Is planetary culture a brain bug?

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Adrian Laguna
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Post by Adrian Laguna »

What if our hypothetical society builds the Cloning Vats secret project?
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Post by RedImperator »

Adrian Laguna wrote:What if our hypothetical society builds the Cloning Vats secret project?
It's still limited by its ability to raise and care for all those children, and expand its economy fast enough to keep up with population growth. And a sustained growth rate of 5% a year probably would require cloning vats, anyway.

At any rate, even if you were growing at 100% per year, the other problems involved in sustaining a monoculture still apply. Culture isn't just funny hats and folk dancing. It's a set of behaviors evolved to increase the odds of survival in a given environment. Colonists who fail to adapt their culture in new environments die; witness Jamestown, for instance, where everyone almost starved because the nobles refused to work. Any attempt to settle the entire planet will necessarily result in cultural changes.
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Post by Darth Smiley »

One could just assume that the planet(s) in question DO have a varied culture somewhere...but the heroes only get a chance to deal with one culture (presumably the dominant culture) before they run out of time for this episode and have to move on to the next planet.
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Post by Darth Ruinus »

Darth Smiley wrote:One could just assume that the planet(s) in question DO have a varied culture somewhere...but the heroes only get a chance to deal with one culture (presumably the dominant culture) before they run out of time for this episode and have to move on to the next planet.
Yeah, but I think the OP was actually asking about planets were we KNOW there is only one culture.

Anywas, I think it would be a bit better if, well, take the Klingons for instance. If they all HAVE to be stupid vikings in space, or a combat oriented culture, there could be sub-cultures. For instance, the normal everyday Klingons belongs to, uh, Knife clan, and likes using knives in combat. Even ranged combat.

Then there is Sniper clan, who is in political control, because they like taking out people from far away, thinking combat is perfect if the enemy never sees you.

Or, something like Shadow clan. Klingons who "war" with backhanded deals, economic moves and such, since they think there is nothing wrong with war AND making money. And the best war is when the enemy loses even before the war starts.

Some shit like that, though I guess that would cease to be a mono-culture.
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Oh, an interstellar monoculture is so stupid as to be beneath consideration. Every single problem that applies to a planetary monoculture is many orders of magnitude worse for an interstellar civilization, even one with arbitrarily fast FTL.

Looking at Star Trek in particular for a moment, the TNG-era Klingons are by far the most egregious offenders in this regard, because TNG, DS9, and VOY together actually flesh out that monoculture, and make it clear all Klingons share it in detail. The Ferengi are nearly as bad, maybe worse because there's no way their society should work at all, though at least with the Ferengi we see a few token dissenters. The portrayal of the Romulans, by contrast, is far more acceptable, because almost every Romulan we see is a member of their military or government, and it is believable that a military would train its members to all act the same way, and likewise an autocratic government shouldn't show much variation in the behavior of individual bureaucrats and politicians.
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Post by Darth Ruinus »

RedImperator wrote:Oh, an interstellar monoculture is so stupid as to be beneath consideration. Every single problem that applies to a planetary monoculture is many orders of magnitude worse for an interstellar civilization, even one with arbitrarily fast FTL.

Looking at Star Trek in particular for a moment, the TNG-era Klingons are by far the most egregious offenders in this regard, because TNG, DS9, and VOY together actually flesh out that monoculture, and make it clear all Klingons share it in detail. The Ferengi are nearly as bad, maybe worse because there's no way their society should work at all, though at least with the Ferengi we see a few token dissenters. The portrayal of the Romulans, by contrast, is far more acceptable, because almost every Romulan we see is a member of their military or government, and it is believable that a military would train its members to all act the same way, and likewise an autocratic government shouldn't show much variation in the behavior of individual bureaucrats and politicians.
Even so, wouldn't there be at least some Romulans who dont get along with the government and act out differently, or at least leave Romulan territory? (I dont watch ST, so I dont know)

Even with far reaching military influence, I mean surely, military training cant be THAT badass, for it to wipe out or supress at least some form of different thought.
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Post by RedImperator »

Darth Ruinus wrote:
RedImperator wrote:Oh, an interstellar monoculture is so stupid as to be beneath consideration. Every single problem that applies to a planetary monoculture is many orders of magnitude worse for an interstellar civilization, even one with arbitrarily fast FTL.

Looking at Star Trek in particular for a moment, the TNG-era Klingons are by far the most egregious offenders in this regard, because TNG, DS9, and VOY together actually flesh out that monoculture, and make it clear all Klingons share it in detail. The Ferengi are nearly as bad, maybe worse because there's no way their society should work at all, though at least with the Ferengi we see a few token dissenters. The portrayal of the Romulans, by contrast, is far more acceptable, because almost every Romulan we see is a member of their military or government, and it is believable that a military would train its members to all act the same way, and likewise an autocratic government shouldn't show much variation in the behavior of individual bureaucrats and politicians.
Even so, wouldn't there be at least some Romulans who dont get along with the government and act out differently, or at least leave Romulan territory? (I dont watch ST, so I dont know)
There's one episode where a high-ranking officer defects in order to expose what he thinks is a plot to start a war with the Federation, and there's an underground movement to reunite the Romulan and Vulcan peoples, so yes, dissent is shown by Romulans both in and out of the military.
Even with far reaching military influence, I mean surely, military training cant be THAT badass, for it to wipe out or supress at least some form of different thought.
Of course not, and Romulans in uniform are shown having disagreements amongst themselves, but they're certainly going to present a united front to the Federation (whom they regard as a mortal enemy) and toe the government line, especially with a political officer on board.
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Post by Darth Hoth »

RedImperator wrote:They're small, they're poor, and they're at the bottom of a gravity well. It would take virtually zero effort for anyone capable of interstellar travel to destroy them--a few Tunguska sized impacts would do it. And even if habitable planets are common, that doesn't mean it's trivial for another group to settle somewhere else. An STL-only setting makes it very likely other groups won't know the planet is settled, and an arriving colony ship could not go anywhere else.

Then there's the problem that since they've settled on a planet, they can't do anything about other colonists building settlements elsewhere in the solar system. If after a century or two the isolationists are surrounded by a developed interplanetary civilization, they're not going to have any choice in the matter.
Or, they might be able to support decent defensive installations. Such equipment might in this SF setting be low-maintenance or self-repairing.
[SNIP discussion on population growth rates]
There is also the possibility that they might accept selected immigrants that conform to their norms. With the scale most space operas and other FTL SF settings assume, using this standards your posited 100 million would probably not be all that hard to obtain. Over time, the colony should even be able to assimilate relatively large settlements of immigrants from other cultures.
At the same time, this society is either rapidly spreading out over the surface of the planet or (for some unfathomable reason) packing itself in at higher and higher densities in a small area near the landing site, and building and expanding a technological infrastructure to support both this astounding raw population growth and economic growth in general. If the population is spreading into new territory, it is encountering a variety of new environments at the same time central control is necessarily weakening. If it's not, the people will be suffering increasing environmental and social strain as the settlement becomes more than twice as crowded every generation. Under these conditions, are you seriously arguing that culture will remain static and uniform for almost a century and a half, when there is absolutely no reason for it to do so and considerable pressure for it to change to adapt to varied local conditions?You've posited a dictatorship to hold culture in place, but even with only 100,000 people, that is going to require a big, expensive bureaucracy strictly enforcing draconian laws, in an environment where people can pull up stakes and make for the hinterland any time they like, and the problem only gets worse as people spread out and a proportionally bigger bureaucracy is needed (we need watchers in the Great Leader's palace to watch the watchers out in the distant villages, after all), and there's no guarantee whatsoever the dictatorship itself won't change.
First, I did not posit that the culture would be utterly unyielding and prevent all change, merely that it would shift slowly and remain relatively uniform across the planet.

I think we might be misreading each other here. By "monocultural", I do not necessarily mean that, say, everyone wears shorts, whether living in the djungle or on the tundra. Of course, there will be some local adaptations. But are you seriously suggesting that in a few hundreds of years, language, religion, general custom et cetera will develop so great a number of schisms of such great magnitude that they will form new cultures altogether? Especially positing a society with modern (or better) communications and technology, where geographical distance and climate factors are of much lesser importance than what has traditionally been the case? Where everyone watch the same TV programmes, vote for the same parties, learn the same standardised language in school? Especially if there is active co-ordination? (Which does not need to be an Orwellian society; an agency that monitors the media and gives monetary aid to "correct" culture would probably go a long way towards maintaining the status quo by itself.)
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Post by Darth Hoth »

RedImperator wrote:Oh, an interstellar monoculture is so stupid as to be beneath consideration. Every single problem that applies to a planetary monoculture is many orders of magnitude worse for an interstellar civilization, even one with arbitrarily fast FTL.
Here, I agree completely.
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Post by RedImperator »

Darth Hoth wrote:
RedImperator wrote:They're small, they're poor, and they're at the bottom of a gravity well. It would take virtually zero effort for anyone capable of interstellar travel to destroy them--a few Tunguska sized impacts would do it. And even if habitable planets are common, that doesn't mean it's trivial for another group to settle somewhere else. An STL-only setting makes it very likely other groups won't know the planet is settled, and an arriving colony ship could not go anywhere else.

Then there's the problem that since they've settled on a planet, they can't do anything about other colonists building settlements elsewhere in the solar system. If after a century or two the isolationists are surrounded by a developed interplanetary civilization, they're not going to have any choice in the matter.
Or, they might be able to support decent defensive installations. Such equipment might in this SF setting be low-maintenance or self-repairing.
So defensive installations that can control an entire solar system are so cheap and easy to maintain an isolationist breakaway splinter group can afford to purchase them and keep them running in the ass end of nowhere...but the offensive weaponry required to smash a tiny, isolated colony is unobtainable?
[SNIP discussion on population growth rates]
There is also the possibility that they might accept selected immigrants that conform to their norms. With the scale most space operas and other FTL SF settings assume, using this standards your posited 100 million would probably not be all that hard to obtain. Over time, the colony should even be able to assimilate relatively large settlements of immigrants from other cultures.
Even if immigration doubles your already unrealistically high growth rate, it still takes 98 years to reach 100 million people. And with people coming in at that rate, I seriously question the ability of any culture to assimilate them all, even if they are from like-minded societies. For that matter, I question the ability of the government to be selective with people flowing in at that rate. The rulers of this hypothetical colony, already preoccupied with establishing a viable settlement on a virgin world, have to somehow find time to screen 5000 newcomers in the first year alone, and that number keeps going up (interestingly, if you assume a steady 5000 person per year influx instead of a proportionally rising immigration rate, it only takes 13 fewer years to reach 100,000,000 than you would have with 5% growth and no immigration at all).

If your birthrate is much more realistic 2%, and you double that with immigration, the numbers get much worse. You hit 100,000,000 only after 178 years--almost nine generations.

And if this colony is close enough to civilization that they can find thousands of people a year to emigrate there, then they're close enough that other groups will be aware of the planet, and the idea the isolationists can stay isolated becomes laughable. Even if nobody else attempts to settle there, ideas are going to leak in from the outside.

And just so everyone's clear, I think 100,000,000 is too low a number for the colony to regain space. I gave you the low figure for the sake of argument. At 10% a year, it takes most of another generation--115 years--to hit the magic number if it's 500,000,000. And a 10% sustained growth rate is borderline ludicrous. At 4%, it takes 219 years--eleven generations--to hit half a billion.
First, I did not posit that the culture would be utterly unyielding and prevent all change, merely that it would shift slowly and remain relatively uniform across the planet.

I think we might be misreading each other here. By "monocultural", I do not necessarily mean that, say, everyone wears shorts, whether living in the djungle or on the tundra. Of course, there will be some local adaptations. But are you seriously suggesting that in a few hundreds of years, language, religion, general custom et cetera will develop so great a number of schisms of such great magnitude that they will form new cultures altogether?
The closest historical analogy to this situation is the destinies of the four nations founded by Great Britain in relatively empty lands (mostly they were empty because the British colonists chased the natives into marginal areas and killed whoever stayed behind, but for our purposes, how the land emptied isn't relevant): Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. The four countries were founded by the same mother nation in the same era, have had close ties with each other (Canada and the United States share a 3000 mile common border), share a common language, close proximity to one of the others, and travel between them is easy. So how closely do they resemble each other? Well, they're close. But they're not the same, either, not by a long shot, and certainly they're not alike enough to qualify as a bad-science-fiction monoculture.
Especially positing a society with modern (or better) communications and technology, where geographical distance and climate factors are of much lesser importance than what has traditionally been the case? Where everyone watch the same TV programmes, vote for the same parties, learn the same standardised language in school?
There are two big problems here. First, you seem to be positing the colony landing and immediately having at least the trappings of industrial civilization, as well as enough of an economic surplus to afford things like TV programs. How are 100,000 people in the raw wilderness doing that? Even if you had, say, robots to do all your manual labor, there aren't going to be enough specialists in a population that small to build an industrial society from scratch in a single generation. Yes, spaceplanes can take you around the world in 90 minutes--if you can build, fuel, launch, land, and maintain them. How does this possibly work on an isolated colony in the middle of nowhere? Even the early settlers of Australia had more outside help available to them than your isolationists do.

Second, allowing for a moment they can gin up an industrial society from scratch, even a 2% annual growth rate becomes hard to believe. The only societies that grow that fast are lo-tech agricultural ones where many children make economic sense. The United States is growing at .6%, and that's with a relatively high fertility and extremely high immigration rate. In Europe and Japan, populations are falling because in a post-industrial society, children are expensive.

Out of curiosity, I ran the numbers for a colony starting at 100,000 and growing steadily at .6%. Time to 100,000,000? Eleven hundred and fifty eight years.
Especially if there is active co-ordination? (Which does not need to be an Orwellian society; an agency that monitors the media and gives monetary aid to "correct" culture would probably go a long way towards maintaining the status quo by itself.)
Again you're assuming a generous economic surplus to pay for this, and now you're expecting a government program to sustain itself for almost a hundred years, using the most wildly optimistic growth projections for the colony.
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Re: Is planetary culture a brain bug?

Post by Warsie »

GrandMasterTerwynn wrote:They'd only have a single culture as long as A) They were the only ones there, and B) The colony encompasses only a few small, tightly clustered towns. If the colony spreads out its people across the planet, cultural drift will start to occur, even if they had the benefit of a network of satellites beaming a single planetary government news and Church of Oprah worship station to all colonial settlements scattered on the planet. And cultural drift will certainly occur once there's enough people.
It won't be a massive change to the point of radically different cultures though. And what about Ecunempolises, city-worlds. Would they have different cultures for each part of the world? Yes there would be differences, there are even small versions in accent and grammar between US cities. But I don't think it would be heavily influenced, see many cultures like the African Disapora and the heavy similarities and maintenance of the original identity in various western areas.
No, not really. Take our world as a quick and dirty example. The United States has one real export these days., and that's culture, and it exports it in enormous quantities. There are artifacts of American culture all over the planet. But how a Chinese person interprets American cultural values will be much different than how a person from Poland would interpret them. And both of these would be rather shocked at a South Pacific cargo cult. For that matter, how a person in urban California sees American culture, and how a Wyoming cattle rancher sees them differ greatly, and they're ostensibly part of the same "American culture."
America isn't really one 'nation'. It's an amalgation of various nations ruled by a certain government. There are several coexisting cultures in America, America isn't really monocultural and was that way from the beginning due to segregation and the like. example: Ebonics, or AAVE vs. Standard American English.

Or how the Amish maintained their culture for so long. There's also Poland. It maintained its culture even after centuries of being divided up, or Germany, etc. With unification of the EU, it changed as well the communication is better. Maybe a more accurate example of the single world-similar culture would be one of the 'Rural' united states. a 'Red State', with a similar culture for a long time.
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Post by Darth Hoth »

RedImperator wrote:So defensive installations that can control an entire solar system are so cheap and easy to maintain an isolationist breakaway splinter group can afford to purchase them and keep them running in the ass end of nowhere...but the offensive weaponry required to smash a tiny, isolated colony is unobtainable?
No, merely expensive enough to not make it worth it. A decent military power could probably beat them pretty easily, but no one thinks it would be worth the costs.
Even if immigration doubles your already unrealistically high growth rate, it still takes 98 years to reach 100 million people. And with people coming in at that rate, I seriously question the ability of any culture to assimilate them all, even if they are from like-minded societies. For that matter, I question the ability of the government to be selective with people flowing in at that rate. The rulers of this hypothetical colony, already preoccupied with establishing a viable settlement on a virgin world, have to somehow find time to screen 5000 newcomers in the first year alone, and that number keeps going up (interestingly, if you assume a steady 5000 person per year influx instead of a proportionally rising immigration rate, it only takes 13 fewer years to reach 100,000,000 than you would have with 5% growth and no immigration at all).

If your birthrate is much more realistic 2%, and you double that with immigration, the numbers get much worse. You hit 100,000,000 only after 178 years--almost nine generations.

And if this colony is close enough to civilization that they can find thousands of people a year to emigrate there, then they're close enough that other groups will be aware of the planet, and the idea the isolationists can stay isolated becomes laughable. Even if nobody else attempts to settle there, ideas are going to leak in from the outside.

And just so everyone's clear, I think 100,000,000 is too low a number for the colony to regain space. I gave you the low figure for the sake of argument. At 10% a year, it takes most of another generation--115 years--to hit the magic number if it's 500,000,000. And a 10% sustained growth rate is borderline ludicrous. At 4%, it takes 219 years--eleven generations--to hit half a billion.
I still maintain that two to three hundred years would probably not be enough for an existing culture to split up, and it doing so in just one or two hundred is even less likely.
The closest historical analogy to this situation is the destinies of the four nations founded by Great Britain in relatively empty lands (mostly they were empty because the British colonists chased the natives into marginal areas and killed whoever stayed behind, but for our purposes, how the land emptied isn't relevant): Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. The four countries were founded by the same mother nation in the same era, have had close ties with each other (Canada and the United States share a 3000 mile common border), share a common language, close proximity to one of the others, and travel between them is easy. So how closely do they resemble each other? Well, they're close. But they're not the same, either, not by a long shot, and certainly they're not alike enough to qualify as a bad-science-fiction monoculture.
There is also the matter that settlers in these colonies were all of many different religions, ethnicities and cultures, so it was not even monocultural at any one point. Weren't the British in the minority in Canada as compared to French, Germans et cetera at at least some point?
There are two big problems here. First, you seem to be positing the colony landing and immediately having at least the trappings of industrial civilization, as well as enough of an economic surplus to afford things like TV programs. How are 100,000 people in the raw wilderness doing that? Even if you had, say, robots to do all your manual labor, there aren't going to be enough specialists in a population that small to build an industrial society from scratch in a single generation. Yes, spaceplanes can take you around the world in 90 minutes--if you can build, fuel, launch, land, and maintain them. How does this possibly work on an isolated colony in the middle of nowhere? Even the early settlers of Australia had more outside help available to them than your isolationists do.
In an FTL setting, might there not be portable factories, et cetera, to just be brought in? Or, they may have trade, but with only one culture, one reminiscent of their own. If you can settle other worlds at all, will you be poor convicts or refugees?
Second, allowing for a moment they can gin up an industrial society from scratch, even a 2% annual growth rate becomes hard to believe. The only societies that grow that fast are lo-tech agricultural ones where many children make economic sense. The United States is growing at .6%, and that's with a relatively high fertility and extremely high immigration rate. In Europe and Japan, populations are falling because in a post-industrial society, children are expensive.
Well, they might have a Draka-ish society in which child-bearing is enforced or somesuch... but OK, I should probably admit you got me there.
Again you're assuming a generous economic surplus to pay for this, and now you're expecting a government program to sustain itself for almost a hundred years, using the most wildly optimistic growth projections for the colony.
It does not have to be the same government, it just has to recognise the benefits of maintaining monoculture.
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i think everyone is forgetting that the typical colony ship/fleet often contains automated heavy industry and an awful lot of resources. how long would it take to regain space with a fully-functional spacecraft autofac? mind, if they don't bring this all the above math is correct, but most good sci-fi has them bring along a multi-purpose automated factory and frequently the colony missions consist almost exclusively of experts and their famlies. as for stopping people from landing, if the colony mission is from a group that is part of The United Nations of Sol, or whatever the space-UN is, it's entirely possible that they have dibs, and attacking the colony is a pretty much guarnteed embargo even if it's not tightly grouped enough that attacking the colony is an act of war.
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i think everyone is forgetting that the typical colony ship/fleet often contains automated heavy industry and an awful lot of resources. how long would it take to regain space with a fully-functional spacecraft autofac? mind, if they don't bring this all the above math is correct, but most good sci-fi has them bring along a multi-purpose automated factory and frequently the colony missions consist almost exclusively of experts and their famlies. as for stopping people from landing, if the colony mission is from a group that is part of The United Nations of Sol, or whatever the space-UN is, it's entirely possible that they have dibs, and attacking the colony is a pretty much guarnteed embargo even if it's not tightly grouped enough that attacking the colony is an act of war.
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Post by Junghalli »

On starting industry of the colony: it depends on the tech base. Let's take the hardest possible tech base. We'll take the Daedalus and turn it into a colony ship. Now the Daedalus required 50,000 tons of fuel and had a 500 ton scientific payload (not counting the mass of the ship itself). We swap the scientific payload with colonists and support equipment and give it enough fuel to decellerate at the end of its journey.

Running the rocket equations means we're looking at a ~150-200,000 ton ship (remember, it has to accelerate the fuel it uses to decellerate, so it's not a simple matter of doubling the fuel), with a speed of around 7% the speed of light, capable of carrying 500 tons of stuff to the new planet. The stuff will be colonists and the equipment they need, as well as the vehicle they have to use to get down to the planet (since Daedalus can't land). For reference, 500 tons is comparable to (somewhat bigger than) the cargo capacity of a large cargo aircraft. Remember, this includes the mass of the lander, which will probably be a good 100 tons or so, so in practice we're looking at more like 400 tons of stuff they can take with them (though of course the lander will be useful later; they can cannibalize it for parts and scrap metal).

The stuff is going to include the colonists themselves, and their suspended animation equipment (because with a ship this small and travel times measured in centuries you'll need it). Then they need equipment. We'll go easy on them and assume the target world is Earthlike. They'll need basic shelter (tents). They'll need seeds and farming equipment, and food to hold them out until the first crops come in. Alternately, spirulina farms may be used for that. We're probably looking at a few hundred kilograms per colonist. Most of the mass will be equipment they need to build stuff that they need. Machine tools, nanotech fabricators, metal-working tools, woodworking tools (assuming the world has something like trees). They'll need power, probably in the form of solar panels. They'll need medicines and stuff like that, until they can start to produce their own, which in some cases may be quite a while.

Of course all this puts a sharp limit on both the numbers and resources of the colonists. We'll be looking at a very small group (a few hundred people), with equipment that will be almost entirely geared toward simple survival. It's going to be a while before a group like has the capacity to have its own space program.

Of course, if you have an FTL scheme that's kinder to large payloads, you can give them more resources.
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Post by RedImperator »

(name here) wrote:i think everyone is forgetting that the typical colony ship/fleet often contains automated heavy industry and an awful lot of resources.
I think you're grossly underestimating how much infrastructure is needed to support anything heavier than cottage industries, regardless of tech level. How are raw materials to feed the factories going to get out of the ground? How are they transported and delivered? How many different factories do you need to produce all the many thousands of parts a single spacecraft needs? What kind of facilities are needed to assemble a spaceship? What about fueling and launching it? How are all these things transported across interstellar distances? How do you get them to the ground? How do you power them?

In space, the answers to these questions are a lot easier--hence Destructionator's post on settling the asteroids first in a virgin system. But the idea of maintaining a monoculture across a series of self-sufficient asteroid settlements, with outposts on an Earthlike planet's surface, is just laughable.

how long would it take to regain space with a fully-functional spacecraft autofac? mind, if they don't bring this all the above math is correct, but most good sci-fi has them bring along a multi-purpose automated factory and frequently the colony missions consist almost exclusively of experts and their famlies.
I'm trying to figure out what "good" science fiction sucks all conceivable drama out of colonizing a virgin planet by making it no more difficult than moving to a new apartment, but never mind.

Let's allow for the sake of argument that you can, in fact, take it with you; the colonists will have a fully functional industrial civilization when they land (say, Von Neuman machines arrive first and build it, or the settlers dump a bottle of nanites on the ground and grow an industrial revolution). This leads us directly into the problem of reproduction rate I discussed above: there is zero economic incentive for the colony's population to grow quickly. Point in fact, there's no incentive for it to grow at all, save for boredom on the part of the colonists. It may be able to build spaceships, but there's nobody to crew them, and no reason to go anywhere (other than your own solar system in a quest for more resources).

Of course, you don't seem to realize just how big a can of worms you've opened up here. A society with a few hundred or thousand people which can build starships can effortlessly provide any conceivable material need to its entire population. It is a de facto post-scarcity economy. Further talk about culture becomes pointless at post-scarcity, since nobody has any idea what would happen if survival became effortless to an entire society, save that it's unlikely that society would be remotely recognizable to anyone from a culture where scarcity was a fact of life.
as for stopping people from landing, if the colony mission is from a group that is part of The United Nations of Sol, or whatever the space-UN is, it's entirely possible that they have dibs, and attacking the colony is a pretty much guarnteed embargo even if it's not tightly grouped enough that attacking the colony is an act of war.
First, why would anyone give a few hundred or thousand people "dibs" on an entire solar system? Second, what kind of threat is an economic embargo when you can effortlessly create an industrial society from scratch? Third, if the barrier to colonization is this low, the old calculations about the abundance of Earthlike planets go out the window. Even if there were a billion such worlds, they could potentially fill up fast, precluding tiny splinter colonies from claiming entire worlds to themselves.

To Darth Hoth: I'd forgotten about this thread, and it doesn't seem fair to reply to you two weeks late, when you might not even know I posted again. If you want to continue our discussion, please say so.
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Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves…We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.--Ada Louise Huxtable, "Farewell to Penn Station", New York Times editorial, 30 October 1963
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Post by Paolo »

Apparently post-scarcity plays really well on television, if the ratings for Laguna Beach and The Hills are any indicator. ;) Sorry, just had to get that in there.

There is actually a lot of literature (mostly micro, some macro) on abundance, although the separate "interdisciplinary" track dealing with "post-scarcity" seems remarkably unaware of this. Common themes include disappearance of manufacturing and crafts trades in wealthy neighborhoods, growing reliance on the service sector to maintain full employment and even then the decline of accounting, sales and operations work in the face of emerging automation. There's at least a century's worth of work on this issue, so I'm guessing Wired's ignorance of it has less to do with the originality of "post-scarcity" research and more to do with the linguistic acrobatics of tech sector types moonlighting in econ.
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