Does the Empire use self-replicating von neumann machines?

[avatar (Alistair Young)]

@doctorcatfish

Any generation ships would have been Thirteen Colonies era, several millennia back. (I don’t know if any of them actually were generation ships, or if they were all popsicle freighters.)

The Deep Star colony ships were all cold-sleep ships. Generation ships have existed in Worlds’ history, but the Empire never used them.

@doctorcatfish

As for probes, only @avatar knows, but I point out in passing what amazing resolution imagery is possible with baselines measured in light-years.

See, for detailed descriptions, Zoom.

The Super-Size Synthetic Aperture is of fairly limited use for colonization purposes because of how difficult it is to reorient, but the others are on-line and feeding data into the start of the process.

That gets you your initial list of signs of life, civilization, interesting anomalies or resource-rich areas to work from. Next the starwisp tenders go to work and fire Far Horizon Probes off in the direction of these interesting things at speeds in the high-relativistic regime. By careful design of courses, they can usually get a few star systems’ worth of data out of each FHP.

Now depending on various things, there may be cause to send a crewed relativistic scout out there in advance. (Oh, hey, it’s an existing developed multistellar polity!)

Otherwise, it’s time to skip to sending out the weylforges and the superlifters to get on with constructing a shiny new constellation of stargates in and around the Interesting Area™.

At which point you have convenient FTL access to the area^[1], and you can switch to dispatching the regular set of IES exploration ships, in an order which should hopefully be obvious from their descriptions. In any case, depending on what you’ve got, procedures start diverging dramatically at this point.

@Jade_Nekotenshi.8702

What I wonder, regarding exploration - is it considered cricket for one polity to lay claim to worlds/systems discovered by another, especially if they’re not useful to the polity that discovered them?

Well, on one hand, the first question one gets to ask is “at what point in the above processes does the planet count as ‘discovered’”? See it? Orbit it? Land on it? Build a research outpost that has a flag^[2]?

But fortunately, that’s not actually how it works, partly because it would mean many star nations would have very little chance to have colonies (running a full-bandwidth interstellar exploration service is very, very expensive), and mostly because allowing a free-for-all in colonization is the sort of thing that leads to endless claim-jumping, planet-jacking, and border wars out the wazoo. Long, long ago the Presidium powers put their collective foot down and enforced the Accord on Colonization.

To say the Accord on Colonization is disliked by almost everyone in the galaxy is… something of an understatement. On the other hand, since it’s disliked by almost everyone in the galaxy, it’s unlikely to be replaced with anything else any time soon.

Here’s how it works.

All worlds opened up to transit, whoever discovered them, are given over to the Accord to hold in trust. Then the allocation process begins:

• First, identified protected planets are taken out of the pool. Protected planets includes a wide variety of things: quarantined worlds^[3], necropolis worlds, Precursor sites or other fossil worlds, unique sites of scientific interest, promising prebiotic worlds, unusual native sophonts, that sort of thing.

• Second, non-spacefaring races get first claim on their own system^[4], at least until the timer runs down.

• Third, a limited number of habitables and near-habitables are plucked out of the pool before it goes on the market to be allocated as freesoil worlds, open to settlement by anyone. This is the “outside”/“safety-valve” solution applied on a Worlds-wide scale.

After all that, then they’ll - meaning the Conclave Commission on Colonization - will take your requests to bid. The rules, which are “more like guidelines anyway”, amount to this:

• You must have a plan for use for whatever you request. No claiming worlds just to keep them in reserve. If you don’t follow through, for whatever reason, it goes back in the pool. No money returned.

• Garden worlds go to people with good records in the field of environmental stewardship. Those are valuable and will not be handed out willy-nilly to people who might ruin them. If you have no particular record in this area, expect to get something ecopoesis-capable first to see how you do with it before you’re trusted with anything that has a native ecosystem.

• Yes, the bidding rules do favor the people who run the big exploratory programs, which in particular means that the Empire tends to get whatever it is particularly interested in. (People complain about this, but since (a) they’re perfectly open about this - as “an incentive” to explore - (b), they don’t abuse it too much, and (c) if the IES stopped exploring, there’d be a lot fewer planets on the market, they by and large deal.)

• People being people everywhere and the Conclave being annoyingly political despite the Empire’s best efforts, it helps to be a respectable, well-liked star nation and not today’s annoying rogue state when the planets get handed out. Failing that, bribes generous contributions to worthy causes may help. (See here, under The Council for Economic Justice & Development, for example.)

• While a few outposts here and there on unallocated worlds are permissible if they don’t grow large, wildcat colonies will be evicted.

@Elise

Oh, don’t the Associate Worlds use the von Neumann probes? Very sensible of them. In that case, how they colonize new worlds? I highly doubt they would be so primitive as to depend on means such as generation ships.

After the exploration and allocation I’ve just described, the typical type of colonial venture makes use of one of these:

Floating Acorn

@Elise

In the Eldraeverse, planetary colonization seems to be the mainstream (including asteroid colonization). Does this have to do with the fact that they do not utilize von Neumann machines to dismantle rocky and gas planets for building space habitats?

For the most part - excepting Corícál and Esilmúr, where girdling the entire stars in megastructures has implied disassembling most of the existing planetary masses for material - there’s just not been a need.

I mean, they have a lot of habitats - the choice between planet-dwelling and hab-dwelling is largely down to personal taste - but space is, not to put too fine a point on it, full of rocks, and as a mature civilization well past the exponential point of its growth curve^[5], the existing conveniently-minable space rocks have been more than enough to meet demand.

@Elise

Cogli looks very interesting. What is the estimated likelihood of cases like Cogli, or even more seriously, von Neumann machines undergoing mutation into a hegemonizing swarm?

Oh, infinitesimal, or so the engineers would tell you. It’s just that in a functionally infinite universe, infinitesimals will happen from time to time, and they only have to happen once in the wrong place to give you a real problem.

@Elise

Lastly, what is difference between ADHAÏC CALYPSE and ADHAÏC PARASOL?

The latter is strictly defensive (basically, form an impenetrable sphere around the defended volume); the former… is not (in case of Tyranids, pull lever).

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1. I am, obviously, describing the pre-frameslip status quo. ↩︎

2. Stealing countries with the cunning use of flags, as Suzy Eddie Izzard once put it, is a long-standing tradition that we can reasonably expect to carry on into the future. ↩︎

3. …that could pose a threat to galactic civilization in general, usually. Mere death worlds don’t count; if you’re crazy enough to try to colonize somewhere like Glainevar or Kodelyk, you go for it, pal. ↩︎

4. Other than protected planets; it’s complex. ↩︎

5. And without an ideology telling them to fill the universe with spam-in-a-can. ↩︎