Realism of Interstellar Empire

[Zargon]

I do wonder how will this realistic Interstellar Empire stay together and not have colonists wanting to become independent or be hindered by human tribalism. Or how would they even get rid of tribalism in first place to make united Interstellar Empire possible.

Well, the United States might be a good example.

[Riedquat]

I do wonder how will this realistic Interstellar Empire stay together and not have colonists wanting to become independent or be hindered by human tribalism. Or how would they even get rid of tribalism in first place to make united Interstellar Empire possible.

You assume it wouldn't be one of many human interstellar empires for that very reason.

I personally find one of the sillier repeated things in Sci-Fi being Mankind united under one political entity rather than something more true to how we are, with interstellar nations that constantly squabble and compete only to unite briefly to stamp out whatever extraterrestrial threat might crop up before returning to business as usual.

Definitely. We like to manage our own affairs. An optimistic vision of the future is lots of completely independent but friendly nations (planets? colonies?), cooperating on some large-scale things but managing their own affairs without interference. An empire requires, ultimately, the rule of force, or at least being formed from groups with only very minor cultural differences.

[Beastro]

Definitely. We like to manage our own affairs. An optimistic vision of the future is lots of completely independent but friendly nations (planets? colonies?), cooperating on some large-scale things but managing their own affairs without interference. An empire requires, ultimately, the rule of force, or at least being formed from groups with only very minor cultural differences.

There's different aspects of empire, such as the soft empire of China has always preferred ("Kowtow, recognize we're dominant, throw us tribute and you can do whatever the hell you want" what's only changed recently is adding in "and let us strip mine our country").

For me I have a rather unconventional outlook on an "optimistic" future of human stellar nations given my love of political realism:

states are the central actors in international politics, rather than leaders or international organizations;
the international political system is anarchic, as there is no supranational authority to enforce rules;
states act in their rational self-interest within the international system; and
states desire power to ensure self-preservation.

As such in such a setting I could only see business as usual with the competition of nations vying for one another to gain advantages, possibly having more of a return to the old, quarrelsome days before Congress of Vienna. The only thing I could see altering that briefly would be encountering extraterrestrials who could be viewed as an existential threat to Mankind, where by Mankind would unite to eliminate the threat, then return to being at each others throats.

I do note most Sci-Fi implicitly accepts Political Liberalism as self-evident, where cooperation is a virtue in and of itself, a position I markedly disagree with. I'd rather argue gulfs between nations would expand with interstellar nations, as interdependence of resources would largely vanish and differences in beliefs and culture would widen (I myself hold belief as the central motivator of conflict. Even over resources it stems from the belief that such resources are valuable enough to compete for).

I do wonder how will this realistic Interstellar Empire stay together and not have colonists wanting to become independent or be hindered by human tribalism. Or how would they even get rid of tribalism in first place to make united Interstellar Empire possible.

Well, the United States might be a good example.

Historically, the United States very much would be: Private groups of citizens expanding the sphere of their nations, falling into conflict with aliens, conquering and wiping them out if they win (Such as terraforming worlds aliens are on with biology incompatible with our own implying changing their world would entail wiping them out if they couldn't pick up and leave). If they lose against aliens, they draw in state actors given all the trouble they've caused, which check the aliens. That might extended to sucking in the rest of Mankind to deal with the threat. Once the threat is removed, the private citizens continue their expansion across the galaxy.

I could only see aliens being tolerated on worlds un-terraformable, and otherwise unreachable by human beings, like life on a Venus-like world. People desire to cause trouble and stir things up with those that could be reached would eventually happen sooner or later.

The US Cavalry is often painted as warmongers in the West, but more often than not, they were the ones most inclined to making peace. They outraged the frontiersman by actually following their orders and not wanting to roll back the Indians and grab every bit of land that they could leading to the latter to provoke confrontations and suck them into acting militarily in defence of them.

[Fianna]

A lot depends what you mean by "empire". Traditionally, an empire involves a country conquering and dominating foreign countries and their people. But does it still count as an empire if the new lands being conquered and put under heel are uninhabited planets with no indigenous population to suppress?

As for having a single government for all humanity, that depends on how arduous making the trip from world to world is. If it takes a great deal of time or a great deal of money to make interstellar voyages, then you will almost certainly see the galaxy splitting into a bunch of different nations, as most people will never travel far from the planet they were born on, causing each planet to develop its own culture and set of values that will be at odds with those of other planets. However, if going from one end of the galaxy to the other only takes a few hours, and can be done with the equivalent of a small car, then you're far more likely to see a single government in place. Without geographical borders, you won't see such distinct local cultures developing. There will still be differences of opinion and loads of subcultures, but members of each subculture/religion/ideology will be spread throughout the galaxy, not centralized in a single location that can cleanly cut itself off.

[Beastro]

However, if going from one end of the galaxy to the other only takes a few hours, and can be done with the equivalent of a small car, then you're far more likely to see a single government in place.

Why? That doesn't impact our world and rates of travel, and stressers wonderfully bring back how relevant national interest is in the minds of countries.

Without geographical borders, you won't see such distinct local cultures developing. There will still be differences of opinion and loads of subcultures, but members of each subculture/religion/ideology will be spread throughout the galaxy, not centralized in a single location that can cleanly cut itself off.

I find that splitting hairs between cultures and subcultures, but we tend to look upon things from a very short term perspective mindset (decades and not centuries or millennia).

I'd also argue that geographical borders would still play a role depending upon how people spread across worlds, and that worlds my have regions controlled by several competing nations (Different nations land on Mars, suddenly different regions of Mars possess political boundaries). There's also the fringe groups seeking to get away and looking to go into areas of planets that people simply don't want to go to as seen as lacking value (Dune did this with the Fremen).

As others said about the US, Americans structure culturally might be a good example of something to look towards. They're the oldest colonial culture of a societal mindset that did not like to mingle with outside groups, and so is the best to reflect how people might develop on separate planets.

The US has A LOT of different sub-cultures that have only been eclipsed in recent history that are nonetheless united by their differences from mother English culture while Americans still remain a slight variation of Englishmen (They don't like to admit it, but they are; it's very amusing for me to observe as a Canadian). You could very well see the same thing on worlds where the original seeds anchor the culture of the planet, but then after centuries, the groups will vary wildly depending on how isolated they've become, willingly or unwillingly while remaining fundamentally the same.

In a similar (very) vein is how Anglo-Saxon culture developed over the centuries from their conquest of Britannia. The Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians all looked upon one another as clearly separate groups certainly not united in the least, yet the roots of their shared common ancestry, and their undertaking migrating across the North Sea, were never denied. It's noticeable that that same ancestry linked them to the Danes centuries later (Danelaw cannot be genetically established because the invading people overlap with the Anglo-Saxon invasions centuries before), and yet their "cousins" were reviled more than any of their other enemies.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

A lot depends what you mean by "empire". Traditionally, an empire involves a country conquering and dominating foreign countries and their people. But does it still count as an empire if the new lands being conquered and put under heel are uninhabited planets with no indigenous population to suppress?

And what of the bacteria whose breeding area you pillage. Does it not bleed too?

[Fianna]

Our current understanding of culture and nationhood is based on geographic isolation. A bunch of people live in the same area; few of them ever travel far from the area, and few people from outside the area ever come to it. So when a particular belief or ideology or aesthetic preference becomes common in the area, it has a great deal of staying power, since there's little competition from outside viewpoints, and so those ideas become entrenched, generation after generation. Get enough entrenched ideas like that, and you have a distinct culture, and those cultural differences (not to mention linguistic differences) make trading ideas with people from other areas, with their own distinct cultures, even less likely.

But as travel and communication across long distances become easier, that geographic isolation breaks down. If people are always coming into your area from far away, and plenty of people in your area have been to far away places themselves, and you can communicate with people in those far away places via technology, then culture is going to start dispersing. Your area's cultural ideas will start being heard and adopted in those far away places, just as ideas from those far away places are heard of and adopted in your area.

I'm not saying that distinct cultures will eventually disappear, but eventually it will no longer be the case that a person is born into one culture, that culture is all they've ever known, and so they stick with it. With exposure to cultural ideas from all over, people have a much greater ability to pick and choose what cultures they want to be a part of.

To continue using the United States as an example, I live in the Midwest, but I guarantee you there are people from as far away as Maine, Texas, California, or Hawaii that I have far more in common with politically, philosophically, religiously, and artistically then a lot of the people who live on the same street as me (and I'm sure those neighbors of mine could also find people in Maine, Texas, etc. that they have far more cultural ties to than they do to me).

Once cultural identity becomes separated from geographical vicinity, forming separate nations based on culture becomes unfeasible: you can't draw national borders for a people who are dispersed across every city in the world. Even if a lot of them gathered together in one place in order to secede from the rest of the world's government(s), unless they enforce cultural isolation on their population, the next generation they raise will pick up ideas from outside their culture and share their culture's ideas with outsiders, and the process will repeat itself.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Once cultural identity becomes separated from geographical vicinity, forming separate nations based on culture becomes unfeasible: you can't draw national borders for a people who are dispersed across every city in the world. Even if a lot of them gathered together in one place in order to secede from the rest of the world's government(s), unless they enforce cultural isolation on their population, the next generation they raise will pick up ideas from outside their culture and share their culture's ideas with outsiders, and the process will repeat itself.

I agree that there will be a great deal more fluidity that inevitably complicate matters, but all that really happens is a shifting of the bounds of social parameters that make up a region. It's human nature also to incorporate associative practices either expanding as a large social body or dispersing into multiple.

[Beastro]

I'm not saying that distinct cultures will eventually disappear, but eventually it will no longer be the case that a person is born into one culture, that culture is all they've ever known, and so they stick with it. With exposure to cultural ideas from all over, people have a much greater ability to pick and choose what cultures they want to be a part of.

From my point of view that entrenchment will weaken, but people will continue to go their own way. People will have a culture, they cannot help but however much they may be exposed to others if only through osmosis through their family. I'd also say you presume people have far more control over what they can choose from culture than they actually do, at least consciously.

One might have an opinion on what Canadian culture is and isn't, but whatever my countries culture, my family is VERY British and always has been despite being fourth generation Canadian. Now, I'd argue Canadian culture is at its foundations British. That holds to my point, though, that despite the way its gone culturally over time, we've remained very much cut from that cloth, and in ways, more akin to stereotypes of Americans than to Canadians in some ways (But I'd argue Canadians and Americans have far more in common than most of each would like to admit).

To continue using the United States as an example, I live in the Midwest, but I guarantee you there are people from as far away as Maine, Texas, California, or Hawaii that I have far more in common with politically, philosophically, religiously, and artistically then a lot of the people who live on the same street as me (and I'm sure those neighbors of mine could also find people in Maine, Texas, etc. that they have far more cultural ties to than they do to me).

You still use examples from your country and how culture is maintained through "artificial" means through the use of borders. Even if those are not stringent, borders still exert an influence. I speak as someone who as a kid in those lovely pre-9/11 days, would bike over the border to grab candy from we didn't have in Canada. Despite that, there are marked differences between Canadian and US culture.

That is the symbolic purpose of things like borders, walls and the reason why we all have doors on the entrances to our houses.

I feel you also ignore the temperament and conflate that too much with culture. Every society has a wide range of people with different personalities and that effects their outlook and approaches to life. That people in wide ranging areas of the world might have more in common with you might simply be that your personality is similar to theirs while in other ways they would find you very different and very much a Midwesterner in how you behave and view things.

This is an issue I see this board runs into a lot when conflating political outlooks with people's expressed values, like the claim elsewhere on here that some Trek producers were clearly conservatives because of Treks approach towards sexuality. That I feel ignores how progressive the show was overall and the fact that being of a certain bent doesn't mean you're entirely in keeping with it. And I speak as someone who wouldn't call matters of modesty and such strictly a conservative issue when it ignores how private people are. In the case of cultural bents, I feel Americans and their prudish reputation has more to do with how guarded they are over their privacy than it does over anything else.

[Fianna]

I'd argue that culture's nothing but a set of personality traits (fondness for certain foods, certain views on certain issues, that sort of thing) that are commonly found in a certain group of people, so I don't see a fundamental difference between having personal similarities to a person and being of the same culture as that person.

As for culture divided by country, you need to bear in mind that it's only fairly recently we've had people reach adulthood who grew up with widespread access to the Internet. For prior generations, the fact that different countries had their own media outlets, and the fact that long distance communication was so expensive, maintained a certain level of cultural isolation. I expect to see that start to evaporate as we get more and more people who have spent their whole lives able to communicate as easily with someone on the other side of the world as they can with someone one town over.

The real big hurdle will be language, as while it's easy to talk to someone else anywhere in the world, it's not so easy to make yourself understood. That's a problem that will require either the long, slow process of languages meshing together over time, or the development of a truly accurate auto-translation program. That latter of which is something I'd expect a let's-colonize-the-galaxy-with-our-super-advanced-technology civilization to have.