The Care and Feeding of an Evil Interstellar Empire
Author: Presidencia de la República Mexicana
image link CC BY 2.0 license
Let's imagine that it is 1000 years in the future and humans have mastered space travel, except that it is slower than light space travel.
The reason for this is that the speed of light cannot be exceeded by anything that has a non-zero rest mass (i.e. people, ships or any matter whatsoever). All those dreams of warp drive and faster-than-light travel are just that, dreams.
This leads one to ask, with sub-light spaceships, how will an evil dictator hold her Earth Empire together over the vast distances of space and time?
Magnets Interstellar Empires - How Do They Work?
In a post I created last month, Kill Time At Work With Recreational Math: Let's Travel To Alpha Centauri! I presented the math that shows that you can get to other stars at sub-light speeds in only a relatively few years (ship time).
On Earth many years will have passed but on the ship time slows as you approach the speed of light. The closer you get to the speed of light the more significant is the slowing of time.
For example, if you send soldiers in a ship at an acceleration of 1g from Earth to a colony 20 light years away it will take about 22 years Earth time but only 6 years ship time. The time that passes on the colony will also be 22 years just as on Earth.
Does this mean that the colony could revolt and have about 42 years to build up their forces and prepare for an Earth Empire invasion? (Math time: 20 years for the news of the revolt to reach Earth by radio and 22 years for the Earth forces to get to the colony equals 42 years.)
No, not if they send a new expeditionary armed space force to the colony each and every year, year after year.
The soldiers on the ship will arrive at the colony within 6 years ship time, they will replace a previous cohort of soldiers and spend a five year tour of duty before getting replaced by another, later cohort of Earth soldiers, and ship back out.
This means that the Earth Empire Forces at this colony would consist of 6 separate cohorts of soldiers with one cohort that has been there for 5 years or so and is now ready to ship out and one cohort of soldiers that has just arrived to replace that old cohort.
Each cohort will be commanded by its own independent and Earth-loyal commander. This means that a disloyal commander who has been there a while and turned 'native' will need to fight off the 4 other cohorts that are very likely to still remain loyal to the Earth Empress.
It is necessary that the armed forces are only allowed to stay at the colony for 5 years and then they have to ship out back to Earth or maybe to another colony. This eliminates the desire to put down roots and possibly start a war of independence.
If an uprising does occur and manages to win then they will have to deal with a new cohort of armed forces that will be arriving from Earth within the next year. This newly arriving cohort will know something is wrong because they will have received radio signals from loyal units during the battle.
So the colony will have to fight off the newly arriving forces and then they will have to do that again and again each year thereafter. If they are 20 light years away the signal that an uprising has occurred will take 20 years to get back to Earth.
This means that the expeditionary forces sent after that initial 20 years will be bulkier, more equipped and ready for battle. The new forces might even have new developments in weapons and technology. Developments that might even have been held back in secret from the regular expeditionary forces.
The Empire of course will want to keep each colony weak in the military sense with civilian spacecraft being forbidden from having weapons. The only space-borne weapons will belong the military forces loyal to Earth.
Closing Words
Revolts will of course very likely occur in this future space Empire and the ensuing wars will be long and drawn out affairs taking many decades or even centuries to resolve. News of a victory or a loss will also takes decades to get back to Earth.
If medical technology or genetic manipulation allows humans to live for centuries or even millennia in this future then long wars would be okay as these people will have much longer perspectives and much more patience than we do with our 30 minute sitcoms and 10 second Twitter attention spans.
This now leads to a new question. How large can a sub-light space Empire get before the travel times are just too long for this to work? Would it only be a few hundred light years?
Thank you for reading my post.
Post Sources
The video cited below wasn't a source but it did inspire me to think about this topic. This post is my solution to the problem posed by Isaac Arthur and his wonderful SFIA team.
Special relativity is so interesting and cool ;)
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I just wrote a similar comment. "Corrupted as fuck" :) I honestly hope that with interstellar expansion we will also do our mentalities and brain expansion :D
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Have you read any of Vernor Vinge's books? In some them, the galaxy is divided into different zones in which various levels of technology may exist. In the 'slow zone' FTL is not possible, while it is possible in other areas. The differences in how cultures develop in those zones is strongly affected by that. You may like it as a kind of thought experiment.
No, but I think I will now. Thx for the tip.
If an empire was willing to use artificial intelligence to expand their empire, then it isn’t too hard to imagine it covering an entire galaxy. But with the humans only occupying a smaller and smaller share in the middle, it would be hard to argue that it would really be our empire anymore.
:) LOL
I am honestly hoping that a future Empire would not need weapons and the people will eventually learn that nothing good comes from war. Why is everything having to revolve around managing people with fear and force? :(
Let's hope that a new colony will have smarter people that know how to socialize and how to be good leaders. They will keep the colonists happy and nobody will want to revolt. I don't know if it's possible but I honestly think that having interstellar war fleets is a really really really dumb way to spend our money.
Just my 2 cents!