2300AD/2320 What If: "Of course Beta Comae Berenices has a native civilization!"

[rfmcdpei]

2300AD/2320 What If: "Of course Beta Comae Berenices has a native civilization!"

(Here's my final what-if for a while.)

Over the course of the 23rd century, explorers on the battered human colony world of Nous Voila have found tantalizing suggestions that before the world's all-but-sterilizing glaciation, there might have been a population of sentient "mammalian quadrupeds" that was starting to create a village-based civilization on the northern plains of that world. At this point in time it's probably too difficult to tell, owing to time and the punishing effects of planetary glaciation.

So. Let's say that, one fine day, a local butterfly-analogue flaps left instead of right, with the result that what would otherwise have been a one-in-a-billion years climatic catastrophe becomes just another ice age. When a ESA survey ship arrives in the Beta Comae Berenices system sometime in the first decade of the 23rd century, its crew is stunned to discover an alien civilization roughly comparable to the Sung civilization that would later be discovered on Stark, with a industrial/post-industrial economy and advanced science but without stutterwarp.

For the purposes of this exercise, let's assume that Humans and Berenicians form as basically productive a relationship as Humans and Sung on the Chinese Arm. (This isn't such a big issue, since all Human contacts with alien sophonts other than the Kafers have tended to segue more-or-less quickly into peaceful trade and commerce.)

The existence of an alien-populated world separating Beta Canum from from Dunkleheim, Hochbaden, and Aurore is going to change human settlement patterns significantly, and by the timethat the Kafers arrive in the region the far French Arm is going to be quite different.

But how different? Presumably the ESA powers could aspire to Manchurian levels of benevolency; presumably the Berenicians would constitute a large market for human merchants; presuambly, unlike the blocked-in Sung, the Berenicians would have an open frontier if they wanted to take advantage of it. Any other speculations as to what else might happen?

 

[Colin]

The Kafers would likely hit them bad. I don't see the French (or any European power) selling of giving away stutterwarp, and so the Berenicians would have little defense against the Kafers fleets. Were talking a near-genocidal event here. Without stutterwarp, you don't stand much of a chance against a stutterwarp-capable foe.

 

[rfmcdpei]

The Kafers would likely hit them bad. I don't see the French (or any European power) selling of giving away stutterwarp, and so the Berenicians would have little defense against the Kafers fleets. Were talking a near-genocidal event here. Without stutterwarp, you don't stand much of a chance against a stutterwarp-capable foe.

As the Sung proved. They were lucky that they were discovered in an arm where the Manchurians were establishing their own more-or-less benevolently hierarchical civilization of their own.

 

[Anders]

Much would also depend on what kind of civilization they had and the peculiarities of the species. Imagine something like the tines in Vinge's A Fire upon the Deep: with a technological civlization they could be pretty formidable (internet-equipped tines would be very smart and adaptable). Also, a non-stutterwarp civ that has extensively colonized their own solar system might be a tricky target.

Another possibility: what if the Berenicians had met the Pentapods? The Pentapods might have traded bioships to them in exchange for technology. That might produce an interesting situation where humans stumble upon an alien alliance dominating the French arm.

 

[rfmcdpei]

Much would also depend on what kind of civilization they had and the peculiarities of the species.

That is completely open. When I read "mammalian quadrupeds" I first thought of the K'Kree

Imagine something like the tines in Vinge's A Fire upon the Deep: with a technological civlization they could be pretty formidable (internet-equipped tines would be very smart and adaptable). Also, a non-stutterwarp civ that has extensively colonized their own solar system might be a tricky target.

Lightspeed weapons might have reasonable effectiveness.

Another possibility: what if the Berenicians had met the Pentapods? The Pentapods might have traded bioships to them in exchange for technology. That might produce an interesting situation where humans stumble upon an alien alliance dominating the French arm.

That idea's interesting, and not only because it implies a rather significant level of deviousness to the Pentapods (they just happened to venture out from their cluster to find humanity in the mid-23rd century, that's all, certainly they weren't trying to stage a first contact). Depending on how long the two species had been in contact, the humans could have seen the extent to which the Pentapods reshaped Berenician civilization. (Or maybe not ...)

If the French Arm effectively dead-ended at (say) Beowulf, that would have interesting ramifications on the subsequent development of human space. The French built a series of outposts in the late 22nd century on the approaches to the Chinese and American Arms, but never followed up on them once they broke out into the French Arm. If the ESA does try to shove itself into these space alongside the American-Australian alliances and the Manchurian hegemony, some significant conflicts could come about.