) technology reaches the point where a ruler no longer needs the support of other humans to rule.
AI raises scary possibilities around b), but Empires of Everything seem to make very limited use of AI, even the ones without a Butlerian Jihad in their past.
> " Well, yes. Mostly. It certainly doesn’t seem likely that Earth could unite under a single planetary government (at least, not any time in the next few millennia or so). However, I don’t think it’s implausible that other planets could be politically united. " <
The Holy Roman Empire had roughly 300 voting entities until being unified into the country of Germany under Bizmark and Kaiser Wilhelm.
Earth had tens of thousands of tribes and national entities and is down to 200-ish nations plus hundreds more tribes though definitely less than in 1000AD, which in turn had fewer than 2,000 BC.
This process appears to be speeding up, it is not linear, especially as culture globally consolidates via online media and global trade. It is not at all implausible to assume a global unification in less than two thousand years.
That's a very good point, though I think that even in a millennium or two, the cultural differences between, say, the US and China, will make true political unification impossible. At most, I would expect the consolidation of different cultural blocks into "civilization states"
"However, if FTL does exist... I don’t think an interstellar empire is implausible.... the current “meta” of military technology strongly favors the defender in a conflict. That may not be true forever."
Truncated quote, but somewhat amusing that you don't even consider a peaceful unification... but not unreasonable. I think I mentioned in a discussion of the article you address that the power to colonize another planet by necessity brings a commanding military position over it.
Another point worth considering is just how complete we want that unification. Does 90% with occasional flare ups in the remainder count as unification? I'd accept that, and that doesn't seem impossible, though it may be *unstable* over the long term, at least with humans in charge.
You also mention that colonies would likely start centralized. This seems valid, though it depends on the distribution of travel capability and the availability of alternate colony sites. That is, if there's enough habitable exoplanets out there for a Chinese sector, an American sector, etc. (like in many Sci-fi settings) then they will probably start with a single colonization authority. But if there are few, we could see competing attempts at founding settlements, replicating Earth's divisions. Whether they'd stay in a cold war, unify against the home world, or reflect Earth's geo politics depends on factors like self-sustainability and logistical expense, but would certainly make an interesting story.
That's a very good point. In practice, we see parallels to both scenarios in history. The Americas were carved up between Spain, France, England, Portugal, etc., while the entire continent of Australia was taken by the British Empire wholesale. In practice, I would expect to see both planets with a single colonial authority and planets with multiple sovereign states. That's all assuming FTL exists. If not, I would expect star systems to be settled mainly by a single arc-ship expedition and to therefore be relatively politically homogeneous.
There's basically just two things standing in the way of us spreading through the universe.
There being anywhere worth going, and having any way to get there.
'if the modern US equipped with only 21st century technology is able to maintain global deployment of its military' - discuss with reference to interplanetary Iranians (or Taliban, or ...)
I actually think the Taliban is a good example in favor of my point. The US managed to capture Kabul in 40 days, then occupy Afghanistan, a landlocked country halfway around the world with essentially zero loyalty or cultural similarity to the US whatsoever, for two decades.
But then abandoned it because they had no effective control.
One World Government, and all the benefits it entails, has been an accepted science fiction trope since at least H. G. Wells (maybe longer?). Although it wasn't really the point of either one of these articles, I've often wondered how ideal a one world government would be in practice? Throughout history persecuted people have been able to move to avoid persecution, but where would they move if the government was the same everywhere? Where would they move to be free?
When Wells proposed his "Open Conspiracy" he expected to have to use some coercive means to reach his one world goal. In other words, restrictions on freedom. Would the one world dream be an improvement over the factious, competitive, deadly present-day world if its establishment led to more restrictions on personal freedom? Every person probably has a somewhat different answer to that question, and currently there are countries where people can give their different answers, and there are countries where they can't. I wonder which type one world would be?
Specifically, about this article, I like the idea of different worlds under a galactic government being one world governments. Different governments with different tradeoffs between safety and freedom and maybe the right of a galactic citizen to emigrate to the one that fits their desire to be more safe or more free.
Very interesting comment! I have to think that humanity's expansion into space (whether interstellar or not) will have increase the amount of political diversity we see. That could have positive and negative effects, but hopefully positive on the whole, since like you say, people would be better able to pick a government that suits them