Re: Communication and Travel

At 09:50 12/06/98 -0500, you wrote:
>You wrote: 
>
>>That and 8+ billion $US a year in militrary aid, not to mention 
>civilian >aid, plus all teh foreign donations.
>
>And would not an interstellar colony be recipients of a considerable 
>amount of aid?  After all, the initial outlay for such a colony (except

>on the smallest scale on the most habitable worlds) would be quite 
>large--I expect the mother country would make a sizeable effort to keep

>the damn thing intact until it can begin contributing to the mother 
>country's economy!  
>
>John 

There seems to be an assumption that the various powers are the only
ones
colonising.  What about private firms and groups? Similar I suppose to
Lalonde in Peter Hamiltons "The reality dysfunction". It surely couldn't
be
worthwhile for the major powers to colonise all the various worlds they
find even if some are perfectly viable.  Why not farm them out to
corporations or ethnic groupings (Remember the Scottish Ethnic planets
in
Julian Mays books).

These types of colonies may have military forces but they might be local
militias or mercenaries.  I remember a scenario Mike Elliot wrote for
one
of the Ragnaroks in which a minoing corporation were about to take over
a
planetary government but the government hired some mercenaries to steal
some nukes from the mining corp.  It went something along those lines.
--------------------
Niall Gilsenan,
DIT Cathal Brugha St,
Dublin 1,
Ireland.