Monday, October 25, 2010

Barbarians in SPAAACE !!! - Part II


Barbarians you want, barbarians you get. My last post left itself open to a threadjacking, and the commenters were quick to oblige. Barbarian hordes 1, temperate and indecisive, 0.

First of all, what do we mean by 'barbarians?' There turns out to be more than one definition. In comments on the last post I used it in a quasi-technical sense to mean nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples who lived on the fringes of the agrarian age world, and periodically invaded and laid it waste, or so the 'civilized' survivors claimed. But there turn out to be two other relevant definitions, at least.

A second meaning is gross violators of civilized norms, a sense of the word in which the last century produced more and worse barbarians than any before it. This is relevant to conflict because it gave us World War II, enough said.

In the beginning the word means simply people who did not speak Greek, and applied equally to Egyptians and Thracians. The late Romans applied it to all those people who made border security difficult and finally impossible, and whom the Romans viewed, well, barbarians.

In the popular culture this image comes right down, via Gibbon, to Conan the Barbarian. Because from Tacitus on, the 'barbarians' were seen not just as savages but also at times Noble Savages, free of the constraints and artifices of urban civilization. This third meaning - essentially 'barbarian' as a trope - is the one that concerns Romance, so that is the one I will concentrate on here.

This is why I set aside 'barbarian' in the sense of civilization gone bad. No matter now much a rogue state traps itself out like a heavy metal band, if you are filing weekly reports of how many people you massacred, you are not a 'barbarian' in the sense that Conan is.

(Having said that, I admit a Hollywood tendency to conflate 'barbarian' and 'totalitarian' elements that would hardly go together in real life - think of the original Klingons on Trek TOS.)

I will say a bit more, though, about the sense of 'barbarians' as warlike nomadic peoples, by quoting another eminent 18th century Briton, Adam Smith:

A nation of hunters can never be formidable to the civilized nations in their neighbourhood. A nation of shepherds may. Nothing can be more contemptible than an Indian war in North America. Nothing, on the contrary, can be more dreadful than Tartar invasion has frequently been in Asia.
From my 'Murrican perspective the likes of Andrew Jackson, not to mention George C. Custer, could have a word or two about this, but on the grand strategic level Smith is right. By sometime around 1700 the First Nations lost any prospect of stopping the European incursion. There just weren't enough of them. Even if they had learned to be shepherds, or cowhands, gunpowder had closed that window of opportunity. Compare to the fact that the Norse - Vikings, no less, the scourge of Europe for 300 years - found the local Skraelings more than they wanted to deal with.

In any case, nomadic peoples got into the history books as 'barbarians' because their ordinary way of life made most of the adult male population warriors. There's no obvious futuristic counterpart. People who have spaceships have a huge advantage over people who don't, but the advantage is in mobility, not fighting as such (other than the ability to throw kinetics).

This does offer a tempting analogy to the Vikings, and the rather similar Homeric sea rovers who helped finish off Mycenaean Greece. Seamanship provides no inherent advantage in a fight on land, though a ship's crew is already a cohesive unit, a big advantage over hastily assembled militia. But the raiders' advantage in actual fighting came more from practice than from their previous way of life.


Hastening a bit through Step Two, here is a scenario, as hackneyed as it deserves to be. The Empire is collapsing. This is actually one of the easier pieces of space opera to justify - just combine post-Apollo funk with the real estate bubble, and scale up. It would be the least of surprises if a period of spectacular space expansion were followed by retrenchment, and when Earth sneezes the outposts get pneumonia.

A 'pre-collapse' could be developing in the Back of Beyond even as the Empire is still growing. As in a classic bubble, sound enterprises - colonies, mines, whatever - give way to bubblicious ones, local shortages and crises develop, and law and order can begin to fray. This can go on for a long time before anyone on Earth really grasps the implications. (When they do grasp the implications is when collapse goes into high gear.)

A scavenger subculture plausibly develops, starting with surplus equipment sold for scrap prices and moving on to equipment that has been abandoned outright.

Scavenging permits some classic mining tropes that otherwise are hard to justify. The problem with mother lodes and claim jumping in space has always been that if you can reach one mother lode in the vastness of space you can probably reach many others. But there are only so many abandoned space stations to go around.

The next step, for some scavengers, will be not waiting for abandonment. If a struggling colony cannot defend its orbital station it is yours to salvage.

Really this is just Mad Max with spaceships instead of bikes, and the reason it works is that it doesn't really need to work - the scavenger subculture does not need to be a sustainable way of life. It is, after all, part of a collapse process. The Homeric sackers of cities ran out of cities to sack, except in Egypt where they ran into Rameses III. The scavengers will, in time, run out of stuff to scavenge.

In the meanwhile some of them might learn to do more with less, learning to maintain a high techlevel with a much smaller population base - replicators, nanotech, whatever - while others evolve from scavengers (and sometimes raiders) to traders. So the scavenger subculture has its positive side as well, and best of all it gives you three classic SF tropes for the price of one.

Are the scavengers 'barbarians?' Obviously not in the narrow historical sense of being Eurasian steppe nomads, but their way of life implies a sort of nomadism while it lasts. Some may well qualify as 'barbarians' in the moral sense, the worst of them robbing struggling habs and colonies of their means of survival.

And even the best of them might be 'barbarians' in their disconnection from large formal institutions. Their progenitors worked on contract for large firms or other institutions; later they are working just to keep going, sometimes trading, sometimes raiding, mostly scrounging and patching.

For practical purposes they will pretty much do.

There are variations on this theme. As commenters have suggested, parts of a space economy could slide into decline and collapse while the rest of it thrives - rustbelt worlds of declining industries. And we see in the present day world that world trade interests find it cheaper to pay off the occasional Somali businessman than to pay for a massive naval mobilization to suppress piracy.

Like the Wild West, or the great age of Caribbean piracy, or the terrible and grand 12th century BC that Homer sang, the era of scavengers will not last long, not in historical terms (though it might persist for decades). But it will cast a long shadow as a formative experience of the new, rising worlds.

Sort of hard to resist, isn't it? These tropes do exist for a reason ...




This pop-culture barbarian image graces the Interstellar Empire page header at Atomic Rockets, which I have not linked to enough lately.

82 comments:

Milo said...

Rick:

"In any case, nomadic peoples got into the history books as 'barbarians' because their ordinary way of life made most of the adult male population warriors."

Vikings were settled, and most adult males were still warriors.

Meanwhile, there were nomads who were not particularly feared by their neighbors. It's just that you don't hear about those much...


"Seamanship provides no inherent advantage in a fight on land, though a ship's crew is already a cohesive unit, a big advantage over hastily assembled militia."

The advantage of mobility is that it allows you to choose your targets and then strike swiftly, ensuring that you will in fact be dealing with hastily assembled militia and not with the king's army.


"Like the Wild West, or the great age of Caribbean piracy, or the terrible and grand 12th century BC that Homer sang, the era of scavengers will not last long, not in historical terms (though it might persist for decades)."

Well, even the famous barbarians of history only caused major trouble for a fairly limited amount of time. Once someone starts causing enough trouble, other people start working on stopping them from causing trouble.

However, we also note that they existed for considerably longer. Germanic tribes had a long martial tradition and had been feuding with each other for numerous centuries.

To really give the feel of historical barbarians, those barbarians need to have their own culture that had developed separately from more "civilized" areas for quite some time, during which they have been engaged mostly in tribal feuds with each other. Eventually their warlike nature starts spilling out of their homeland - either as a result of small groups deciding to pick on those lazy city-dwellers on their own initiative, or as a result of a Genghis-Khan-like figure uniting the tribes and turning them against the outside world. Many of these tribes would have previously had no interaction with civilized peoples for the very good reason of not bordering any... until either their nomadic ways brought them closer to civilization, or some newly expanding empire managed to push its borders to the lands these barbarians are occupying.

For this to happen in space, an obvious prerequisite is looking far enough into the future for seriously different cultures to evolve.

Hugh said...

Would the Mazianni in CJ Cherry's Alliance/Union stories count as a scavenger / barbarian culture? A deep space military is cut off from the planet that provided their logistics, and turns into (from the viewpoint of their victims, at least) a sort of permanent Viking fleet.

Taranaich said...

Howard never viewed Conan as a Noble Savage, at least as the term is commonly used, and in fact he despises the term as a romantic artifice. He had no illusions about the harshness and savagery of barbarian life: short, merciless and cruel. He just viewed it as more honest than the more corrupt stages of civilization.

Byron said...

The advantage of mobility is that it allows you to choose your targets and then strike swiftly, ensuring that you will in fact be dealing with hastily assembled militia and not with the king's army.
Yes, but that doesn't really help you when you fight. It does help who you fight, but it doesn't mean that a given fight is easier.
I have read, however, that one reason the Vikings were so dangerous was that they rowed themselves, giving them incredible upper-body strength.
Rick, the problem with your scenario is that it requires the scavengers to have incredible technical skills. Rockets aren't cars. It will take a degree to keep them running. It's like, say, scavengers stealing a submarine and running it. It might work, but it's far from easy, or even truly feasible.

Michael said...

Consider this: The societal pyramid has gotten a lot steeper, even inverting a bit as technology increases. Once there were a tiny fraction of educated/skilled people, and everyone else was a farmer. In an industrial society, thanks to industrial agriculture and plant breeding, "farmer" is a technical position, and much of the muscle power is mechanized. Keep advancing this idea: technology becomes more and more reliable and self-maintaining, and you can have than many more specialists.

Michael said...

A related, but different thesis to my thought above. It does not take a society as large as ours to maintain an equivalent technology base.

Consider, a society that has been living out in space for a while has certain requirements to keep sustaining itself. Education starts earlier, and is more intense, because it is part of life. Things start looking more like they did through most of history, where children had intense, on the job training instead of the relaxed playtime they do in current western society.

Higher education would be much more focused as well. If one showed aptitude for high level science and engineering, it would be a duty to your family and your town (ship/station) to learn as fast and thoroughly as possible, because these people depend on you for their lives. No time for elective classes or taking a year off between undergrad and graduate school (if such a distinction even existed).

Raymond said...

Byron:

"Rick, the problem with your scenario is that it requires the scavengers to have incredible technical skills. Rockets aren't cars. It will take a degree to keep them running. It's like, say, scavengers stealing a submarine and running it. It might work, but it's far from easy, or even truly feasible."

Yes, and wouldn't space be populated mostly by people with degrees? You're clinging to this idea of scavengers and nomads and the like being stupid and uneducated. In this scenario, anyone that far out by definition has the skills to keep their rockets running and the oxygen flowing. They'd only be scavengers due to lack of economic support - it's not like they'd suddenly forget everything they knew about survival in space.

AdShea said...

Michael:

It'd probably be less of a formal education system and more apprenticeship. You don't need a PhD to fix/maintain/cobble together a space drive. If you spent your childhood helping out your uncle who was a Engineer's mate on some transfer station you'd pick up most of the technical skills needed by teenage years.

Byron said...

Michael:
We hashed out a lot of this in the previous thread. A given piece of technology will become more reliable, but on the whole, it won't. That's because we keep inventing more not yet reliable stuff.
While it might not take quite as large of a society to maintain an equivalent industrial base, you're still looking at the same order of magnitude. If it takes, say, 1 billion now (Please don't attack me over the number. I can't see absolutely everyone being vital, but there are a lot of them that are.) maybe you could get it down to 500 million. It's still a lot.

Raymond:
I'm not saying that. I'm merely saying that even in that case, they need a lot of technical skills. It could happen, but even then, who are the ones usually out of work after an economic bubble? It's the less-skilled people. Those who don't know how to make rockets run. Or, even more, how to build them. It could happen, but as Rick said Really this is just Mad Max with spaceships instead of bikes...
The problem is that a lot of people can keep a bike running. The same isn't true of a spaceship. It'd be like scavenging a nuclear submarine, and trying to keep it running. Even in the chaos that was Russia, I haven't heard of anyone trying that. Of course, maybe they were scared of the reactor.
Leaving aside the fact that I wouldn't go near a Russian reactor, there's a lot of skills needed. It makes it far less likely, and most scavengers probably meet their ends fairly quickly.

Anonymous said...

There are possible technical developments that might allow even relatively unskilled scavengers to perform at least basic maintenance on their spacecraft, stations and other equipment. One development would be components becoming sufficiently modular that they are effectively 'plug and play', so that if a part breaks, it can simply be removed, and a replacement put in its place. A second development, that already exists in prototype form, is known as Augmented Reality for Maintenance and Repair. It involves augmented reality headsets, which project instructions and diagrams into the wearer's field of view, helping them to perform technical tasks. Even if only a handful of people had the necessary skills to keep equipment running, they could create and copy as many instruction sets for the rest of the crew as necessary.

R.C.

Raymond said...

Byron:

"...who are the ones usually out of work after an economic bubble? It's the less-skilled people."

Um, really? And here I thought it was those employed by the sector which collapsed. Which, if it's the interplanetary rocket business, happens to be the people who keep said rockets running.

And, for the record, keeping one's job in the midst of a collapsing bubble frequently has less to do with skillset and more with tenure, nepotism, favoritism, and/or contract cost.

Tony said...

R.C.:

"There are possible technical developments that might allow even relatively unskilled scavengers to perform at least basic maintenance on their spacecraft..."

The problem is in knowing how to analyze malfunctions and identify solutions. A barbarian (whatever that is supposed to mean) could have a technical issue, the proper diagnostic equipment, and a binfull of replacement parts, but if he doesn't know how to do failure mode analysis, he's not going to be able to make the fix.

Michael said...

Byron,

Isn't the whole point of Rick's scenario that the scavengers/barbarians already have the technical expertise to keep things running, because that's their job pre-collapse?

I followed the last thread, but I didn't want to interject my comments into the arguments on definition of "barbarian". I agree that it takes a huge industrial base to mass produce advanced technology, but I also argue that it doesn't take an industrial base to produce mass technology. Someone brought up Soviet missiles made in a lab vs. US missiles made in a factory. This sort of culture would be a "lab" culture. You'd have machine shops on the ship or station for fabricating each component needed to keep its residents alive.

I know you said not to hassle your numbers, but they are completely arbitrary. So much of our infrastructure is devoted to dealing with the complexities of living in a large, complex society. The kinds of societies Rick described are much smaller, so carry much less "dead weight."

What do you really need to keep a space ship going?

Life support
Radiation protection
Structural integrity
A way to collect energy
A way to make you go (maybe)

What do you not absolutely need?
Lawyers
Law Enforcement
Insurers
Financiers
Politicians/Bureaucrats
Artists
The Media

Teachers for all these things
(the list goes on)

That's not to say these things don't exist, they simply aren't formalized, full time positions. Because society is much smaller and less complex, they become part-time jobs that people do when they aren't keeping their spaceships from leaking air.

To reiterate, the barbarians in Rick's scenario are not inventing and mass producing technology, they are experts maintaining a technology, and passing this expertise on to their offspring.

Designing the best sprocket for Rocketship A requires a huge base. Fabricating a replacement for that sprocket does not.

Byron said...

There are several problems with the "they'll have the knowledge" argument. First, having any sort of conflict requires having a situation where the demand for old parts exceeds supply. However, if you need half a dozen engineers to run each rocket, then there must be more than half a dozen engineers to each rocket. But I think that there will likely be a lot more stuff than people left behind.
An example:
After the asteroid mining boom, what happens?
Everybody wakes up to the fact that there are a lot of companies competing for a small market. Most of them fold. The miners and engineers signed contracts saying that the companies would bring them home. (If they didn't, they're stupid.) The companies ship them back. The people left out there are the ones who were independent, and came out in support occupations. Equipment was abandoned by the companies, but most of the people left behind don't know how to use it. There might be struggles over functioning stuff and the few engineers left, but that's just entropy.
Plus, if you have a rocket, why not just fly home? I would expect that space-qualified engineers could find better jobs than "scavenger" back home.

On parts:
I think you overestimate the power and efficiency of a machine shop. These things are not magic, and it's way, way easier to build stuff on a mass production line. Plus, you either need the plans, or have to measure the part and draw new plans. That's not easy at all.

Rick said...

Remember that for story/setting/game purpose the scavengers don't need to keep everything going indefinitely with spit, genius, and duct tape. They are a transient phenomenon, historical speaking.

In effect they are like crews trying to get their ships to some safe port before they become unseaworthy - and in some desperate cases hijacking other ships.

But all of this gets to the other question that has been floating around the last couple of threads: How large does a society have to be to sustain space travel?

Dammit, you people, I need to take that to a front page post, don't I?

Rick said...

Regarding the Vikings, I would guess that their superiority in fighting developed as raiding became a career, and the crews quasi professionals.

From the outset their advantage in mobility would mean they usually encountered only raw militia, but over time they'd be a match for royal guards.

Raymond said...

Rick:

Yep, you probably do.

Raymond said...

Addendum:

I think this question of the required size of a spacefaring society is at the heart of just about every discussion we've had here in the last while. I'd like to mention that when we're trying to size it properly, let's also consider the case of a space-inhabiting society, where a far greater fraction of the economic output will be focused on the requirements of spaceflight.

Milo said...

Byron:

"A given piece of technology will become more reliable, but on the whole, it won't. That's because we keep inventing more not yet reliable stuff."

As long as your "live in and move around space without dying" technology remains reliable, it's perfectly fine if nearly everything else on your ship breaks down. That gives you an incentive to go scavenging for replacement parts.

This discussion implies a world where space travel is no longer cutting-edge technology. The barbarians don't have the cutting-edge technology of the civilizations, but they still have spaceships.

Pop quiz: what might be considered cutting-edge technology in a setting where starships are old hat?


"However, if you need half a dozen engineers to run each rocket, then there must be more than half a dozen engineers to each rocket."

Half a dozen engineers is not a lot, if that includes ground crews. Viking raiding parties were larger. If you can keep your rocket running with less people than were typically rowing a longship, then barbarians ahoy!


"Plus, if you have a rocket, why not just fly home? I would expect that space-qualified engineers could find better jobs than "scavenger" back home."

No, because space-qualified engineering is no longer a cutting-edge job.

Milo said...

Michael:

Re: jobs barbarians don't need...

"Lawyers"

Barbarian legal code: if you have a dispute with someone, you challenge him to a duel. Whoever wins is happy with the ruling. The other person is too dead to file any complaints.


"Law Enforcement"

Barbarian justice: if someone has wronged you, you hunt him down yourself, get a friend to do so, or hire a mercenary to do so. If he eludes your best efforts, then good for him.


"Insurers"

Barbarian social security: if you fall on hard times, you go pillage some stuff from someone who's better off. If you're too weak to raid anyone, you deserve to starve.


"Financiers"

Barbarian economic policy: if you can defend it, it's yours. Informal lending and such might take place, but lenders will keep their contracts simple because if they don't, their clients will slice the contracts with their sword and take the money.


"Politicians/Bureaucrats"

Not on a large scale, but it is useful to have some community leaders who organize the raiding parties. These would be chosen from, you guessed it, the best and most experienced warriors.


"Artists
The Media"


Now these barbarians actually need, somewhat. Many primitive cultures had some form of bard caste that entertained people and recorded history. Vikings had skalds, for example.

Milo said...

Rick:

"Regarding the Vikings, I would guess that their superiority in fighting developed as raiding became a career, and the crews quasi professionals.

From the outset their advantage in mobility would mean they usually encountered only raw militia, but over time they'd be a match for royal guards."


Remember, barbarians (Vikings included) spend significant amounts of time fighting each other, not just soft outsiders. That's how they hone their skills. Even mafia soldiers spend most of their time shooting up other mafia families.

The "barbarian menace" happens when a bunch of toughened warriors used to fighting other warriors tooth and nail notice that these other people next door have a lot of money and are easier to beat.

When you're desparate, you'll raid what you need from whoever's available - even other raiders.

Byron said...

And what else is there going to be on a ship besides live and move around gear? Cargo handling gear? Weapons? One is simple and pointless, the other valuable to any barbarian.
Milo, saying "Starships are old hat" is like saying "airplanes are old hat" Yes, we've had them for a while. That doesn't mean that there aren't developments out there still happening. Plus, I'm not a soothsayer. Oops, I mean a futurist. I have no idea what we'll see for technology then.
On the engineers: The point is that there will only be competition over rockets if there are more crews than rockets. Otherwise there will be competition over crews. And it's just the operation crew. I can't see any less, really. And why, pray tell, is the longship crew a good metric?

This brings me to another point. It thought of it a while ago, but forgot to bring it up. None of the great nomad races were seafarers. They were exclusively land powers. The mongols did get a navy after the settled down in China, but they weren't nomads then. The point is that if they don't seem to be able to make boats, why should they be able to make spacecraft?
And even if spacecraft engineering isn't a cutting-edge job, the people have to be good to do it. You don't want someone sloppy or lazy running a nuclear reactor. So even if it isn't the latest and greatest job around, you still could probably get a decent job. Engineering degrees are pretty flexible.

Thucydides said...

The only semi plausible trope to work with here isn't "Space Vikings", but "Terry and the Pirates". Having your own air force involves a lot of technical skills, logistics and money, and while exciting to read, is about as plausible as Bruce Wayne inventing stuff in his spare time down in the Bat cave. (Most other superheroes have magical or mystical powers, so are not part of this discussion)

The only "real life" examples that I can think of that even come close are the German commerce raiders in World War One. These were warships with professional crews, who were able to subsist for a short time by living off the spoils of captured merchant ships (and taking the coal from their bunkers as well). In the end, even heroic levels of self maintainence could only go so far, and more importantly, these light cruisers were hunted down by large allied task forces and marginalized before being destroyed. Second World War commerce raiders didn't fare nearly as well, and no submarine crews were able or willing to go pirate after the surrender of Germany or Imperial Japan because they didn't have the support base.

Raymond said...

There could easily be competition over the spaceworthy rockets, which would probably be a much smaller subset of all available rockets.

And I'm somewhat confused why we keep conflating so many attributes of horse nomads with those of a spacefaring society. I mean, at some point the impedance mismatch should have us looking at the legitimacy of the model...

Tony said...

Raymond:

"I mean, at some point the impedance mismatch should have us looking at the legitimacy of the model..."

Tongue firmly planted in cheek, of course?

Raymond said...

Tony:

"Tongue firmly planted in cheek, of course?"

My tongue is always planted in cheek; the question is only whether I'm chewing on it.

Tony said...

Michael:

"What do you really need to keep a space ship going?

Life support
Radiation protection
Structural integrity
A way to collect energy
A way to make you go (maybe)"


Guidance sensors/emitters/processors
Energy distribution
Waste heat collection and rejection
Communications
Biological waste collection/processing/disposal

(I'm sure others could think of many more.)

I find it interesting that your list of necessary functions are all technical capabilites, while your list of unnecessary one are all human professions. It seems like you think the technology takes care of itself, while the people are just deadweight. It takes people to make the technology work. Even when you eliminate the passengers, you still need a competent crew.

Michael said...

Tony said:

"Guidance sensors/emitters/processors
Energy distribution
Waste heat collection and rejection
Communications
Biological waste collection/processing/disposal

(I'm sure others could think of many more.)"

Almost certainly. My point was that there are limited numbers of things that need expert skill to keep a spaceship maintaining society running compared to things that require expert skill to keep a spaceship mass producing society running.

"I find it interesting that your list of necessary functions are all technical capabilites, while your list of unnecessary one are all human professions."

If you notice, I said:

"That's not to say these things don't exist, they simply aren't formalized, full time positions."

Tony said...

Michael:

"If you notice, I said:

'That's not to say these things don't exist, they simply aren't formalized, full time positions.'"


I did notice. I just don't take that assertion very seriously. Technoligical society needs all those roles to be professions. If it gets down to the size where those roles are ancillary duties, even under conditions of collapse, society simply isn't going to be technoligical enough to run a spaceship, even on a temporary basis.

Cityside said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Cityside said...

"A scavenger subculture plausibly develops, starting with surplus equipment sold for scrap prices and moving on to equipment that has been abandoned outright."

Been there:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20727/20727-h/20727-h.htm

"The next step, for some scavengers, will be not waiting for abandonment. If a struggling colony cannot defend its orbital station it is yours to salvage."

Done that:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20728/20728-h/20728-h.htm

Piper, of course, does an interesting inversion. His "Space Vikings" aren't the barbarians (well, not exactly...). They're a group of civilized worlds whose settlers exiled themselves early on in the "pre-collapse" and are now picking over the battered remains of the old federation.

Actually, rather than "vikings," Justinian's brief foray back into the West might be a better analogy.

Anonymous said...

Cityside said: "Piper, of course, does an interesting inversion. His "Space Vikings" aren't the barbarians (well, not exactly...). They're a group of civilized worlds whose settlers exiled themselves early on in the "pre-collapse" and are now picking over the battered remains of the old federation.

Actually, rather than "vikings," Justinian's brief foray back into the West might be a better analogy."

Yes, Piper does stand the trope on its head...the "Vikings" are the civilized ones and the wolds of the old Federation is filled with wreckage and poeple who no longer can maintain the technology that the "Viking" have come to take...not because they need the technology, but because the stuff is valuble and it will increase their wealth (they take other stuff, too, like statues and other art). So; is there another definition of Barbarian? Could it be the decendents of a formally advanced civilization that have decayed to the point where they can no longer build, maintain, or repair the machines left behind by their ancestors, nor be able to produce the art, cultural events, or social structures they formally could. They may not even be able to maintain the level of social cohession that mad them an advanced civilization. Although, not a perfect analogy, the Polynisians are an example.

Ferrell

Thucydides said...

The collapse of the Mycenaean palace culture and most civilizations and empires at the end of the Bronze age only resulted in legends (Cyclopean walls that "must" have been built by giants, overgrown palace ruins becoming "Labyrinths" with unspeakable monsters in the middle).

The collapse of the Imperium resulted in lots of high grade building material being available for Europeans (just as earlier collapses provided various civilizations with loads of quarried stone, etc.)

The situation you describe is very rare, and I suspect insofar as it is plausible, that also makes a fringe of "barbarians" who prey on the scavengers possible as well.

The only other setup which might support some sort of raiding/scavenging culture involves the use of fairly large scale STL transport moving at relatavistic speeds. Think of the "Forever War", where ships moving through the collapsar network come out from changed frames of reference. They might be decades ahead of the enemy, or centuries behind in terms of technology. A more specific instance is Larry Niven's "Known Worlds" mythos. The predatory Kzin had a sort of Empire spread across the light years, until it was collapsed by manipulation by the Puppeteers. If Niven had really thought this through, the "tame" Kzin running the Empire would be under constant threat from inbound fleets of ancient Kzin returning from the far reaches of Empire, who still maintained their ferocious and xenophobic attitudes.

This (once again) plays more to the "cultural" barbarians trope, as the people who can operate fleets of STL spacecraft have all the trappings of a technological civilization.

Mukk said...

I feel that this is vaguely possible although my biggest concern is that the people left out there after collapse wouldn't just go back to civilization as soon as they could.

Theoretically I live on a science outpost beyond pluto. I've heard on the radio that Earth had stopped all its space programs and I wasn't getting ressuplied. I would probably be willing to come back to Earth to be a burger flipper than experience a slow death to entropy as parts broke. Unless our space colony represented a truly self sustaining society (not one that would eventually break down as parts failed).

Sure if I was evil I might sack the next colony over so I had some stuff to sell when I got back to earth.

Alternatively I might stay out there running the SCIENCE! for as long as I could. There are plenty of good reasons that I might value my wrk over my life.

But I just don't see myself threatening Earth with raids. What am I going to touch down in Las Vegas and take off with as many showgirls as I could grab? So I can penetrate planetar defenses? Not to mention in order to raid civilization I had to make it back to earth anyway. If I'm not criminally inclined I'll just stay. If I am the kind to steal Las Vegas showgirls then I was probably a criminal pirate type before the collapse. It doesn't really make sense to have normal working engineers become evil barbarian murderer/theives unless somebody really pissed them off.

You could get around the Earth Defenses thing by suggesting that there is a moon base still operating I could raid for supplies. That brings up the question of why some dude from a science outpost is capable of figthing the Earth navies.

Barbarians are more interesting when they threaten civilization.

You can make a good story about barbarians killing each other, or doing BAD THINGS to stupid civilized people who strayed into their territories on a expidition/vacation/missionary work trip.

But If I'm not mistaken the space opera romance barbarians we want are the vikings and the germanic tribes that overan the romans. Maybe some mongols. Maybe Conan could make an apearance or be our protagonist.

I only have the movies to go by but I'm pretty sure Conan was a threat to civilization. Killing the head snake priest guy is kind of like killing the pope. Minus the pope not being outright evil. Not to mention the villages Conan gives a hard time.

The kind of stuff thats happening in present day third world africa isn't exactly the makings of classic space opera even though its barbaric. You could make a riveting story about it, but if you tried to make a fun romantic story about that people would call you tasteless.

These are the things I think we want from our barbarians and some of the things we need to make them happen:
Distinct Cultures - This is what seperates a Barbarian from a generic serial killer, pirate, thief, or other criminal. I think this is the most defining characteristic of a Barbarian. They have a different culture from civilized people.

FTL travel or slower than light interstellar travel - (I know we don't like FTL magitech on these forums. I'd like to point out that barbarians are a pretty soft SCIFI concept for the near future) The point is thats its going to be hard to develop a distict culture when you're recieving Earth broadcasts with only a couple of hours away. And then you can transmit back. Actually I lie. A distinct culture is probably inevitable, but its not going to be a barbarian culture. Imagine if Ghengis khan went to Rome every night to watch whatever theater they had. He may have turned out to be a great warrior anyway, but he would not have been a barbarian. I guess what I mean is that not only does the barbarian culture need to be distinct, but it also needs to not include the elements that make a civilized culture distinct.

Mukk said...

Dang I'm sorry I spammed the boards. That was pretty stupid on my part.

Mukk said...

This is the second bit of what I was trying to post.

Time for the barbarian culture to develop - This is pretty self explanatory. You probably need the first generation, the settlers, to be dead before the culture has deviated far enough to be considered barbarians. If you take normal civilized people and yank the rug of civilization out from under them the worst you get is anarchy and barbaric activities.

But take Bob who was born in Longmont, Colorado and went to heritage High School before the bombs fell. Now he kills people in the radioactive dessert for their food. I guess you could take Bob and everyone like him and call them raiders, essentially barbarians. And that works as long as you take pains not to humanize Bob or his fellows. But if you humanize him and don’t make him part of any army of redshirts hes more of your average murderer.

OK fine I guess you can make a barbarian horde pretty quick with a horrible enough calamity and rapid cultural change, Bob as part of the raider army.

Then we have to argue how likely or realistic a raider army is. IDK... If feel the raider army thing is totally soft and mushy.

Eh it still takes time to put together the raider army, right after the bombs fall people aren't going to run out of their shelters to find the nearest prospective evil warlord. So I guess I should say the time is variable depending on the severity of the disaster. Bob still has to have enough to become integrated with the raider army.


Infrastructure that sustains the culture long enough to develop barbarism - The ships can eventually break down. The food can run out. We can run out of spare parts. But not before our culture has changed significantly from its more civilized roots and had a chance to go make someone more civilized miserable. Funny enough lack of supplies will probably accelerate the process of becoming barbaric.

This whole thing assumes the path Disaster -> Cultural Individuality -> Barbarism. Kind of like if the bombs fell and two neighboring US towns responded differently. One becomes raiders and the other tries to carry on the old civilization.

Historically what happened was more like 2 distinct cultures -> natural forces cause one to collide into the other (Germanic Tribes Displacement, Genghis uniting the Mongols) -> Each view the other as subhuman although the author probably considers the static one to be the civilization the one that came in to be barbarians -> Military conflict

Byron said...

There won't be significant groups of people left out there under a normal situation. Period. Certainly not technically skilled people. They should have a ticket home before this happens. There might be salvagers to get parts that were left behind, but I don't think that anything like Rick's "scavengers" will really happen. Unless, of course, something really bad interrupts it. Like, say, a world war. Then it might happen. This is starting to sound plausible. Earth has a nuclear war, and it's a decade before space travel is restored. Now, any travelers have to deal with the people who were left up when the war started, and mostly see any current missions as a source of supplies.

Now he kills people in the radioactive dessert for their food.
That must be a really nasty kitchen somewhere.

Milo said...

Mukk:

"But I just don't see myself threatening Earth with raids."

It will be a long, long time before any colony, civilized or barbarian, will be able to seriously threaten Mother Earth. Our favorite examples, the Vikings, attacked out-of-the-way villages and monasteries, not castles. (In a space age, "village" = closed life support habitat and "monastery" = science outpost.)

If barbarians are a threat of any kind, then that means that either (A) humanity has spread out enough for them to have something to attack (even just a whole lot of space stations in the Earth-Moon system), (B) Earth has fallen on very hard times (post-apocalyptic scenario, the Earthlings themselves are probably largely scavengers too), or (C) a mixture of the above.


"Minus the pope not being outright evil."

Not the current one, maybe. Some medieval popes were pretty corrupt. Especially if you ask the people on the receiving end of the crusades...


"Distinct Cultures - This is what seperates a Barbarian from a generic serial killer, pirate, thief, or other criminal. I think this is the most defining characteristic of a Barbarian. They have a different culture from civilized people."

Yes, I agree this is important.

A criminal was brought up with the teaching that killing people and taking their stuff is wrong, but chose to not care.

A barbarian was brought up with the teaching that killing people and taking their stuff is honorable and glorious.

The cultural differences also make them harder to reach an understanding with, reinforcing the notion that the only way to deal with them is by force.


"(I know we don't like FTL magitech on these forums. I'd like to point out that barbarians are a pretty soft SCIFI concept for the near future)"

Space barbarians, and for that matter good interplanetary war of any kind, requires a lot of worlds to play with. (Barbarians posing a threat to civilization in particular requires them to be able to hit civilization's soft parts while skirting around the well-defended places, which requires civilization to have soft parts, something that won't happen if we're all on one planet.) This means either interstellar travel, or making very good use of the room we have in this solar system - significant colonies on numerous moons (since we're kinda short on planets, although Mars is a good one). Even then we'd be struggling to make it. Interstellar travel is really the way to go.


"The point is thats its going to be hard to develop a distict culture when you're recieving Earth broadcasts with only a couple of hours away."

The best barbarian scenario is if you have relatively slow FTL, but no ansible, so the only interstellar communication is by courier. Humanity spreads out to tens or hundreds of lightyears but cannot stay in contact, so cultures diverge. Then sometime later, they meet again, either from gradual migrations, or due to someone in what is now the most developed world (possibly no longer Earth) inventing better FTL technology.

Cambias said...

Why are we obsessing about "people" in the sense of fragile bags of meat? A much more interesting prospect would be for the Barbarians to be robots gone rogue in space. To them it's not such a hostile environment, so they can live as "steppe nomads" out there, lurking in the outer system and occasionally launching raids to get metals and manufactured goods from the inner worlds. They'd descend on Silicon Valley instead of Las Vegas, and abduct chip fabricators.

Bryan said...

As always, I am late to the party...

I am wondering if some people are not over-estimating the difficulty of preserving a "primitive" space-faring nation. For three reasons.

The first being the relative simplicity of space travel once you are in space. At least today the hardest/most technical part of spaceflight is getting off/back to the earth. A space-based society would not have those issues, and so long as they had access to low-G materials (i.e. asteroid mining or whatever) would be able to avoid the more complex boosters needed for achieving escape velocity.

The second reason being the claimed difficulty of producing parts - in my lab we have an ~$4000 prototyper which can make almost any part we need - and can be operated by anyone familiar with a computer. Our prototyper could make most (maybe all) of the mechanical parts required to make another prototyper; so if you also had an electronics prototyper you could, in theory, keep such a system running indefinitely. No need for highly educated engineers, or whatnot - just raw materials, energy, and people with sufficient mechanical skill to put the parts togeather afterwards.

I would suspect that any realistic colony would need this kind of fabrication capacity, as if a critical part broke and you had to ship it in, you'd probably be economically unfeasible - "rush" orders in space being hugely expensive in terms of fuel, while "affordable" transport taking extended times.

The final reason being that a barbarian society could survive - for a while, anyways - on relatively primitive technology. There is a fair bit of hydrogen and oxygen available in space - add in a pretty simply machined device and you have a chemical rocket. Not exactly efficient, but it'll get you around. Some of the more efficient thrust sources - ion thrusters, for example, are mechanically quite simple and should be producible by a society with prototyper-type equipment. Basic computers and electronics should be sufficient for navionics, communications, and whatnot. Simple cannons/guns may suffice for weapons. Solar for power, plants for atmospheric recycling, etc. Probably not sustainable in the long run, but sustainable for the decadal - maybe even a century or two - time scale.

The later scenario makes for a good barbarian back-story - the barbarians can make 99% of what they need to keep their colonies going, but rely on trade and theft to get the advanced stuff the cannot make - fusion reactors, advanced computers, and so forth.

Bryan said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Byron said...

Bryan:
1. You still have to breathe and move. It may not take giant boosters, but you can't simply strap a rocket to your hab and go off to colonize an asteroid. There's a lot of stuff that still has to happen. It isn't as hard, but it isn't easy.
2. Yes, your fabricator can make parts. But it can't do so as efficiently as a factory. And you still have to get the raw materials. There's a reason they're called prototypers. We had a long discussion about this in the last thread.
3. They simply can't make all of the stuff they need on prototypers. It'd be a lot more expensive, and they still need raw materials. And they're less efficient. Plus, I think you underestimate the demand for stuff by people in space.

Bryan said...

You still have to breathe and move. It may not take giant boosters, but you can't simply strap a rocket to your hab and go off to colonize an asteroid. There's a lot of stuff that still has to happen. It isn't as hard, but it isn't easy.

I was under the impression we were talking about a group of people who already had the infrastructure in place (i.e. former colonists who get cutoff, rebel, etc). In this case, transport would be limited largely to trade/raids/transport; ergo, simpler systems would suffice.

Colonising, I agree, is a radically more difficult process.

Yes, your fabricator can make parts. But it can't do so as efficiently as a factory.
But it also requires less specialization, people and organisation than a factory. Once again, I'm thinking more along the lines of sustaining a pre-existing society, not colonising to form a new one.

Plus, if you can use your prototyper to make more prototypers, than your industrial base is limited to the materials and energy you have available.

And you still have to get the raw materials
As I stated in my origonal post...

There's a reason they're called prototypers.
But assuming a few centuries of development, they'll likely be far more efficient. FWIW, we do not use ours for prototyping, but rather to produce single-use microfluidic devices for use in the lab. Damned thing can fire off a unit in 4-12 minutes (depending on size and complexity) - pretty amazing seeing as its cutting features as small as 0.05mm.

They simply can't make all of the stuff they need on prototypers.
Care to support this claim? Given what we produce now on such devices, I find it hard to believe that in a generation or two these will be unable to produce nearly any mechanical part that may be required.

Yes, humans (or robots) may the have to put those parts together, but the "nuts and bolts" shouldn't be an issue.

And, as I stated earlier, any colony that didn't have this capacity to start with would be unlikely to be successful in the first place. Transport in space is expensive and slow; if you are dependent on it for maintaining basic structural stuff, you are screwed. You cannot be waiting months for a critical part of your O2 generating system, and "rapid shipping" would require a fuel use that would make such a system financially impossible. I can see the fedex guy already - "here is you part, $10.99, plus $948.762.381.44 in shipping. Sorry, we no longer accept first-born sons, nor left arms."

It'd be a lot more expensive, and they still need raw materials. And they're less efficient.
But we're not talking about the best way of doing things, but rather basic survival. So long as they can repair what breaks, and replace what cannot be repaired, their needs are met - even if it isn't in a efficient manner.

Plus, I think you underestimate the demand for stuff by people in space.
Food, water, clothing (optional?), O2, enough energy to run things, and parts/materials to repair the colony...not a glorious life, but better than death

Bryan

Byron said...

The fact that you don't need a giant booster doesn't make moving in space easy. Rockets are not simple systems no matter what.
Fabricators are not a cure-all. They are not capable of making stuff in the same volume as a factory. That is the problem. Not what they can make, but how much and how efficiently.
You have yet to justify how they get the raw materials. That can't be ignored.
And your use counts as prototyping in my book. It's being used for single-use applications, and you're not mass-producing them.
Please read the discussion on the "Temperate and indecisive contests" thread. It covers a lot of this.

Raymond said...

Byron:

"Fabricators are not a cure-all. They are not capable of making stuff in the same volume as a factory. That is the problem. Not what they can make, but how much and how efficiently."

Hate to burst bubbles, but if the question is mere survival, then "what they can make" is the only question that matters. You think efficiency of production matters in the slightest if you're cut off (or even sufficiently far away) from the official industrial base?

Also, you've got a narrow view of "factory" - if fabricators become sufficiently capable, the advantage of flexibility may begin to rival that of specialization, due to the lowered capital costs. They may even become standard use in factories. Do not discount the role of startup capital cost when constructing viability thresholds. It's an equation, not a forgone conclusion.

Bryan said...

Byron, Raymond pretty much beat me to it.

Your statements vis-a-vis capacity and efficiency are over-stated: you merely need to make enough to survive. Efficiency is nice, but you can get away with whatever minimal efficiency that is sufficient to achieve your minimal needs. Moreover, for a small-scale economy (i.e. small colony of barbarians) mass-production may be a less efficient way of production than would be a more generalised production shop. On a per-item basis it costs more (in both time and cost), but you can produce a broader range of goods with a given set of resources.

Obviously, todays prototypers/fabricators would not suffice. But to pretend they will not get more capable, faster, etc, is simply naive. So long as they can produce at sustenance levels they are sufficient; at least for a while. Efficiency is nice, but hardly a requirement for sufficiency.

The issue of materials is one I haven't touched on, but assuming good recycling rates, may actually be a minimal issue when talking about sustenance survival. None-the-less, mining and refining equipment would, presumably, be among the items that any factory or fabricator would produce.

And I hate to burst your bubble, but chemical rockets are insanely simple devices. I built my first rocket engine (solid propellant) at age 14. My first hybrid (solid/gas) was built in my early 20's. My first liquid engine (O2/EtOH) will hopefully fly this winter - not too bad for someone with no formal machining, engineering, or rocket sciences training. No, the ones I build are not going to land a man on the moon, but conversely, is someone as unskilled as myself can cobble one together, imagine what can be done with a fabricator a few centuries in tech ahead of what we have today, and a half-competent engineer...

Tony said...

Raymond:

"Also, you've got a narrow view of "factory" - if fabricators become sufficiently capable, the advantage of flexibility may begin to rival that of specialization, due to the lowered capital costs."

The one thing I would be willing to bet about nanotechnology, well into and even past the plausible midfuture, is that it won't be low capital cost.

Raymond said...

Whenever I say "fabricators", you can fairly assume I'm referring to the direct descendants of today's prototypers and portable automated machine shops, plus whatever small-scale circuit-fabrication may be feasible if we're using some derivative of graphene or carbon nanotubes for our chips. (The Canadian National Institute of Nanotechnology at my old school, the University of Alberta, recently made a big advance in self-assembling chips by drastically speeding up the block co-polymer process. Link here. A bit lightweight of an article, but it's all I could find.)

Jim Baerg said...

"Minus the pope not being outright evil."

Tell that to the people who think he is largely responsible for sheltering pedophile priests. ;-)

Tony said...

Jim Baerg:

"Tell that to the people who think he is largely responsible for sheltering pedophile priests. ;-)"

What I'll tell them is that they're just as much responsible for supporting a Church that denies its executives and middle management normal human outlets -- perhaps even moreso, considering that the biggest complainers are, almost to a man or woman, perfectly happy that it be that way. Don't point fingers at people or lecture them about not doing their jobs right when you yourself put them in an untenable situation.

Rick said...

Welcome to another new commenter! No matter where you are from theoretically, you are not immune to Blogger, which every so often goes on a comment duplicating spree. I think I got rid of the dupes.

Not the other kind of dupes, who are in endless supply.

I don't expect the scavenger subculture to last. (Well, I don't really expect any of this.) But space hardware generally will be built to last, and the whole point of scavenging is to replace stuff that is wearing out with something that isn't, or is less worn out.

For this sort of thing to work at all you pretty much need the classic space opera setting of FTL and shirt sleeves planets.

As for the whole replicator thing, I'm working on it.

Rick said...

A front page post, I mean, not an actual replicator.

Mukk said...

The prototyping question isn't just about sustenance survival. If you want threatening Barbarians they have to be above sustenance level or they won't be a credible threat.

Oh no. The space hobos btoke my windows and stole my radio.

Of course if civilization is already collapsing then the space hobo might be a threat if the policeman is too busy shooting at the mayor's personal gaurd while the army refuses to do anything unless they get another set of raises.

You can have a weaker more beleivable barbarian if civilization is decadent and corrupted.

And if you go to the opposite end of the spectrum from space hobos you end up in some wierd places. Well equiped barbarians that can outfight a civilization's military are a couple victories away from becoming the empire.

Cambias said...

It sounds as if we're conflating two very different scenarios here, by the way. Are we talking about barbarians vs. an _interstellar_ empire, or barbarians in the Solar System?

Because an interstellar-scale society holds the potential for worlds which are at least marginally habitable, so the barbarians do have a place to grow food, have little barbarians, etc. As the interstellar civilization declines, planets beyond the reach of the central government might well send out raiders, especially to consolidate specialty industrial facilities -- whichever planet winds up with the FTL-drive plant gets to build the next empire.

Within the Solar System it's a whole different ballgame. As others have pointed out, in the collapse of civilization, if you can move around enough to raid other settlements, you can probably get back to Earth where there's air and food. Only barbarians with an absolutely fanatical ideology keeping them in space would remain behind.

I can think of an interesting marginal case: Mars. There might be settlments there with enough self-sufficiency that some diehards would prefer to stay behind, and they might jump the gun on "salvaging" the other settlements before the good stuff gets taken back to Earth.

This is, in effect, the Road Warrior with pressurized rovers instead of motorcycles.

However, launching from Mars is not nearly as hard as launching from Earth. Those Martian bandit-kings might decide to cobble together some spaceships to plunder the abandoned station on Phobos -- and if you've got Mars orbit capability it's not hard to reach some asteroids . . .

So look to Mars for your Solar System Space Vikings.

Mukk said...

Mars has all the problems of a space habitat AND a gravity well. Why would it be a better place for barbarians?

I guess if it was terraformed...

I think our discussion between the solar system and a multiple star system setting is to try to determine what is viable. The general consensus being that you probably want more than just the solar system.

Actually I think we're on a sliding scale here. In a post apocalyptic setting barbarians are pretty viable. In a setting where Earth shuts down the space program its not as likely. The worse the disaster, the more likely you are to find new groups of barbarians. If the disaster isn't very bad you have to do more hand waving to make them appear: making human space larger, giving them better prototypers, giving them more extreme motivations, ect.

Mukk said...

It might be the best way to have barbarians in one solar system is to let Earth nuke itself back to the dark ages after establishing a large number of colonies.

Going back to Earth then becomes a lot less desirable. As a colonist I would neither want to get irradiated nor have to deal with the post apocalyptic population down there. So I'm going to try to keep living in space.

I think I've seen this used as a premise in at least a couple books.

Milo said...

Mukk:

"Well equiped barbarians that can outfight a civilization's military are a couple victories away from becoming the empire."

AKA Genghis Khan? That's pretty much exactly what happened.

Or Norman France, which, don't forget, are also the ancestors of present-day England... Of course, they're easy to forget because they rapidly adopted their conquered populace's (civilized) culture rather than retaining their barbarian traditions. (Which is a common consequence of a very small number of people managing to conquer a much larger area.)



Cambias:

"Within the Solar System it's a whole different ballgame. As others have pointed out, in the collapse of civilization, if you can move around enough to raid other settlements, you can probably get back to Earth where there's air and food."

Hmm. What if the barbarians spend most of their time in a gas giant system, raiding moon-to-moon rather than planet-to-planet? Their sphere of influence would be small, but it's still a significant fraction of the solar system's non-empty space and it'd definitely make it difficult for civilization to send missions to that planet. It'd be less "Goths sacking Rome" and more "Indians we need to defeat to gain access to the frontier", but still. (And by this point there may be a Rome-equivalent on one of that gas giant's moons.) The problem is that you'd need to settle a lot of moons to really make it work. It would be best if you have zero-gravity habitats hollowed into unrounded moons - otherwise, Saturn and Uranus only have 5 good settlement candidates apiece, other planets have less.

Also, I'm not so convinced of the "they could just move to Earth and get a job" argument. A few could, sure, but is there enough room on Earth to absorb the influx from an entire returning colony? Does the space capability to bring that many people back so quickly, given most of them settled gradually rather than all at once, with the expectation of staying there (before civilization collapsed), and started having children since then?


"So look to Mars for your Solar System Space Vikings."

It's even the right temperature! :)

And one argument in favor of Martian Vikings is that people keep talking about colonizing it even though it's about the least economically useful place in the solar system to settle. There's nothing there we want, so inhabitants may well find themselves resorting to desparate measures to get their hands on stuff from the places that do have meaningful exports...

Milo said...

Mukk:

"In a post apocalyptic setting barbarians are pretty viable."

Wasteland barbarians on a single planet? Pastoral nomads of the radioactive desert? Sure. But interplanetary barbarism is going to be harder.


"It might be the best way to have barbarians in one solar system is to let Earth nuke itself back to the dark ages after establishing a large number of colonies."

Once you have a large number of colonies with that degree of self-sufficiency, they can cause trouble for each other even if Earth is intact. Earth itself would be the Rome, the imperial capital that cannot directly be threatened by barbarians unless civilization is first weakened by other means, but that still has trouble with the upkeep of a spread-out interplanetary navy, and so is threatened by their barbarians on their home turf. Or just doesn't care about the barbarians because they're too expensive to worry about, and so lets them go about their business of pillaging the rich but decadent cities of Mimas and the peaceful science outposts of Titan.

Mukk said...

Milo
The 'Earth nukes itself' scenario answers two questions.

Why didn't the prospective barbarians just go back to earth when it became clear that continuing to live out in space would lead to the tough living conditions that favored barbaric cultures?

How did the barbarians develop a distinct culture so quickly?

Bryan said...

The prototyping question isn't just about sustenance survival. If you want threatening Barbarians they have to be above sustenance level or they won't be a credible threat.

I disagree. Regardless of how advanced engines become, inter-planetary travel will always be costly; both in time and in materials (fuel, ships, food, air, etc). So if you have a strong industrial abase that can provide for your needs, there will be little impetus to drive a barbarian-like lifestyle. If, on the other hand, you can only produce a subset of the goods you need, than the whole pillaging lifestyle has a strong economic driver; despite the costs of interplanetary travel.

Keep in mind, if your goal as a society is to wage a hit-and-run kind of war, it'll be far cheaper (in materials, fuel, and lives) to use guided projectiles and the like. You only need fuel for 1-way travel, no living quarters, etc.

Rick said...

All of these scenarios work a lot better in the classic interstellar setting of habitable colony planets, because people can live on one at current techlevel or even much lower.

I don't think Earth has to bomb itself back to the stone age, or otherwise collapse entirely. A bubble collapse that is a mere economic recession on Earth could be much more than that in the outer reaches of a colonization sphere.

And as Milo suggested, Earth might get tired of the costs of policing it all, and decide not to throw good money after bad. From Earth's perspective it is all just remote outposts.

Milo said...

Bryan:

"Keep in mind, if your goal as a society is to wage a hit-and-run kind of war, it'll be far cheaper (in materials, fuel, and lives) to use guided projectiles and the like. You only need fuel for 1-way travel, no living quarters, etc."

The only war a pure missile-based war can work is if you're trying to declare independance or otherwise get another power to leave you alone.

If you want to extort tribute from your victims, someone needs to stuff the loot into a rocket and launch it. If you want to closely control the losing government's actions on their own planet, you need to send over occupation troops.

Byron said...

If you use missiles to extort tribute, bad things can happen. What if, instead of circuit boards, they send a nuke? You'll need to check the tribute at their end where you can ensure cooperation. Plus, missiles are limited-time weapons. If they're on the way, you lose leverage once they pass. If you wait until they refuse, they have time to build defenses.

Anonymous said...

Reading the posts, I have realized that we have skipped over why people would not return to Earth. I think that I have a reason: people born on, say, Mars, wouldn't want to go to Earth because they don't want to live somewhere that has 3 times the gravity they are use too...The Martian Humans (after the recovery after the Collapse), now want to estabish outposts in the Asteroid Belt and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. This puts them in direct conflict with the now recovered Earth who also wants those same outposts. It is ironic that in this scenario, who the "Barbarian" is, depends on which planet you come from.

Ferrell

Cambias said...

Let me defend Mars as a site for colonization. It has mass. It has metals and volatiles, especially water. That's important, because water equals rocket fuel, reaction mass, etc. Plus you can make breathing oxygen.

What about Jovian moons, you ask? They're down in Jupiter's insane gravity well. And Earth's water is down in Earth's insane gravity well. It's a heck of a lot easier to get to most of the inner Solar System from Mars than from Earth -- which means Mars would be the obvious resource base for any habitats within the orbit of Saturn.

Milo said...

Cambias:

"Let me defend Mars as a site for colonization. It has mass."

Its gravity is still significantly lower than Earth's. Low enough that muscle loss is a serious issue, yet high enough to still make space launches relatively difficult.


"It has metals"

So do most other places.


"and volatiles, especially water."

So does almost everywhere else in the solar system.


"Plus you can make breathing oxygen."

Oxygen is the single most common element on every rocky planet or moon there is. It's literally dirt cheap.


"It's a heck of a lot easier to get to most of the inner Solar System from Mars than from Earth"

If accessibility is your objective, then you can't beat Luna. It has very good access to Earth, is somewhat closer to Mercury and Venus than Mars is, and its low gravity facilitates space activities. And yes, it has water, as we're now discovering.

Thucydides said...

Moving back a bit to Space "barbarians", the Niven/Pournelle Co-Dominium universe has several types.

During the First Empire of Man, the Sauron Unified State behaves as a Barbarian culture with the resources of a planetary civilization, able to wage interstellar war against the Empire until the home planet is destroyed by the final Imperial fleet.

After the collapse of the Empire, a series of lesser wars rage between successor kingdoms, until the technology "dies" and wars are no longer possible. This fighting over the wreakage of Empire is probably closest to the Barbarians in Space meme.

Many fallen planets degenerate to pre technological levels of civilization, which leads to mismatches between the locals and the various recovering civilizations which have recovered spaceflight and interstellar transportation. (King David's Spaceship)

The Second Empire of Man views the "outies" and planetary systems in rebellion as "Barbarians", and is inclined to suppress such rebellion with overwhelming force (up tp planetary sterilization, as implied in the Mote in God's Eye).

As I think most of us agree, the trope requires some very specific elements in the setting (or set-up) in order to make it work.

Rick said...

I think that life, if we find it, will be the big driver of where we go, making Mars and Europa the leading candidates at this point.

Fighting over the wreckage of Empire is indeed close to the Barbarians in Space trope, which indeed has some pretty specialized requirement.

Milo said...

Rick:

"I think that life, if we find it, will be the big driver of where we go, making Mars and Europa the leading candidates at this point."

Oh come on. No love for Titan? And don't forget Enceladus, either.

This, however, is where we will be basing scientific research stations ("monasteries"), not full colonies. Colonies might spring up to provide services for the scientists, but that's a pretty tenuous incentive for a large colony to develop.

Colony sites - if people really want to settle in large numbers - will be chosen based on the ease of terraforming, which gives Luna for dome cities (for proximity reasons) and probably Mars for true terraforming (which, however, is way into the "indistinguishable from magic" level of technology and might not even become possible before we discover FTL).

Rick said...

If colonies arise, my guess is that they will not be planned as colonies. They will emerge from research stations or logistics bases - or, especially, stations that combine both - as secondary functions accrete and significant numbers of people find themselves staying on instead of rotating back to Earth.

I'm very doubtful of planetary surface colonies, because I suspect that even Mars surface gravity will not be enough for human health.

Byron said...

Why not? We have no experience with anything of the sort. All we know is that a couple years will be possible. Other than that, take your pick. If NASA would take a decent-size centrifuge to ISS...

Rick said...

As you say, until we put up a centrifuge we have no data points between 1 g and microgravity. What we know is that people in microgravity deteriorate like bedridden people, and exercise does not prevent it.

It may be that Mars' 1/3 g or even Luna's 1/6 g are enough to fool the body into thinking it is in normal gravity. But my gut feeling is that half a g or even more will be the minimum to keep the body in proper tone.

Thucydides said...

Colonies will also accrue like barnacles around space facilities, especially large ones like motion exchange tethers.

Repair crews, propellant depots, loading and unloading facilities, workshops etc. will beget restaurants, bars, casinos and houses of ill repute, along with trade factors, futures exchanges and ever increasing support facilities to keep it all going. I suspect it won't be a neat "Island Three" structure either, but rather a series of habs clustered around the major feature that drives this section of the micro economy or local ecosystem.

Rick said...

That is essentially the same scenario I outlined, focused on logistics bases, what in earlier posts I called trade nexi.

I also tend to agree in thinking that if colonies do appear they won't be megastructures, but clusters of smaller habs. An interesting technical question is local transit, because having to use space taxis to get around is awfully cumbersome - basically every crosstown trip is a human space mission.

But connecting big spinning habs with transit tubes has its own complications.

Tony said...

One of the big reasons I think habs won't exist in free space is that it just costs way too much in resources for that kind of thing. People may eventually live in large groups on Mars, and if FTL travel is worked out or enough time passes, eventually on plaents in other solar systems. They may even live in tunneled-out asteroids, if the biomedical effects of microgravity can be put to bed. But in free space? No. There's no ROI.

Jim Baerg said...

I don't think anyone has ever advocated habs in the middle of nowhere. Habs near an asteroid or in the earth-moon system where easy deliveries of raw materials are available are another matter.

Tony said...

Jim Baerg:

"I don't think anyone has ever advocated habs in the middle of nowhere. Habs near an asteroid or in the earth-moon system where easy deliveries of raw materials are available are another matter."

That's precisely what I was talking about. "Free space" means not attached to a natural body. The economic problems don't have anything to do with proximity to natural bodies, but the fact that you have to build the things in microgravity the first place, making them many times more expensive than something you build on or under a natural body.

Jim Baerg said...

Why would building in microgravity *necessarily* be much more expensive than building on the surface of a planet moon or asteroid?

I can certainly expect initial difficulties because the best techniques will be different in the 2 situations & it will take time to learn what works well, but once people have some experience the advantages may well out weigh the disadvantages.

Anonymous said...

Maybe orbital habs could be built in Earth orbit and towed/boosted into their final orbit.

Ferrell

Tony said...

Jim Baerg:

"Why would building in microgravity *necessarily* be much more expensive than building on the surface of a planet moon or asteroid?"

Two primary reasons:

1. The construction site is closer to resources and the resources need not meet fine specifications. You can build out of brick on Mars, or just dig tunnels. Space habs need to be made out of refined metals or fibers, and you can't tunnel through space.

2. Because gravity is a powerfull tool. Moving stuff around in a gravity field can be a hassle at times, but it's gravity that allows us to leave things where we've put them and expect them to be there when we come back, gravity that creates the downward force that generates friction that makes wheels work, gravity that means chips fall away from a part being machined, and coolants flow in a predetermined direction, gravity that give you the weight that gives you leverage when turning a wrench.

Microgravity, on the other hand, is a bitch of a construction and fabrication environment. Every move has to be prelanned with Newtonian physics in mind. Every object set aside has to be carefully staged, either in its own orbit or attached to something. Dropped or misplaced items don't just stop when they hit the floor or where they're left. Even the most basic materials have to be manufactured to close tolerances out of of special materials, and moved thousand or millions of km to the construction site or machine shop.

Thucydides said...

Spacehabs in theory can be made from a plastic bladder shaped like a tire inner tube and a lot of water. The Neofuel site (http://www.neofuel.com/index_neofuel.html) has lots of interesting low tech ideas, especially in ditching the cyrogenic storage of LH2 and how to build ice ships with 150 people in the 100 meter diameter space ship and 1900 people in the 215 meter ship.

You still need the capability of putting a 12 ton bladder in space and extracting @ 8000 tons of water to make the smaller ship, something that is theoretically within the capabilities of the present day United States; not especially high tech in terms of the plausible mid future.

jollyreaper said...


Consider, a society that has been living out in space for a while has certain requirements to keep sustaining itself. Education starts earlier, and is more intense, because it is part of life. Things start looking more like they did through most of history, where children had intense, on the job training instead of the relaxed playtime they do in current western society.


You could get this barbarians at the gate scenario fairly easily. Our modern society really does stifle human potential. The typical human being has an immense capacity for learning new skills and applying himself in numerous ways but we're stuck in mcjobs that don't provide much spiritual satisfaction or leave time for meaningful hobbies.

1) So as you said, border societies in space are harsh, require rapid maturing and demand much of their members. Technical skill is power.

2) The main society is stagnating due to being bureaucratic, kleptocratic, and prizing nepotism and cronyism above ability. Wasteful, inefficient, and dying under its own weight.

3) When a body dies, the rot that was held away takes hold. When empire rots, the security forces are no longer strong enough to hold back the barbarian hordes.

4) Assuming that there was a hostile relationship between empire citizens and the borderlanders here, they could now raid the colonies for resources. This would be the robber-baron era as the borderlands become formalized into polities. Assume there will be nice bands and not so nice bands of barbarians so some empire citizens will join up willingly seeing it as a good deal and others will be coerced into it.

The real question, of course, is what would the barbarians need that they could not manufacture themselves? Grasping at straws, maybe making hulls and growing food and refining rocket fuel is easy but it's the electronics that require zillion-credit fabrication plants? Maybe the anti-geriatric treatments are really expensive so empire citizens have 200 year lifespans and the barbarians are dropping by age 60 due to the rigors of space life? The barbarians are raiding to build up a tech base so that they won't have to rely on raiding the empire anymore.