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Rather depends on other factors though: you can perfectly well run an interstellar empire with very long communication times and people going into suspended ani
by XorNot 3y ago
Rather depends on other factors though: you can perfectly well run an interstellar empire with very long communication times and people going into suspended animation for transit.
Control strategy simply has to adapt accordingly: i.e. a message probably comes with a fleet sufficient to ensure its obeyed.
This was one of the ideas in the Doom novelizations: that the aliens had spent so long travelling that there was little chance of victory because of you attacked a place you took along everything needed for overwhelming victory.
- Mistletoe 3y agoSuspended animation may be as impossible as faster than light travel.
- Animats 3y ago> Rather depends on other factors though: you can perfectly well run an interstellar empire with very long communication times and people going into suspended animation for transit. Probably not. Historically, a few months of lag is roughly the upper limit for running an empire. The Roman empire got round trip lag down to two months to the distant provinces. The Spanish empire was at 4-5 months of lag for the New World. Holding an empire together with a lag of decades probably won' work.
- cryptonector 3y ago> you can perfectly well run an interstellar empire with very long communication times and people going into suspended animation for transit. If travel times are orders of magnitude longer than lifetimes, then you will tend to lose civilizational cohesion. > Control strategy simply has to adapt accordingly: i.e. a message probably comes with a fleet sufficient to ensure its obeyed. What even is the point? The message takes N years to be received by a receiver N light-years away, but travel times will be orders of magnitude longer, so no "fleet" can be sent.
- exe34 3y agoThe fleet carries the message. Of course, there's a fair chance that by the time the fleet gets there, the colony is long dead, or has advanced in weaponry in a different but overwhelming direction, so they just barely notice the little flash way out past their oort cloud.
- XorNot 3y agoAscribing limited-lifespan human motivations to potentially infinite lifespan non-human intelligence is the core mistake here though. You look at running an empire with hundreds of years of message delay as pointless, they may view it as totally necessary. After all - if from your subjective opinion you blink and you're in another star system (hundreds of years later), then are you even worried about that time difference, or are you worried about whether they're still flying the right flags when you get there? (you can imagine a similar arrangement of times working out for social relationships over such timespans - duration might not much matter if everyone sort of agrees they'll wake up for X amount of subjective time before meeting up again in person).
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoAI. Instead of FTL, or FTL communication lines, or forms of suspended animation. The ships that are sent out could be run by an AI. Maybe the ships are factory ships to self-replicate. The Grabby could be more like Blindsight.
- cryptonector 3y agoYes, but then each colony is independent and disconnected from the mother ship. There are people who say that... that's what we are on Earth: a colony started by aliens.