Social effects of cheap space travel & colonization

Great Debates
1

Thought experiment: In the next 50-100 years, space-related technology advances to the point where it is relatively cheap to explore or colonize space. There are Earth-to-orbit beanstalks, L5 colonies, and fusion-ramjet ships that can reach the nearer star systems at relativistic speeds while colonists wait in coldsleep. And it turns out there are ways to explore the resources of space and a lot of money to be made, so people are going into space for all kinds of reasons. Most human presence in space, at first, would be directly involved in industry or science. But any group with the relative resources of the Mayflower pilgrims can found its own colony, on the Moon, in a floating habitat, or on an extrasolar planet with Earthlike environment, if any exist nearby. Perhaps even on a terraformed Mars or Venus. The first stages of a Human Diaspora.

What kind of society(ies) and culture(s) would develop in space? Would most colonies be founded by nation-states, and remain under their political or economic control? Or by the UN, and be of mixed nationality by policy? Would religious or political sects found their own colonies? Imagine a space colony, far removed and insulated from outside influences, founded by Scientologists, or by white (or other race) separatists, by North Korean Communists, fundamentalist Muslims, Pentecostals, Moonies, Sedevacantist Catholics, Mormons (not to compare Mormons with the others in nuttiness, I just include them because they have a relevant history) . . .

One way this would differ from every previous wave of colonization in human history: In the first stages, all humans in space would be highly educated professionals (military personnel, engineers, scientists, technicians), and their families, with no serious physical or mental disabilities. Very clean gene pool, very low-dysfunction social group – and weighted, genetically and culturally, to whichever ethnic/racial group is most likely to produce professionals in the colonizing society. And then later standards would be relaxed, and a wider range of kinds of people would start arriving in space – but according to the “hearth culture” or “doctrine of effective first settlement” theory, the first group to effectively colonize a given region creates a local culture to which later settlers and immigrants largely adapt. And also, if you live in space, whatever kind of person you are, your life depends on very complicated technology, and people who don’t have a high level of scientific and technical sophistication don’t live long. So what kind of culture would that produce? A highly scientific, rational one? Less given to religious enthusiasm than Earthside cultures? How would that interact with a proliferation of sectarian colonies?

2

The biggest social effect would be adapting to living in totally enclosed self-sustaining environments: an absolute necessity of living anywhere beyond the Earth that we know of. Imagine living your entire life from birth to death inside. No sky, no weather, no large amounts of unused volume, no plants or animals that don’t contribute to human survival, wearing a pressure suit to even go for a walk through a featureless desert,
Maybe very large O’Neil type orbital colonies wouldn’t be too bad, but for the most part life in space (or rather, life in tin cans located in space) would be very limited by Terran standards.

3

Human rights would still apply the way they do on earth. North Korea’s claims of soveriginity do not really affect the rest of humanity in trying to stop them, if they had a space colony it would be no different.

The first generations would be scientific, but as time went on generations would not need to be as the scientific infrastructure would be taken care of. That is like feeling modern americans must be good at farming and building things out of wood because the pioneers who traveled west 150 years ago did that. In today’s society there is endless complex technology but you don’t need to understand it to use it. A person can be totally ignorant of technology and still watch TV, drive a car, use the internet, use electricity, etc.

4

We’re talking about an environment where even a poor state like NK can afford its own space program, and set up a space colony without asking anyone’s permission (unless by then there is some international space agency with effective authority over colonization), and organize it in its own way.

5

Sounds a lot like the Firefly TV series.

6

Given that you don’t seem to have broken the lightspeed limit for either travel or communications, colonies set up outside our solar system would necessarily be politically independent. There would be no way to either govern or police them from home. Persons participating in such an endeavor would likely be both heterogenous groups being shipped off to escape pollution and overpopulation, and homogoneous groups composed of members of a minority group hoping to leverage the majority power they’d have in the new colony. (Strangely, the natural-birth homosexuals’ colony would never properly take root.) You would almost have to have located earthlike planets to entice colonists for such affairs; people could live in tin cans at home.

Speaking of the tin cans at home, they would most likely be established for one of three reasons: to advance science/prestige, to claim resouces, or to diperse population. Of the three I would only expect the first to be composed of a ‘superior’ population, and such establishments would likely be so small as not to count. The other sorts of colonies would include the middle class laborers and whatnot, since the elite are likely to want to remain on-planet unless we have entirely trashed the place, and the severely poor are somewhat less likely to be picked as well. (They might get shipped off on extrasystem colony ships, though.)

Virtually all ‘local’ colonies and stations would be founded by existing countries; they would export their culture directly to the colony. They would be ruled in the same manner as a state or province of the establishing country. It seems unlikely that the populations would be less religious or more rational that the average moderately-eduacted member of the populace.

7

One thing that strikes me about the lightspeed-or-less interstellar travel to colonies concept is that a sort of class of the Coma-Rich would develop.

Stick with me here, I’m not sure I can explain the concept entirely well as I just thought it up.

Alright, so we have numerous colony planets scattered around the galaxy, each would have at least somewhat different cultures assuming they weren’t all formed by some kind of super-colonization collective of some sort. Even so, there would be a reason to travel from one to another. Quite a lot of reasons in fact, but the two main reasons would be Tourism and Business.

Ships would travel from one world to another. People on these ships would for the most part be in Coldsleep. That combined with possible relativistic effects would in effect increase their lifespan dramatically, at least from Earth’s frame of reference. I’ll leave it to others to decide whether this really extends life or not, that’s not really the point here.

Some of the crew of these ships would have to be awake, if only on shifts, to deal with emergencies, and would appear to age noticeably during the span of just a single trip. The rest would basically only age while on-planet… while not in coldsleep.

The very rich would be able to make these trips often, and could adopt a tourist lifestyle. Visit planet X for a week, then visit planet Y for a week, then visit planet Q for a week, stop off for a month to see some friends on planet M, then off again to planet B. In the course of a single year from the point of view of a tourist, they may make several dozen trips, spending a great many (possibly hundreds of) years in coldsleep.

The worlds NOT in coldsleep would continue to advance at the ‘normal’ rate.

These rich people would very much like to continue to be rich when they wake up again. To ensure this, numerous laws and corporations and off-planet accounts and accountants, and other things I can’t imagine, would have to be set up to handle the tourist’s affairs while they are out of touch, deep in their coma.

Compound interest alone would render the people able to adopt this lifestyle extremely wealthy, assuming they don’t encounter catastrophe (Galactic Great Depression, supernova, alien invasion or the like) which destroys their wealth.

In addition, the particularly wise of these persons will purchase or otherwise establish ‘homes’ on each planet they’re likely to visit. These locations would of course have to be maintained, which means people.

Now, from the point of view of a person on a planet who does NOT have access to interplanetary travel of this sort, these extremely rich people would rapidly become extremely old. It might be several generations before the owner of the manor returns. And when they do… they may not appear to have aged at all.

In time, these may become legendary figures… even considered mythological if enough time passes.

Something to think about.

8

Or if true suspended animation (rather than mere hibernation) is perfected, you could have a “Sleeping Beauty” scenerio in which an entire estate or manor is suspended for decades or centuries waiting "for their prince to come (home) ". To protect against plundering, the estate would have to have formidable automated defenses. (like, I dunno, a barrier of sentient sharp spikes?). And if anything went wrong, some hero would have to get in and activate the emergency reawakening protocol. (Damn, someone send this in to Science Fiction & Fantasy magazine!)

9

Nope, because the interest rate would adapt to this new situation and plummet. Since the assumption in this thread is that space travel is cheap, plenty of people would try to pull this trick, and as a result the interest rates would fall to 5%/century or something similar.

It’s also very possible that property rights could be forfeited by law when one leave for a long space travel. It’s not like people staying on planet X would like ressources to be “frozen” for centuries for the benefit of absentees.

10

I don’t expect that there could be such a caste of interplanetary super-rich. Suppose you’re super-rich on Planet 10. You go on a cold-sleep journey to Planet 17 that takes (say) 20 years. What would make you “super-rich” once you got to Planet 17? Unless there is large-scale interstellar trade, the super-rich from Planet 10 will have to bring whatever wealth they wish to use on Planet 17 with them.

Imagine the King of England in 1200 AD getting on a boat and sailing to Africa. The Africans aren’t going to consider him super-rich, he’s only going to be as rich as the wealth that he brings with him, or the wealth that the soldiers he brings with him can seize. Once you’re in another country you’re only as wealthy as the people in the other country say you are.

So today a super-rich person can bring hundreds of millions of dollars with him to another country, because of our global trading system. But if you’re in some backwater village in Guatemala it doesn’t matter how rich you are, the villagers only have so much to sell to you.

So in a system of interstellar colonies where it takes 20 years in hibernation to travel even to the nearest star systems there will be almost no exchanges of goods and services across interstellar distances. How can you enforce contracts over those distances? The only possible trading model is to take a ship full of trade goods to another system, trade with the locals, and head back home. Or keep going. But you’ve only got the wealth that you brought with you, and the wealth you bring home. Your vast holdings on Planet 10 mean nothing to the inhabitants of Planet 17…

So a super-rich person who went into hibernation and headed off on a 40 year round trip is essentially dead on their home planet. There’s no reason to believe they’ll ever be back. And that super-rich person is going to have heirs. The heirs have every incentive to change the local law to declare the absent rich person legally dead, and due to their abscence the super-rich person has no opportunity to fight back. Absentee landlordism isn’t a very good long-term strategy, since the managers have every incentive to rob the landlord blind. And the managers left behind by the super-rich would then effectively become super-rich themselves. Even if they don’t de jure own the portfolio of the absentee landlord, they control it. They therefore possess enormous power. Why should the managers agree to hand over control of the estate to the absent for decades returning absentee landlord? The managers will be the new owners, and the returning absentee an annoying nuisance.

11

Heinlein, in his novel Citizen of the Galaxy, imagined a culture of “Free Traders” who travel from system to system with trade goods and spend their whole lives on their ships. Of course, they had FTL capability; dunno if it could work with just coldsleep.

12

Heinlein’s free traders took only a few months to travel between star systems. Even with NAFAL, it would take 9 years to make a round trip from Earth to Alpha Centauri. Any other round trip to a more distant colony is going to take much longer. So the profit from a trading mission to a colony 20 light years away has to be greater than what you’d get putting your money in the bank for 40 years.

I just don’t see any way to do this effectively. What exactly are you bringing back that couldn’t be extracted much more effectively from the home system? Technology is going to be obsolete. Raw materials? Are you really going to ship a load of platinum on a 40 year round trip? Why can’t you mine that platinum from asteroids at home? Unique raw materials? Except you’ve got a load of Denebian Fire Crystals, and 20 years into your trip some scientist figures out how to synthesize Denebian Fire Crystals by the truckload, and your cargo is worthless. Information? That can be sent via laser. The only thing I can think of that would be worth hauling would be living organisms.

Forty year trade missions just won’t work. You’d have just as much luck loading a cargo hold with trade goods, set your hibernation timer for 40 years and stay in the same system and hope that 40 years from now your hold full of trade goods will have appreciated in value.

13

We do that now with governments. North Korea set up its own government and organized it whatever way they wanted. However other governments on earth still pressure them to improve human rights. It would be no different in space.

14

The difference is, the Communist colony would be at a very far remove (interstellar distance) from everywhere else, and effectively insulated from most forms of direct political pressure. To make interstellar war practical would require far greater technological advances than I am proposing here, and the difficulties of interstellar commerce would make an economic embargo a feeble threat.

15

One society would be midget lesbians floating around the Earth in a tin can. At least, that’s what John Varley thinks :wink:

16

I don’t think that’d work. Interest rates are based on a number of effects and might be adjustable in that manner, but at a fundamental level, investment works. Setting up a trust with reasonably conservative diverse investments is almost guaranteed to pay out over a long enough time period—unless there’s a complete social and economic upheaval in the meantime.

Maybe, maybe not. It depends a lot on the technology and expense of such jaunts. The coma rich don’t have to be gone for 40 years at a stretch. They might just go off for a year or two. There would be pressure to change laws, but the segment of the population who would be able to sleep their way to the top are likely to have strong economic and political influences themselves.
I think that expanded space travel would eventually leave Earth in worse shape. Like any colonization effort, all the early development is invested by the colonizing state, but the vast majority of the returns are realized by the colonists. The high-tech nature of space colonization would, I think, hasten this process with brain drain.

17

If we’re talking interstellar travel, and no FTL, then there’s no way to travel to another star system without taking decades. Period.

Yeah, you can go from Earth to Mars and back in a year. But you can’t go from Earth to Alpha Centauri and back without taking at least 9 years, and that assumes NAFAL travel. With real world rockets, even given hyper-advanced total-conversion rockets it’s going to take decades.

And the class of people who have invested money and gone into cold sleep and woke up decades later (whether they were on an interstellar trip or not) and made fortunes through compound interest don’t have any incentive to allow OTHER people to do the same thing. They’ve already got their money. What do they care whether some other corpsicles get paid 70 years from now?