6 ms·

The logic seems sound to me, with a few obvious caveats: * The number of samples is small. There aren't a lot of empires throughout history. * The definition

• tgv 4y ago
  But for future interplanetary colonization, the rule would become one light month. Not very far. But imagine any form of communication taking years to bounce back and forth. That could not be centrally governed. It might not just be travel time, but it probably does correlate.
  • shaoonb 4y ago
    Have you read much Le Guin by any chance? This is a theme I've seen in her work.
    • nindalf 4y ago
      Could you mention some books?
      • lantry 4y ago
        It's a big part of "the word for world is forest". A colony on one planet has essentially become self governing, until one day a ship delivers an instantaneous communication device, at which point the planet is back under imperial control. There's more to the story than that ofc There's also "The Dispossessed", where an anarchist movement travels to a distant planet in order to set up their own government.
        • ldh0011 4y ago
          > anarchist movement > set up their own government I'm pretty sure I get what you mean but I found that funny.
          • keybored 4y ago
            One has to use words for contrast, lest the fish who don’t know what water is get confused.
          • Symbiote 4y ago
            It's a poor summary anyway. The Dispossessed describes an anarchist society on the impoverished moon of a verdant planet, and a scientist's struggle to reconcile his anarchism with his wish to further his research, which requires more resources than the anarchist society can provide. It is one of my favourite books. I also don't remember distant communication being relevant for The Word for World is Forest. That's far more about the conflict between the natives and the colonizers, and passive vs. aggressive societies.
            • int_19h 4y ago
              Distant communication is what establishes the setting in "Forest". At the very beginning, it is stated that the colony is 27 light years away - a frontier - and as the story progresses, there are hints that this is one of the reasons why the colonists can get away with brutalizing the local population, going far beyond the mandate that they have. And then when they get the ansible midway through the story along with an inspection party that promptly reports their findings back to Earth, they start getting a steady stream of orders banning their various practices - slavery, violent reprisals etc. And when the local administration tries to implement some of those bans, the more hard-minded colonists deliberately provoke the natives into an open uprising by massacring their village. So it's a major plot driver, too.
          • int_19h 4y ago
            It's not a contradiction. Anarchists oppose states and hierarchies in general, not governments as such.
  • meatyloafy 4y ago
    Anybody dreaming of Mars colonies should keep that in mind. As long as the Mars colony will be dependent on supplies from Earth, they will do what Earth wants. Once they are self sufficient, this will change. C.f. the immigration-friendly early U.S. and its "close borders" and PR lottery approaches of today.
  • tablespoon 4y ago
    > But for future interplanetary colonization, the rule would become one light month. Not very far. But imagine any form of communication taking years to bounce back and forth. That could not be centrally governed. It might not just be travel time, but it probably does correlate. The rule seems too simplistic. What's so special about 1 month? Is the significant value time to communicate, time to move military forces, or something else? For instance, for your hypothetical interplanetary empire: How could a capital, with a military that can move at 1% light speed, effectively rule over a colony one light month away if the worst it could do for ten years is send a nasty letters over radio? Having local forces isn't a good answer, because one of the easier paths to rebellion is for the leader(s) those forces to declare independence and make themselves kings.
    • brians 4y ago
      Well, yes. There are plenty of takes on this. The "Traveller" RPG has a nice one: distributed feudal confederation. There's a nominal emperor, but it's hugely important that he never do almost anything, because "his" empire is a lifetime across. Nearly the only law is that you don't impede the mail system, and that you pay a small tax to support the fleet that will hammer you into the ground if you impede the mail.
    • kqr 4y ago
      You can hypothetically keep 120 military ships en route to the colony at all times so that a forceful response is always at most one month away.
      • tablespoon 4y ago
        > You can hypothetically keep 120 military ships en route to the colony at all times so that a forceful response is always at most one month away. One problem with that idea is that either the king's forces would be spread very thin or they would be massively (and expensively) oversized.
        • speed_spread 4y ago
• masklinn 4y ago
  > The logic seems sound to me It seems less than unsound. It's barely a just-so story.
• notahacker 4y ago
  The logic is fine, it's just massively overstated with the clickbait headline, and travel time in a region is an endogenous factor which depends on where the boundaries of the empire are drawn, because empires build roads, chop down forests, drain swamps and make rivers navigable. As the article acknowledges, travel times within the Roman Empire tended to be less than a month. But they conquered land regions (where possible) before they built the roads that let them supply them that fast. Certainly there's nothing about lowland Germany that should make it more difficult to reach than Hadrian's Wall, but they effectively subdued the British tribes and built roads all over that particular faraway island, and didn't have as much success against the Germanic tribes who inhabited desirable land closer to their capital that could have been reached in a shorter time with a nice lowland road from Gaul, if they'd ever been able to build it.
• pifm_guy 4y ago
  > empires that span the globe are much more feasible today A lot of people would argue that ~half the world is part of the US empire today... In that the US has power to strongly influence/make decisions in about half the world, extradite people from about half the world, and enforce IP/anti drug/monetary controls in about half the world. And by some definitions, it might be 80% of the world.
• humanistbot 4y ago
  The "logic" or lack thereof is in trying to find a universal "hidden rule" in large-scale human behavior across literally all of recorded history. This is pure physics envy, and it never ends well.
• mymythisisthis 4y ago
  It's really about trading routes. Today different regions of the world specialize in different industries. You get competition between people vying in the same industry and between trading partners. Communication really doesn't help when it comes to corporate/national power struggles. This is also why so many 'brother' countries tend to fight; Ukraine and Russia, Yeman and Saudi Arabia, Eritrea and Ethiopia.