Silk Road In Space

[chris_gerrib]

I was reading somewhere that, in certain Japanese temples, one can see Roman glassware. To be clear, Roman glassware that was purchased when it was new by the temple staff. It was a reminder that the Silk Road was a real thing. So, not only was the road real, but at least some people on both ends of the road were aware of the people on the other end.

Think about that. Roman emperors were at least tangentially aware of Japanese emperors, and vice versa. But from a day-to-day perspective, they had no influence on each other.

Where this ties into space (no, I'm not obsessed about space, I can stop thinking about it any time I want to) is in terms of alien civilizations. The best guess we have about intelligent life in the galaxy is that we would expect, on average, civilizations to be separated by about 200 light years. Now, averages are funny, and so you could have a civilization a thousand light years from its nearest neighbor or one light year and still have an average galaxy-wide of 200 light years.

But 200 light years is a God-awfully long way. Travelling at the speed of light, a trip would take 200 years - assuming you can go that fast and don't need to stop for anything. Even travelling at 100 times the speed of light - or 100 times faster than Einstein says you can - that's a two-year trip one way.

This would, I suspect, set up something similar to the old Silk Road. Sufficiently-advanced civilizations would be aware of each other, and would probably have some low level of trade, but very little real influence on each other.

The universe is big, old and empty too.

Comments

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

This brings to mind the old Douglas Adams line: “Space is big. Really, really big…”

This is what Ursula K LeGuin was doing with her various 'Ekumene' stories, novels, &c. - near-lightspeed star travel meant that while interstellar commerce could occur within the timespans of civilizations, yet the consequences on human timespans were sometimes dire, even as the impact upon the various planets and cultures was diffused. Millennium Falcon starhopping this warn't - a planet not particularly close by might receive an interstellar visitor once in a century, and while that's amazing, it doesn't change the price of peanuts in Peoria, y' know? Ordinary folk would get on with their ordinary lives, in an ordinary i e unchanged world.

So Dorothy in Kansas might actually know of someplace Over the Rainbow, that there IS a planet called 'Oz,' might even have seen artifacts from it displayed at an exhibition, but it would take a heck of a tornado to get her there - and by the time she got back home the very letters on Auntie Em's gravestone would be weather-worn.

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

This also ties well into Larry Niven's old adage, “Change the technology, change the society.” Consider three possibilities by which a hypothetical planet is impacted by other civilizations:

• A solar-sail sporeship which was in flight for gawdnose how many tens of thousands of years. Whether it's what originally seeded the planet with life forms (and people) or whether it's arriving now, it's obviously a one-way, one-shot deal. (Unless it's not; see below.) Yet the effect of its cargo could be as influential as the introduction of the horse to the New World, or the polio vaccine. Control of that cargo, who has possession of it, could be a major political flash point.


• The “How Are Things in Gloccamorra” school, where either near-lightspeed or reasonable faster-than-light reduce the travel time to cultural-continuity time frames. (A contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci would find today's Italy much different, but also much the same.) A given cargo might be inconsequential, but there'd be more than one, enough to produce, say, the kind of impact tea had on the British Empire, or coffee on the French (and us) - plus chinoiserie and orientalism in general, including the impact of Egyptology on the fashions of the day! This is the situation you were talking about: If the old SF favorite, the square-root drive, were employed, your 200 lightyears can be spanned in 14 years, or 28 years round trip. This would have a cumulative impact.

• The interstellar teleporter! This completely flips the board, removing the terrifying gulfs of interstellar space as a factor (“Length of stay?” “Lunch.” - Men in Black). This is true even if it requires a receiver; that's what the solar-sail sporeship was carrying! Obviously the story potential here is the receiver ship itself, set in flight “literally hundreds of years ago, when life was emerging from the slime,” and now arriving. If it's manned, the crew go home at the end of their shift; if not, the race is to see who can reach it before it sets up shop, as the only way to maintain any control over the situation.

Change the technology, change the story!