Thought Experiment: A Realistic/Hard SF Galactic Empire

[Magister Militum]

For a while now, I've been pondering about the infrastructure/bureaucracy, levels of control, and government necessary for a true galactic-spanning empire (and not so-called 'galactic' empires that barely rule over 1/100th of the galaxy) due to my nature of my current universe project. However, one day I wondered about the feasibility of a galactic empire in a hard SF/realistic SF setting. At first, I was under the impression that was pretty much impossible, but now I wonder if that's really the case? Since I know some of you guys may have some input on the subject, I've decided to get your thoughts as to the concept. Is it possible? What type of structure or organization would such a behemoth have, especially given the likely highly decentralized and devolved nature of such a government?

Assume a realistic/hard SF-ish setting in terms of technology, i.e., nothing that brakes the basic laws of physics.

[speaker-to-trolls]

Well the whole empire would have to have enormous projects and work on terrifying timescales in order for it to have any reason to exist, if it's only concerned with essentially things which can be handled on a system-by-system basis then it wouldn't be able to help anyone since any projects which could possibly be organised would take millions of years to bear fruit. Seems to me it would work by working out long term plans thousands of years in advance before basically sending huge amounts of resources to the places that need to be effected by these plans and trusting the regional governors to do their thing. I'd imagine that it would make most sense for a galactic empire to be centred in the core, where resources are most concentrated and thus could be (relatively) swiftly put together before being sent out for galactic conquest/mass dyson sphere construction/disintegration of stars or whatever you need done out in the disc.

Sorry, that is a bit vague. Basically I imagine it being quite centralised in terms of actual galactic projects but each system being essentially on its own in regards to most other things.

[Siege]

I'm honestly not sure if empire-management is practical on that scale if you don't have FTL communications and/or travel. You could put something like the empire from Dune together, with a Padishah Emperor in charge only by virtue of being able to send massive warfleets this way and that... But what would be the point? It'd take hundreds or thousands of years for the fleet to arrive, and by that time the situation might have already radically changed (technology might have developed, the fleet might have been needed elsewhere, etc.) Why would the Padishah even bother doing something that'll only have an effect after such an immensely long time?

EDIT: Speaker's 'look at my works' approach might work, but the problem with that is that it leaves me wonder what the hell they could possibly be constructing that's worth going to that much difficulty. Again my question is, why bother in the first place?

[Shroom Man 777]

Booted's what approach? Booted Vulture?

Hurm, one way could be to have a Von Neumann swarm eat all of the galaxy's matter and replicate it into more Von Neumann's. But would this count as a Galactic Empire? What if these Von Neumann's still followed orders from the home planet that deployed them (even if the home planet's orders take millennia to reach the furthest Von Neumann)? If that home planet is the only remaining polity left in the galaxy, because the Von Neumanns they deployed ate everyone else in the galaxy, would that count?

(No, that would be a shitty galactic empire, shroom)

[Destructionator]

If you define "Empire" loosely, as an entities tied together by common beliefs and such rather than megaprojects or sending a war fleet, you can do it with AIs.

If you clone a bunch of AIs from one template and have them programmed for stability, I figure you could have any number of independent leaders who all make the same decisions in the same situation. The AI could guide culture too, to an extent, keeping some unity there too.

The "Emperor" isn't an individual (well maybe the AI template programmer but he's no longer in direct control) but is instead a set of common procedures and shared culture and values.

You might talk to a citizen and he'd be proud of his nationality, despite never having any contact with 99.99% of the Empire. But, if he were to take the 100,000 years to cross it, he'd indeed find the people there welcome him just as well.

If he looked up himself in the computer, he'd find records too - they were beamed ahead on communication lasers when he left his home system, so it got there well ahead of him. It'd be impossible to actually keep central records, but this kind of plan ahead cheat would provide the illusion anyway.

(Some central records would be shared, statistics and the such. Math predictions can be used to extrapolate current conditions, though the actual data is thousands of years "old"* due to light speed lag.)

* btw, does it matter if it is old with light speed lag? There's nothing you could possibly do to "catch up" anyway. I'm using quotes here since it's all relative anyway... even the ordering of events is relative to the observer, so in a way, what you actually see now is all that matters.




But the short of it is it is an illusion of unity, but the stability of the local AIs from the common template keep that illusion very convincing, and the common template of the AIs provides a kind of abstract central authority, though there is no personal emperor.

[Blackwing]

What we've sorta touched on here is the reason why I get violently sick every time someone thinks that 'Hard Science Fiction' is somehow more worthy or more cultured than 'Soft Scifi'.

As if it is in any way inherently more valuable to the whole of humankind to write about a boring, limited future where the most anyone could hope for in terms of stellar exploration is that their descendants twenty generations from now might see the garbled remains of a transmission from a generation ship sent out fifty generations earlier telling them 'Well, we'll be 1% done with the three thousand year long terraforming attempt on our target planet by the time you get this message. All hail to <insert random country that hasn't existed in any recognisable form in the last century or two>!'.

Fact of the matter is that any kind of realistically 'hard' science fiction is too fucking boring and bleak to make a good story, or at least to make a good story that couldn't just as easily be set in modern times on a real ship rather than a spaceship.

Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon Five, Stargate, these are franchises that blur the line between Fantasy (as a genre) and Science-Fiction. But at least they feature strange and alien planets, species and phenomena and don't resort to slipping in a fuckton of things that nowhere near realistically possible and get away with it because those are not things of which people realise they're as soft as pudding (mind you: they do it, but they know they do and make no apologies).

[Destructionator]

The only thing boring and limited here is your imagination.

[Blackwing]

First off: Don't insult me just because you disagree with me.

Secondly: You don't get my point. Yes, the situation that you described, for instance, is an interesting concept and yes it may be fun to speculate about. But it does not make a good story.
Actually that's not entirely true, there's plenty of stories one could have take place in such a setting, but there's nothing that makes it unique and there's nothing remotely interesting one could write that would work only with this type of setting.

I'm simply tired of people who write 'Hard' Science-Fiction being haughty and condescending towards settings with 'softer' science as if it is somehow superior.

One thing I will admit: it takes incredible talent and superb writing skills to write fiction set in the far future with solid 100% Hard science and make that science actually matter as an important part of the story. That is the kind of Hard Science Fiction that is indeed something a writer can be proud of. (But he can still go fuck himself sideways if he thinks that gives him the right to sneer at something like Ciaphas Cain for being too 'soft').

It's regrettable therefore that most of the pricks who thumb their noses at 'scifi' write thrillers that just happen to take place on some far off colony, but would work just as well (or better, since they steadfastly refuse to believe that society will change one iota for the next zillion years) set in downtown Gotham City or stuff that reads more like the result of a technical manual savagely raping a history book with two millennia added to all the dates.

Especially since these people think that 'hard science fiction' means 'No FTL, but do whatever the fuck else you want and it'll be fine'. I mean any kind of story where people are enjoying a brisk walk to their non-domed city park, followed by a pleasant picnic as they celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of their'cryogenic sleeper ship' (little fact here: Cryogenics itself is about as 'soft' as molten chocolate, yet every hard science writer and their mother considers it the ultimate way to get around the 'no FTL' thing) arriving on the planet. It takes somewhere between millenia and billions of years to terraform a planet IF it is even possible to create a viable ecosystem without micro-organisms that have long since been extinct on Earth (since they couldn't survive in the situation which they themselves created and which allowed for the kind of life we know in modern times to take over).

Hard science is a very interesting subject to speculate on, it's in no way less creative than the softer stuff and it's certainly an excellent worldbuilding exercise. But it is in no way superior to soft science.

[Mobius 1]

My opinion on the matter has always been pretty simple - it's the height of foolishness to assume we can extrapolate the future of science and technology based on what we know today. It's not that I doubt the veracity of current working knowledge (and to accuse me of such would be the height of... strawmannery?), but there have been plenty of points in human history where people have assumed advancement to be done for, that we've discovered everything we needed to know. Bracketed science fiction - a genre of limitless possibilities to any one path based on current understanding raises too many parallels for me to be entirely comfortable with.

Granted, this works both ways. One need not confine oneself to FTL galaxy-spanning space opera any more than the hardest of hard science fiction. But to claim superiority of one genre over another is ridiculous - it all comes down to the story in the first place. Claiming soft science fiction is poor because it's not consistent and can easily allow one to trip up, create ex machina, ecetera is just as insulting to the literary process as dismissing hard sci-fi for a limitation of options. One needs to separate the world-building from the actual story and see that, while they do lean on each other, one need not determine the other. One can just as easily write a soap-opera romance in the middle ages as one can on a hard sci-fi habitat as one can for Star Wars. Or a crime drama. Or a sitcom. Or, as would be most of the cases on this site, some form of war or cold war or fight scene in general.

Whine about golden mean if you want, but you're all idiots.

[Destructionator]

Claiming soft science fiction is poor because it's not consistent and can easily allow one to trip up, create ex machina, ecetera is just as insulting to the literary process as dismissing hard sci-fi for a limitation of options.

Yup.

The other side of this is: ok, the hard science background is irrelevant fucking boring bullshit from pretentious assholes. But is a soft science background any different?

Take galactic empires. Maybe you can't spin a story out of a setting I described where those details matter. But are soft science galactic empires really any different? When is the last time you saw a story where the details of galactic scale actually was integral to the plot at all? It's usually just background comments or exposition whether hard or soft.


(You could argue that hard sci fi makes those details integral to the plot, by definition, and this leads directly to dry ass shit most the time. But that's orthogonal to realism, so are we even talking about the same thing?)

[Siege]

The answer is obviously that a good story is a good story, regardless of the setting; and a shitty story is a shitty story, regardless of the setting. A good writer can do great things with hard scifi and soft scifi and everything inbetween; what really matters is that you tell an engaging story that grabs the audience and doesn't let go. But I doubt that's actually a novel concept to anyone that's thought about this for more than three seconds .

[speaker-to-trolls]

You know whenever this argument comes up people are quick to make that point, which as you say is obvious, but when you think about it it's obviously not that straightforward, because if all you cared about was good storytelling you wouldn't be a sci fi fan in the first place. Or a fan of crime, romance, war, historical of any period or any other kind of fiction, because the ability to tell a story is all that matters, right?

Maybe that point is nitpicking since whether you like or dislike a certain kind of backdrop doesn't mean it's better or worse than any other. So I suppose it isn't worth arguing about since just because setting type A might be more difficult for most people to write in than setting type B doesn't mean that it's impossible to tell a good story with that setting, I'd certainly hope not at least.

I was going to close by nailing my colours to the mast as a hard scifi fan, but really it'd be a lie, I just prefer scifi settings that think through the implications of their technology and setting, and sometimes that means lots of maths and graphs and the like. A lot of what is sometimes described as 'hard sci fi' includes things like Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds and Larry Niven, whose works contain, respectively: Bacteria on one of the moons of Jupiter that let you escape and control reality, Engines that calculate away their excess heat, and a Galaxy-Killing Telepathic Death Ray.

The weirdness doesn't really bother me so much because their worlds are all different, whereas these days I get an automatic twitch whenever I see another universe where people have decided they want to recreate the Roman Empire/British Empire/Medieval Europe/America in space. I still enjoy some of those but I have more prejudices against them automatically.

[Magister Militum]

What we've sorta touched on here is the reason why I get violently sick every time someone thinks that 'Hard Science Fiction' is somehow more worthy or more cultured than 'Soft Scifi'.

Fact of the matter is that any kind of realistically 'hard' science fiction is too fucking boring and bleak to make a good story, or at least to make a good story that couldn't just as easily be set in modern times on a real ship rather than a spaceship.

Erm, good for you? Honestly, like everyone else has said, the setting doesn't have any sort of impact whatsoever on the quality of the story or its creativity. Hard SF, Soft SF, fantasy, horror, etc. isn't the culprit for a bad story. Rather, its the inability of the author to write up something that is interesting.

[Blackwing]

Exactly.

The appeal of the Science Fiction genre, regardless of hardness/softness, ultimately is the exploration of options, wondering what the future might be like, what kind of technology we might have, how humanity would react to meeting alien species and alien worlds and how (well) 'we' as individuals, as a society and as a species would overcome the inevitable problems all progress brings with it.

What I was specifically railing against was not 'hard' science fiction in general, but the kind of 'ultra hard' 'no technologies not in existence today, no aliens, no nothing' kind of science fiction so popular with exactly the kind of sanctimonious little pricks who view the hardness of a science fiction piece as the ultimate (and often only) indicator of it's worth and who sneer condescendingly down on everything that remotely hazards to dream of a bigger future.

I especially give no quarter to stuff like 'Atomic Rockets'.
Because of quotes like the following, on the 'Respect Science' part of that Ivory Tower of condescension.

Imagine a historical fiction novel where Napoleon at Waterloo defeated the knights of the Round Table by using the Enola Gay to drop an atom bomb. It's OK because it is "fiction", right?

This non-argument is the favorite of science fiction fans who like all the zipping spaceships and ray guns but who actually know practically nothing about real science. And who cannot be bothered to go learn.

First off, not only does the first line sound like it would be frickin' awesome if you could someone to write it and write it well.
Secondly the second paragraph is a gross insult to everyone who became an Engineer because they thought Montgomery Scott was the most awesome tv character ever and who still like Trek today, it is an insult to every person who likes the 'zipping spaceships and ray guns' who finished high school. Because Atomic Rockets seems to completely fail to realize that: a. One can know more about science than these guys combined and still enjoy soft science fiction without nitpicking the hell out of it (Case in point: Stephen Hawking likes Red Dwarf. Red Dwarf is as scientifically hard as something which is scientifically speaking quite soft) and b. that a piece of science fiction can have worth and be enjoyable without being as ultra diamond hard as they demand it to be.

And of course the 'respect science' section is super-special double chocolate mint flavoured ridiculous because it quotes Michael Wong. Stardestroyer's Michael Wong, Michael 'Trek is unrealistic, but Wars is super scientific' Wong. It quotes one of his rants bashing, surprise, surprise, Star Trek.

So as far as I'm concerned, the Atomic Rocket people can continue their masturbatory 'I'm better than other people because I love Science!' circle jerk, but I'll start taking them seriously only when they learn to do a basic fact check and realize the quote about the importance of the 'Science' in Science Fiction they took is nothing more than a biased, inaccurate, strawman argument against Star Trek written by the same guy who, in the same section of his website DEFENDS THE SCIENTIFIC VALIDITY OF THE FUCKMOTHERING DEATH STAR!
Which illustrates to me that these people care not one tit for a good read and just enjoy being vitriolic towards 'bad science', as they call it, for the sake of feeling superior.

[Mobius 1]

I don't know how that post managed to warp in a "Mike Wong sucks" rant, but that post was something bordering on incredible for its repressed strawmannery and bitterness. I mean, christ.

[Destructionator]

who sneer condescendingly down on everything that remotely hazards to dream of a bigger future.

This actually tends to be my biggest complaint about most sci-fi: it doesn't really bother with dreams of a bigger future, instead relying on tired old today and yesterday analogies. In spaaaace.

Star Trek is the most mainstream counter argument - it actually tries to show that things will change, and will change for the better. But so many other franchises do nothing of the sort; they take history, add a few silly apostrophes and call it new. (Of course, Star Trek does this very often too.)


Another thing I like about the hard approach is by keeping to conservative technology assumptions, you keep to something we can actually do today, meaning problems are solved by people like you and I on our own. We can do this without waiting for some magical technological advance that may never come. We can look problems right in the face and defeat them, today. We have the power to make a difference without having to wait for a handout from God.

I especially give no quarter to stuff like 'Atomic Rockets'.

I think you missed the point of the website. Atomic Rockets is meant to kick you in your complacency and get you to think about new ways to do things. It doesn't spell out an end result, but instead tries to get you to join in a conversation (note that almost the entire site is a big chatlog!).

There's a few sections that are different, but you shouldn't generalize those sections to the whole site, and certainly not to the entire genre!



edit: wow, AR got a huge facelift since last time I was there!

[Blackwing]

Another thing I like about the hard approach is by keeping to conservative technology assumptions, you keep to something we can actually do today, meaning problems are solved by people like you and I on our own. We can do this without waiting for some magical technological advance that may never come. We can look problems right in the face and defeat them, today. We have the power to make a difference without having to wait for a handout from God.

I agree with you for the most part. I enjoy the semi-miraculous super science angle too though, because in the end what matters isn't really the tech used to set the story as the story itself. I won't rant about hard science elitists anymore now. I have indeed been too hard on Atomic Rockets.

What does sorta still bother me is the idea of 'what we can actually do today' as it seems to exist today and for the sake of the original topic of this thread I'll explain a bit of what I mean:

For instance, animated suspension by way of Cryonics. Cryonic 'Sleeper' ships are a common 'hard science' approach to getting around a lack of FTL and cryonics does indeed offer some prospects.
However there are still at the moment many, many logistic problems with this technique.
For instance, cryonics as a 'sleeper ship solution' was introduced to fiction somewhere in the '50s or '60s (depends on whether you count mentions of 'suspended animation' and 'cold sleep' as officially referring to cryonics or not) before we knew about long-term tissue damage which resulted from freezing without preservatives. At the time it was a good scientific solution. Science has however marched on, but fiction has not.

We're currently achieving good successes 'freezing and thawing' animals with an extremely good survival rate (things like the 'zombie dogs' were massively overblown) and we're using cryo-preservation in surgery to allow surgeons to operate longer with reduced risk of permanent injury.

However all of this relies on the fact that when it becomes time to 'thaw' the patient, there is an ample supply of relatively warm blood available to flush out the cryo-preservatives (usually a glycol solution) and help the patient warm up. This warm blood is one of the problems with a sleeper ship: You can't keep blood preserved and still viable for very long.
Whole blood lasts a few days, but then again there's no reason not to separate it. Blood cells, if frozen, last about ten years (after which they've decayed beyond viability in such quantities that the resulting material is actually toxic). Blood plasma can be preserved pretty indefinitely, though, so that's a blessing.

This means that you can't send a sleeper ship much further than you can travel in ten years (about eight years if you want to be sure the majority of your stored blood for each traveller is still mostly viable). At our current level of technological capability that's not even to Proxima Centauri. And if you COULD reach Proxima Centauri in under eight years, one would have to wonder why you'd risk Cryonic suspension any way (possibly to conserve resources by not having to feed the grand majority of your colonists).

And all this is if you can design a system that will revive your travellers automatically, something which barring significant unforeseen advancements is not currently possible either.

Another problem is heat management: While Cold sleep is, as the term suggests, cold, it's still around +/- 175 degrees Kelvin or -100 degrees Celsius (as a lower limit to how cold you can keep biological tissue without permanently damaging it even if you use preservatives and at the same time this is close to the upper limit of temperature you can keep it without spoiling). This means you'd need to have a sophisticated system of warming the bodies just enough to keep them from being damaged without letting them heat up enough to let them decay chemically. We cannot currently achieve this just yet, not in both our solar system and deep space with the same system at least.

And lastly there's power management: We can keep a spaceship or spacestation in our own solar system relatively well powered by solar power alone. And we can keep an unmanned vessel powered with a small nuclear reactor. Sort of, the point is that we don't KEEP it powered, we just power the propulsion and recharge the batteries and then shut it off till we need it again.
The power cost of keeping a crew of humans suspended in Cold Sleep (constantly regulating the temperature) for several decades outstrips what we are currently capable of today, by way of heat management again.
Nuclear power produces (and requires) heat and there's really no way to have a nuclear reactor requiring 100+ degrees Celsius to operate on the same ship as a number of Cold Sleep pods requiring -100 degrees Celsius to work. Especially since there's no convection in space and radiating heat really, really isn't feasible at that level since the wiring transferring power to the temperature control units on our Cold Sleep pods would produce more heat than can be radiated away properly.

We could make it work by: using cloning technology (we currently can't and don't know how, but we might get there at some point) for blood, perfecting some kind of automated 'wake up procedure' that doesn't require human input at all (we don't know whether this is even possible at all), waking up our cryo-nauts at certain intervals during the journey so they don't suffer permanent damage (and so we can radiate away our heat gradually for a little while, but that puts more pressure on the temperature control system than we've already foreseen) and by developing 'hot' superconductors and 'cold' fusion to solve, to some extent, our heat and power problems. Many of these things are theoretical concepts of which we aren't certain they are actually physically possible.

So... Cryonic Suspension is, at this point in technology, just as fantastic and miraculous as a Warp Drive. It's just that the things that make it currently unworkable are myriad small things rather than one big thing. Theoretically a Warp Drive is just as possible as Sleeper Ship, but a Warp Drive requires a single technological leap, while a Sleeper Ship requires many small technological steps which are just as important.

And looking at current technology and comparing it to Science Fiction's portrayal of technology, a Warp Drive has one huge gaping flaw which is hard to ignore, while a Sleeper Ship has many small flaws the ignoring of which is a lot easier.

So essentially a Realistic or Hard Science Galactic Empire is probably no feasible, because there's no way we can currently make work to allow human colonists to travel to other worlds and we're not sure whether we'll ever be able to solve the issues that prevent us from doing so. Likewise with AI (we can copy organic brain structures in CPUs, but we don't know whether making a functional AI, let alone a sentient one, is physically possible. Mainly because we can copy neuron structures, but we have no physical way as of yet to replicate the effect of brain chemicals, partly because we don't quite understand how many of them work).
And Von Neumann machines require a level of nano-technology that we don't currently have and that, for all we know, is not even physically possible either.

[Destructionator]

'Sleeper' ships are a common 'hard science' approach to getting around a lack of FTL and cryonics does indeed offer some prospects.

First off, I might argue that if you want to "get around" something scientific, you aren't really doing hard science. Though, there seems to be four different definitions of hard sci-fi in the wild, so we should be sure we're using the same one.

1) Hard sci fi is ones that use only strictly realistic technology and/or scenarios.
2) Hard sci fi is ones where the plot is specifically about science - the process, the results, the side effects, etc.
3) Hard sci fi is ones where the science puts down hard rules first, and the story shapes around it. Similar to #2, but more in the background than the foreground.
4) Hard sci fi is anything with a low tech, retro feel to it.

I think definition 4 is bullshit, but I've seen people use it so I listed it too.

In practice, the amount of "hardness" is a combination of magnitudes of these factors. If your science and technology is completely made up, but nevertheless your story is about it, you have some hardness in you. (I'd put a variety of ST:TNG episodes under this category.) If, say, Star Trek crossed over with real life and your story was about the implications of that magic technology on the real world, you have quite a bit of hardness in you.


Getting back to my first sentence, if you are trying to get around something, you might stick to definition #1, but you are probably going counter to #2 and definitely to #3 - your plot likely isn't about the consequences of your technology choice if you made it just to get around a perceived limitation (though it might be), and it certainly isn't shaping the story around the science - you specifically said you're introducing new tech to keep your desired storyline!


So the more realistic stuff is a nice touch, but is probably expendable; no point getting all worked up about it one way or another. Rememeber though that it is still a scale, so this isn't true in all cases like this.

So... Cryonic Suspension is, at this point in technology, just as fantastic and miraculous as a Warp Drive. It's just that the things that make it currently unworkable are myriad small things rather than one big thing. Theoretically a Warp Drive is just as possible as Sleeper Ship, but a Warp Drive requires a single technological leap, while a Sleeper Ship requires many small technological steps which are just as important.

It's hardly a single tech leap - even if the physics were allowed (they're not by the way - the GR math worked backward from an answer to find a "what if" scenario, not forward from reality to the answer), actually engineering the thing is bound to be incredibly hard too, maybe as hard as the sleeper ship.

Nevertheless, there's still a big difference between extremely hard and outright prohibited by physics on the realism scale. (And yes, a big difference between "we have this today" and "this is technically permitted by physics" too. This is why I'm so extremely conservative with my own assumptions most the time - to avoid those leaps entirely. On the other hand, being conservative might end up wrong on the realism scale at some point. Tech moves on. But who knows, if you get worked up about that you'll never get anywhere.)

Likewise with AI (we can copy organic brain structures in CPUs, but we don't know whether making a functional AI, let alone a sentient one, is physically possible. Mainly because we can copy neuron structures, but we have no physical way as of yet to replicate the effect of brain chemicals, partly because we don't quite understand how many of them work).

An AI mimicing the human brain probably isn't the way to go. Things like sentience are irrelevant for a situation like this. It just needs to be able to respond to statistics and guide them back toward a norm well enough that people are actually willing to follow it (if people decide to shut it down it has obviously failed its stabilization goal). While personal interaction and charisma would help a lot, it isn't necessary to the concept.

Hell it might not need to be an AI at all; a traditional bureaucracy might work just as well.

And Von Neumann machines require a level of nano-technology that we don't currently have and that, for all we know, is not even physically possible either.

VN machines aren't nano. The original concept was basically a factory-factory and almost exists today (limited models have actually been built).

Note that self-replicating machines are obviously physically possibleon the small scale too - biological life fits the defintion well enough to say that.

[Somes J]

I think Destructionator had the right idea with the AI-federalism concept. It's the most practical way I can think of for there to be a galactic-level polity without magic, and also probably the easiest imaginable reason for it to exist (to maintain a certain level of cultural uniformity).

Here's another idea: the empire consists of beings with a much slower than human clock speed. In human terms it takes 100,000 years for a message to get from one end of the empire to the other ... but to these entities it only feels like a few years or something. For such slow creatures an actual factual traditional space-opera style galactic empire might actually work. Easiest way to do this would probably be to have these guys being uploads living in some radically slowed-down simulation. Then you can have mentally human protagonists, instead of worrying about writing from the perspective of whatever weird aliens would naturally think at such a slow rate.

------

As to hard SF being constricting ... I think part of the problem there is that soft SF greatly exagerrates the physical size of the polity you need for a vast setting, because it tends to treat planets and solar systems as small places when in fact they're (respectively) big and really really huge. It also tends to underestimate how quickly the number of stars increases with a larger territory, probably because r^3 scaling just isn't very intuitive. The OP here talks about making a hard SF galactic empire but really there's very little reason you'd actually have to do that if you want a huge setting.

Want to guess how many stars you could reach with a lighthugger within a natural human lifespan? I calculate around seven thousand. Now let's assume all the standard soft SF conventions are in play: everybody lives on a naturally occurring habitable planet. Let's say 1/10 of stars have such a planet; you've got 700 worlds to play with! That's a pretty huge setting! And that's using a convention that's terribly limiting if you want to cram a huge setting into a small volume, totally unnecessary, and doesn't even make a whole lot of sense (everything but habitable planets is a write-off). Even if you do what most soft SF writers do and treat each planet as basically a small country you've got more room for adventures here than you as a writer could ever need!

Now some people may say this empire still takes 160+ years to cross from end to end and that's too long, let's say everything has to be within a 20 year one-way trip of Earth. That's still 116 stars and 11 worlds (btw this gives you an idea of how powerful r^3 scaling is - 4X the radius gives you 63X the planets). Granted this may seem like a rather small setting, but then remember a planet is actually quite big. Consider all the diversity of Earth, and then multiply by 11.

This latter situation is actually quite similar to the vaguely Star Trek Federation-esque union of inhabited worlds in my own ERECT SCI FI. Tentatively it has 11 inhabited worlds spread over 6 star systems within 20 ly of Earth, though the total is higher - there are member systems as far as 40 light years, but past 25-30 ly from Sol they're pretty thinly scattered, so it has maybe 20 inhabited planets in total (in the setting's present era, I have a vague idea for it eventually becoming some huge empire with thousands of worlds spread over all of 200 light years or so in the far future).

Now you may say that this is a pretty implausibly large number of human-inhabitable worlds and it probably is but I cheat and have a long-gone alien race with conveniently similar environmental requirements to humans that went around terraforming planets all over the galaxy way back, so with that assumption it works very nicely.

What I'm trying get at is I think the no FTL = no possibility of a huge setting problem is vastly exagerrated, even if you use standard space opera assumptions (and if you don't even a single solar system wide setting could be ridiculously huge).

[Somes J]

It's regrettable therefore that most of the pricks who thumb their noses at 'scifi' write thrillers that just happen to take place on some far off colony, but would work just as well (or better, since they steadfastly refuse to believe that society will change one iota for the next zillion years) set in downtown Gotham City or stuff that reads more like the result of a technical manual savagely raping a history book with two millennia added to all the dates.

Funny, that's the kind of thing that I complain about in soft SF. My problem with it (insofar as I have one) is not so much that it's unrealistic (I prefer some effort at scientific realism generally but that's just personal taste) but that a lot of it seems to be fundamentally just the present or the past but in space with lasers. At which point I kind of wonder what's the point of making it sci fi, instead of just setting it in 19th century Africa or whatever? If you've read any of my past posts on the subject, one of the things I like about hard SF is in writing you're forced to acknowledge that novel environments actually are novel; you can't just use magic to ram square pegs into round holes. E.g. no, interstellar resource colonialism makes no sense whatsoever and no you can't just pull a McGuffinite out of your ass to justify it, go back to the drawing board and come back with something that actually makes sense in that context instead of being lazily lifted straight from the 19th century.

In either case what we're complaining about really is a problem of failure of the author's imagination, rather than flaws of the genre itself, I think.

Incidentally did you have any particular works of fiction in mind when you wrote your complaint? I haven't had the misfortune of encountering anything like that myself, so I'm personally curious.

[Somes J]

It's hardly a single tech leap - even if the physics were allowed (they're not by the way - the GR math worked backward from an answer to find a "what if" scenario, not forward from reality to the answer), actually engineering the thing is bound to be incredibly hard too, maybe as hard as the sleeper ship.

Probably a lot harder to put it mildly if I remember the energy requirements correctly: didn't the original Alcubierre warp drive proposal require more energy than exists in the entire visible universe, with the "more feasible" Van Den Broek warp drive "merely" requiring the mass-energy equivalent of an entire Jovian planet or something similarly ridiculous?

[Destructionator]

Yup, and other kinds of exotic energy and matter to force the math to work; stuff with no grounding in reality (as we know it) at all.

[Blackwing]

What I'm trying get at is I think the no FTL = no possibility of a huge setting problem is vastly exagerrated, even if you use standard space opera assumptions (and if you don't even a single solar system wide setting could be ridiculously huge).

No the reason why I consider 'Hard' science of the 'strictly what's possible today' overly restrictive is that aside from Warp Drives, you also cannot have:
Cryonic Suspension
Manned flight to anywhere more distant than Jupiter (if even that).
Manned or unmanned flight to another planet in our solar system in less than a year.
Space Elevators
More than a couple dozen people in space at any given time
'Space ships' of any kind that are built anywhere but on Earth
AI anything
Von Neumann devices
'Colonies' on other planets
Any sort of 'terraforming'
Space stations capable of housing more than a few people
Space stations capable to housing anyone permanently without constant supply shipments from earth
And a slew of other things 'Hard' science buffs seem to think is possible, but isn't because the 'science' they know best is generally physics rather than biology or basic economy and so they think that if physics as we know it might possibly allow it, then that's enough.

Most of these because they are not physically possible with modern day (or conceivable near future) tech, some of them (like the space stations and the number of people in space) because the cost would be prohibitive.

Biology wise, for instance, 'hard' science likes to ignore the fact that, as I've mentioned already, we have solid scientific evidence that human tissue will not survive for a decade, let alone several centuries, in cryonic suspension. Nevertheless Cryonic suspension is 'hard' science, but a 'warp drive' is fantasy.

Economy wise (also a 'sin' against physics, by the way), 'hard' science likes to have manned exploration beyond our solar system, besides the fact that there is nothing out there even remotely interesting to us until we invent replicators (if they were possible), because until we develop a post-scarcity economy, no one's going to fund or provide the ridonculous amount of resources required to make a manned flight out of the solar system possible. (Not that a manned space flight in deep space is actually physically survivable. The crew would need some kind of power to maintain life support, but outside the solar system you can't use solar power and a nuclear reactor would fry the crew even if you try to radiate away heat from the entire hull. Also, without the invention of some kind of 'navigational' deflector, even the smallest piece of space debris would utterly devastate the hull of a ship, due to the fact that there is almost no gravity out there and as such some of the debris out there travels at fractions of light speed.

Incidentally did you have any particular works of fiction in mind when you wrote your complaint? I haven't had the misfortune of encountering anything like that myself, so I'm personally curious.

Not a work of fiction, but the fans. Or even more so the non-fans and critics. The kind of people who poo-poo Star Wars/Star Trek/Babylon Five/Farscape for being fantasy (yes, yes it is, Science Fiction is a genre of fantasy), but laud 'hard' sci-fi for being 'realistic', even when it's more full of shit than the 'soft' stuff is.

At least with The Next Generation, Star Trek started thinking about stuff... "Wait, at near light speed or beyond, being hit by even the tiniest particles of dust would turn the Enterprise into a giant space-faring sieve... How do we explain it doesn't? Well it has energy shields already, so why don't we make it have a special shield just for that? We'll call it a 'navigational deflector'."

It may not be the most scientifically feasible solution, but at least it's a solution. Most 'Hard' science fiction stories either ignore the problem or aren't even aware that it exists. Just the same way that they ignore, or aren't even aware of the fact, that biological matter can't survive being frozen forever.

[Destructionator]

FYI: "Manned or unmanned flight to another planet in our solar system in less than a year."

This is laughably untrue; even the most cursory investigation would have realized that we've done it several times. Mars and Venus are both less than a year away. I'm pretty sure Mercury is too. Almost every, if not every last one of them, of probes sent to those planets arrived in less than a year. There's technology in the lab today (successful test flights, but not yet been used in production) able to make it to Mars in a just couple months.

[Destructionator]

Here's one tech that I think is overblown, ironically by lots of hard sci fi and space in general detractors: teleoperation.

I telecommute to my (main) job, and have for a couple years now. It's great. Unless I have to do real time teleoperating. That's an exercise from hell when just typing things. (I imagine gamers experience this to an extent too, but it isn't so bad in games for a number of reasons. My cable box lags like hell too, and it's annoying!)

The servers in California typically had a round trip latency of about 200 milliseconds. So I'd hit a key, but it'd be about 1/5 of a second before letter actually showed up on screen. It doesn't sound like a lot, but it is unnaturally annoying and leads to a lot of error. Think about deleting or highlighting a block of text. The way I do it is hold in the arrow or delete key and watch the screen until the cursor is where I want it to be, then let go of the key.

... but there was a 1/5 second lag, so by the time my release of the key was sent to the server, it had overshot the target by several letters. Now I've gotta spend more time hitting undo - another productivity loss.


Now imagine your whole body with lag. Oh, not just any lag though, a lagging shadow. You move your arm, but the robot on the other end doesn't move until 1/10 of a second later. And you don't feel the robot's response until 1/10 second later. And feel something wrong? Another 1/10 goes by.

It'd be an exercise in frustration. And unlike with the computer, you can't hit undo if you overshoot.


Now, with some time, you can get used to the lag and correct for it reasonably well. It's still frustrating, but not nearly as bad.... until network conditions change at random and introduce a tiny temporary lag. Were doing remote surgury? Sorry, slicey, patient probably wanted that scar (or death) anyway.


(btw another problem with teleoperation is what I'm experiencing right now. The network connection went down. Don't know why. So I'm out of it until it gets back up.)


A lot of this can be mitigated, but there's also some lag that cannot be ignored. Each step in the system will have a little - the sensors, the transmitter, the signal itself, the antenna, the processor, the motor, the sensors there, and it goes around. For something like low orbit work, each of these could potentially be minimized to an extent that it is workable.

But for something like ground -> geosynch orbit, the signal itself introudces a 1/10 second light speed lag (each way)! Even with perfect equipment, it is going to suck. And perfect equipment isn't easy either.




I'm all for real time teleoperating under short range controlled conditions. (Example: in my setting, remote controlled robots are used for ship repair, letting the workers stay inside the ship while working on the outside.) But for general use? Gah, it's a productivity killer, and dangerous.


Remote operated batches are a different story of course. Automating batch operations is easy - write the program ahead of time and send it up. (Example of this is typing a post and submitting it at once as opposed to each keystroke going to the server. Contrast old google search to the new google instant garbage they are trying to force upon us.) But some things just can't be pre-programmed like that. People on sight aren't obsolete!


Thus, if space manufacturing were to take off and it can't be 100% batched, I expect it will still involve people working up there... remote control won't kill the manned presence like some say it will.