kilemall
SOC-14 5K
I was under the impression one of the major entry points was in Alaska, which the White Pass & Yukon now covers.
General How do you colonize?
- Thread starter Tikon
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I was under the impression one of the major entry points was in Alaska, which the White Pass & Yukon now covers.
They were just suggestions. But, being the professional logistician, how do you work out the mechanics of groups like that being able to afford to travel out to and establish a colony? Do they just lease a vessel to take them and their goods/chattel out to the new home & deposit them there for better or worse? What else would you see a group like that doing to settle a new colony?
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How much extra engineering would have to go into it to ensure that the vessel was, effectively, dual use? There'd be a cost component to that, which would have to be weighed up against the budget for the new colony. Or are you imagining that the vessel would just be gutted and stripped and not built for dual use?
Only for the rush itself; it's a blip on the overall settlement of Alaska - It was why juneau was founded, but Juneau has never been a major city... It's still pretty marginal, being propped up by the legislature being present.
The pass itself is also half in Canada... the first mountain peak inland forms the boundary of SE Alaska.
Which brings to mind... Many settlements will not retain their initial purpose.
No, it's a Traveller mindset. To quote Ulysses Everett McGill, "Well, ain't this place a geographical oddity. Two weeks from everywhere!".
Which basically sums up a traveller trader. The colony is as isolated as it wants to be.
If you're landing on a shirt sleeve world, they could bring starter materials to build up early shelters, but ideally would want to have some local manufacturing capacity (i.e. a lumber mill) to help grow the colony, as the typical scenario is that the colony has human capital, rather than monetary capital. So, anything that can magnify and leverage the local labor force is a win (local lumber, grow crops, etc.).
At the same time, there's little reason (outside of idealogical) for them to not have megawatts of power on tap with a handy Kirkland Fusion Generator from COSTCO and hose in a local lake. So, powering a saw mill is straightforward.
If it's not a shirt sleeve world, then, simply, it's not a low capital operation in the first place. They may import huddled masses later in to an established facility, but right off, it's going to be expensive as they need to bring everything with them, including air and water, much less raw materials to start the colony. This would likely be a mining colony of some kind. I honestly can't think of another reason why someone would go to a completely inhospitable place. "Science", but that's not a colony, and that's a funded operation vs bootstrap colonists.
A mining station that's a small city in itself, that anchors itself to an asteroid as it begins to grind its way in. Collected rock is processed and waste is ejected.
Central area is the mining town's entertainment district. Upper levels are management and shipping.
Timerover51
SOC-14 5K
You might like the following short story: Industrial Revolution, by Poul Anderson. I read it when it first came out in Analog. The miners are actually mining gas from Jupiter, but otherwise, it sounds like what you are thinking about.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30971/30971-h/30971-h.htm
Major B
SOC-14 1K
I'm surprised no one has brought up the historical example of the US Homestead Acts - granting land ownership in exchange for agricultural development. Your state colony idea comes close to the same idea so I wanted to expand on it.
The first Homestead Act was signed into law by Abraham Lincoln in 1862. It was amended and expanded several times and homesteading was not discontinued in the Continental US until 1976 and it remained in use in Alaska until 1986. About 10% of the land area of the US (270 million acres) was literally given away to those who would work the land and about 40% of those who applied were successful in sticking it out to gain title to their land. (source=Wikipedia)
Of course there was much fraud by cattle and lumber and mining concerns among others but the system was successful in drawing volunteers to settle lands west of the Mississippi (and Alaska).
I think a similar venture would work in many areas of the 3I too. As Timerover suggested it is the discontented that have the drive to find new lands to settle but I think you can get more participation with an incentive. Your average arcology dweller may be content with his or her life but the thought of owning a big parcel of land would be a powerful incentive.
On the other hand, your average arcology dweller is unlikely to have the skills to survive in the initial stages of a colony. They might have better chances in the second or later wave of colonists after some infrastructure had been set up.
I remember reading a fascinating account of a colony world in the Night's Dawn trilogy. Lalonde was a stage one colony world being cleared and settled with a combination of volunteers and involuntary colonists (your penal colony example) from Earth. Settlement was in progress along a major river with boats being used for transporting colonists and produce. The settlement was started by dropping "dumpers" form the colony ship with the starting supplies and the dumpers were used as administrative buildings still at the point of the narrative - still in the haphazard arrangement of where they were dropped because they didn't have the equipment to move them. All that was from memory so I may not recall all the details correctly but the description of those who were ready and those very unready struggling in this new environment was a great read - as was the rest of the story.
Has someone already mentioned Cities in Flight by James Blish?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities_in_Flight
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities_in_Flight
QFT.
I'll see your bet, and raise. It doesn't take mere satisfaction to keep people where they're at. I think significant, deep-seated dissatisfaction and unpleasantness is required to overcome the inertia of that's-just-the-way-it-is.
Put another way: humans are designed to make do and put up with it to a large degree.
Not so sure. While as a broad generality that might be largely true, is it really true for everyone? In a planet of 7.5B, even a 1% exception to your "rule" provides for a lot of potential colonists.
Whenever one asserts "people are like X" in most cases you are exposing your own bias rather than really identifying a universal anthropological truth, which turn out to be few and far between.
Whenever one asserts "people are like X" in most cases you are exposing your own bias rather than really identifying a universal anthropological truth, which turn out to be few and far between.
GrayPennell
SOC-12
I see most colonization starting off being motivated by fame and fortune. If the area is just too difficult to colonize than often it's replaced by criminal, debtors, slaves basically the poor underclass. If the colony is a source of wealth such as trade, mining, agriculture etc then the chances are the middle class with enough money to risk will also move in. Sometimes a colony will be created in a corporate sense where passage is paid with promises of success. There are other sources such as religious but that falls under a more general of escaping an oppressive to war like society. These would be the dissatisfied people.
The main reason is that it's some orders of magnitude cheaper to charter a ship and use it to carry cargo than to build a dedicated one-shot colony ship. Unless there is some limitation on your technology such as sublight travel then the ship can make as many trips backwards and forwards as you want (or at least are prepared to pay for).
You might bring pre-fabricated shelters but if you have local resources it might be more cost effective just to bring tools and fabricate the shelters from materials available locally. A prefabricated living pod or shelter will weigh several tons and take up a lot of cargo space. A portable sawmill could process enough lumber for thousands of buildings.
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