Re: Interstellar Shipping

On Fri, 11 Jan 2002 07:02:29 -0800, Sean Bayan Schoonmaker
<s_schoon@pacbell.net> wrote:

>I would imagine that the inner colonies would have shipping patterns
akin to
>national patterns today, and that the outer colonies would have
patterns
>more like those of the 1800s.

It's hard to tell, as Jon hasn't given a lot of information about what
caused
colonization. Folks aren't going to colonize a new planet simply because
they
are tired of their choice in television channels.

Traditionally colonization has been due to several reasons:
- population pressure resulting in famine and disease. (This is the
traditional reason in sci-fi, though historically this been a reason for
populations to spread out, not set out for uncharted
islands/continents.)
- wealth. (This takes in a lot of stuff. Poor Scots immigrating to the
New
World in order to acquire land, fisherman moving to Newfoundland to fish
the
Grand Banks, colonization of eastern US for the timber, trading for
furs, etc.
It could be because the mother country is out of resources, or because
people
want to make money on new resources)
- escaping persecution. (Escaping religious persecution was a biggie in
the
17th and 18th centuries.)
- forced settlement. (Everyone thinks of the Australian penal colonies
when
thinking in sci-fi terms, but a bigger uprooting were the British
forcing the
Acadians out of Nova Scotia.)

Note: these are reasons for colonization, not exploration, which has
other
reasons.

The most likely reason for colonization in the Tuffleyverse would be
population pressure and wealth. I've heard that we've only got easily
attainable fossil fuel reserves until 2030 to 2050. After that, it gets
much
harder to find oil (lets face it; they aren't making any more
dinosaurs...).
Pulling ore out of a planet and shipping refined metals and other goods
would
be a big incentive for colonies. 

Population pressure is harder to deal with. We obviously have a
population
problem on Earth, but it's not universal. The population growth in first
world
countries is actually shrinking. It's quite possible that India and
China
would be able to deal with their population problems before colonization
becomes feasible. Africa, though, may be a much bigger problem, but I
don't
see Africa having the resources to colonize other planets. 

Jon hasn't really postulated why the mass colonization effort. A good
sci-fi
reason would be some super bug or virus that's ravaging the population,
albeit
fairly slowly. That, however, would go against the whole idea of
colonies
having close contact with Mother Earth. 

The resource idea is probably the easiest one to live with. Food
production,
ore mining, oil drilling (even if not used in fuels, it is still needed
for
plastics and polymers), to name the obvious ones. Would these colonies
be nice
places to live? I could see some worlds being essentially strip mined
for ore,
leaving a desolate wasteland in a couple hundred years. I can see others
as
being far more liveable.

The result would be shipping more in keeping with the 1700s, with lots
of
resources heading back to the home worlds (and maybe manufactured goods,
but
probably only stuff that's too hazardous or toxic to make back on
Earth), and
some small amounts of goods for those people who are on the colonized
planets.

The analogy would probably be close to that of New France and New
England in
the early 1700s.

Allan Goodall		       agoodall@att.net
Goodall's Grotto:  http://www.vex.net/~agoodall

"Now, see, if you combine different colours of light,
 you get white! Try that with Play-Doh and you get
 brown! How come?" - Alan Moore & Kevin Nolan, 
   "Jack B. Quick, Boy Inventor"