So we were talking about Star Trek: Into Darkness and how
the story developed. I mentioned to them I was working on a new first contact
novel and then from there it evolved into discussion about stellar empires.
Everything from the original Star Trek to Battle Star Galactica and Star Wars,
all portray empires, confederacies or alliances that span vast distances of
space.
We discussed the feasibility of such things and I have to
admit when I was watching the original Star Trek or Star Wars or any of these
shows and movies of such ilk, I suspended my knowledge of reality and accepted
the fact that space empires exist.
Now that I've had a few days to digest it and sending
e-mails back and forth, I decided that stellar empires would actually be
difficult if not impossible to actually enact. The simple reason is distance
between stars and relativity on the planets involved.
When we were discussing this a few days ago, a couple things
didn't enter my mind right away because I got swept up in the idea of vast
fleets and how and why you would conquer a planet with said fleets, I never actually sat down to think about the
logistics of such an empire.
The first thing is the home world. If you're going to have
an empire you have a home world from where everything starts. We can look at
empires here on earth, one the greatest ones we know of in the Western world is
the Roman Empire, the city of Rome was the center of the empire.
Everything radiated out from the city of Rome; Imperial
edicts, declarations of war or trade, treaties and tribute levels all were
issued from the Senate or later the Emperor.
Understanding this we see that everything coming from Rome
means that the empire could enforce its will anywhere within its borders. The
distances were not so vast that word of invasion or a rebellion would not reach
the center within a few days. A Roman legion could march anywhere from 15 to 50
miles a day depending on the urgency. This meant the will of the empire was
never more than a week to two weeks away.
If we look at stellar empires we have some huge problems,
namely distance and relativity. If an empire is self-contained, within a star
system, and although there is some distance between the home world and the
outlying colonies, the Empire could still impose its will within a few months.
The further we get away from the home planet, the more difficult it is to
impose the will of the empire.
I outlined this problem to my friends and they call me a
party pooper because I brought logic to the party. To which I said, Earth
develops a stellar empire and has various outlying colonies on the Moon, Mars
and several of the moons of Jupiter along with various outlying stations near
the planetoid Pluto.
After a century, the Empire decides to expand beyond its
current borders; The Emperor wants to start mining in the Oort cloud, which
would take a vessel at the technological level of the Empire about 25-30 years
to get there since it is approximately 18 trillion miles or so.
So after a century of travel and hardships we build a colony
out in the Oort cloud, with the purpose of mining the asteroids and comets there
collecting ice and precious metals for Earth. A round-trip takes 60-years, a
lot can happen in 60-years. Now say that our empire expands even further and
reaches our nearest star neighbor, the Alpha Centauri system, at about 4.3
light years. That's the distance it takes light to travel from there to here,
4.3 years. Now our empire doesn't have ships that reach light speed, the
fastest we can go is a quarter of that. That means that whatever colonies are
out there, relatively speaking, will be too far for the Empire of Earth to
influence. After all if we set up a light speed communication system between
that planet and us, it would still take 4.3 years for the message to reach them
and another 4.3 years forward to get back to us. Almost 10 years for a question
to be asked and answered.
That's a lot of time between the two systems, and that's
traveling at the speed of light, the actual time that passes on earth and a
planet in the Alpha Centauri system, is centuries. While I am a fan of stellar
empires stories, and I actually have a stellar empire project that I've been
outlining and researching on the back burner, I don't believe it's feasible to
have stellar empires. Of course I could be wrong.
