This is Part 2 of a series that starts here.
Why would people go into space? If you want to create a realistic solarpunk interpretation of the Traveller universe, you have to start by answering the question, “Why do people go into space?” This is the main problem holding back modern space exploration. No one can come up with a compelling reason to go. It is hard, technically challenging, and requires a comparatively large amount of resources.
But, it is pretty obvious that eventually people will start travelling through space. One obvious reason to go is to prove (to yourself and others) that you can. That’s how the USA put people on the moon.
A close follow up to that reason is to see what is there. Given that in the Traveller universe the only way to see what is actually going on at another star system is to go there, it seems likely that a lot of initial space exploration will be jumping to new systems just to map them, see if they have any unusual concentrations of resources, or if there is any alien life there.
This brings us to an oddity of the Traveller backstory. Once upon a time, 300,000 years ago, an alien species called the Ancients transported humans to all sorts of other worlds. No one knows why. But, this means that eventually our exploring humans will encounter other exploring humans and everyone’s view of life, the universe, and everything will be upended. Once we know there are other clusters of humans out there, many cultures are going to jump start their exploration just to see what they can find.
Next, people will go into space just to harvest resources. But there won’t be that many resources people actually need. At least, not resources that will need to be shipped back to another star system. Elements and minerals that are rare on the surface of Earth, gold, diamonds, are common if you look in the right spot. Since gold forms in the hearts of massive events like supernovae, once you find where it is locally abundant, you can get as much as you need. And you don’t really need that much. We like gold because it is non-fungible—meaning we can use it as a token to control commerce. There will be no element that can serve this role once you have access to all of space. And minerals like diamonds—aside from likely being very abundant in certain locations, they can be fabricated. Even today, diamonds are easily manufactured whenever they are needed.
An oily aside. Petrochemicals won’t exist the way we know them today. To get oil deposits, you need plate tectonics, which requires liquid water and oceans, and living systems lasting for hundreds of millions of years. The living systems reduce carbon from their environment, die, and get buried through tectonic action, before they can oxidize. There will be very few worlds where this will happen, and there will be no reason to ship the oil when they do. We like oil because it can be burned when needed to power cars and the like. But in Traveller, you already have all the power you need with fusion reactors. It is easier to build an electrical distribution system around your reactors than to ship a bunch of flammable liquids over interstellar distances.
It seems likely that there will be some short-distance transfer of raw resources. This planet finds it easier to get the mineral that they need from over there, rather than building factories to make it on their own world. But if the trade starts getting too hard, you just walk away from the problem.
Which brings me to what I think will be the main reason people will head off to other worlds. To get away from people.
People form communities and communities form cultures and cultures are always different from one another. I currently live in Manitoba and this is one of the last corners of Western civilization. There are just under two million of us here, with about half living within a half hour drive from where I am typing. (We have one main city, Winnipeg, and it has about half the province’s population.) In this province, we have dozens of different communities composed of people that want to only (or primarily) associate with their own people. Some of these communities are small enough and have been together long enough that they are starting to become inbred. I see no reason to suspect that this will ever change. The individual groups come and go, but I can easily imagine a far future where groups of people are transporting themselves off to uninhabited worlds and establishing themselves there, with the hope of living in isolation.
A biopunk aside; Genetic Isolation. I suspect that once the tech is available, a lot of these communities will also want to modify their biology to further this isolation. It is likely that it will be relatively easy to modify an organism’s chromosome structure so that members of a community can only produce viable children with other community members. This is a likely way that despotic leaders will try and keep their population under their control. At the same time, it is likely they will also want to modify people’s physical appearance so that you can easily recognize outsiders.
“But hey, this is biopunk not solarpunk. Where is the optimism?”
“Easy. It is in the rest of humanity.”
I live in Manitoba and I am surrounded by self-isolating communities. But I am also surrounded by people who have left them. The problem that the despots face is that as soon as people realize that these communities are based on a false understanding of the world, many of their people leave. I know countless ex-this and ex-thats.
So my vision of a solarpunk Traveller universe is one that is full of worlds that are marked as amber zones because the locals are trying to keep their people from learning the true nature of the universe while it is all glued together by people who have—for the most part—recently left this or that group and have discovered the broader nature of human existence.
Further, this will be so common that there will exist communities who’s main goal is liberating those who are trapped. Underground railroads transporting the repressed. Genetic clinics that reverse religious-based modification. Countless games can be focused on the adventure of people discovering life beyond that they are taught.
And that leads us to the one force that has the greatest impact on human mixing, conflict. But I think that is a topic for another post. Until then, I thank you for your time, and as always I invite any questions or comments below.
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