This is an entry in relation to the book I am currently writing.

Last month, I wrote about time. This month, I am writing about how I could see a government working across multiple star systems.

This is just going to be a lore post more than anything else. It doesn’t really fit the book in any fashion, but I figure it might be enjoyable for people to read to get a sense for what is to come.

Limitations on travel

In the setting of Reconnect, ships carrying humans will accelerate only up to 1.1g, or approximately 10.8 metres per second per second.

Taking into account the need to stop, the average ship could get from Earth to Mars in 1 day and 16 hours. However, Earth and Mars are not exactly settings in this book, and we have something else to contend with.

There are two principal planets in my story’s universe: Hibernia and Augustia. There are a smattering of other planets too, but all in all, the distance between these planets is on the surface about 13 light years apart.

Ignoring fuel, it would take just over 14 years to travel between the two planets although because of time dilation, the passengers onboard would experience something like five. The idea of being in a tin can for what would be perceived as half a decade is unpleasant even though it would be a third of what it truly would take.

This is of course impractical for the setting of my book, so of course there is a solution: we’ve achieved some sort of faster than light travel.

Humanity’s loss or the “Disconnect”

A few centuries from now, humans figured out how to pinch through spacetime with the use of twinned gates. One half of a gate was sent off from the Solar System to Tau Ceti. This was achieved with a light sail pushed by lasers.

When the gate arrived, it was soon realised that the planet they expected to be habitable was less than ideal. It would require terraforming in order to make it even remotely useful to colonise beyond a smattering of small population centres confined to spaces akin to those found on Mars.

As a consolation, the star system itself was ripe with resources to exploit. These resources were plentiful enough to permit the construction of significant numbers of gate pairs. This was in stark contrast to humanity’s home system, which could not build more than two pairs, one of which had failed to activate upon arrival at Proxima Centauri, less than five light years away.

Four gate pairs were constructed and then sent off towards other nearby stars. This was met with success as habitable planets were discovered orbiting all of them. This led to worlds named Hibernia and Augustia finding themselves colonised.

However, for reasons that remain a mystery, the only gate connecting back to Earth irreparably collapsed. While possible to build a new gate pair, the motivation to be governed from afar was unpopular with most of the colonists. This was further ensured after political order was returned and contact back home was forbidden by those in power.

Earth without the resources available to remedy the situation, within a few centuries did successfully send a probe containing an unspecified message and a few bottles of whiskey. Yet, unauthorised contact back to humanity’s home world was fleeting at best. When discovered, it was swiftly responded to by the colonial governments with punitive measures towards those involved.

After a generation passes, trade and travel between the colonies becomes commonplace and the memories of the “Old World” as it would be referred to become lost, anecdotes, or stories contained within what entertainment survived. The worlds that linked via these still functional gates were the places these humans would now only know.

New gates would be constructed to ensure redundancy and with time provide additional capacity, but nobody would dare allocate resources to build one to a place that would have once been called “home”.

Regular travel

Trips between Augustia and Hibernia take about three weeks, with one week being to one gate, the other traveling through The Hub or Tau Ceti as we know it, and then another week to get from the gate to the destination.

Gates are kept as far away as possible from planets and stars as they do interfere with the gravity of objects around them despite their mass not being all that significant.

The other aspect about the gates is that there’s a speed limit for their use. Gates have a speed limit of 3,342 KM/h. Why? Reasons. Just accept it.

This restriction creates a chokepoint as while the gates themselves can easily handle multiple vessels going in and out and that travel from one side to the other is largely instantaneous, you have to slow down as otherwise you will run into problems that I will not reveal at this time.

Side note about light sails

I made mention of pushing the gates by light sail, which are a real thing, but it’s probably going to be asked: why could humans not travel by this method?

In short, it is discovered that constant relativistic effects on human consciousness can really take their toll. One of the characters describes it as slowly turning you into “just a bag of meat and water”. The closer you approach velocities where time dilation is measurable in days, the more your mind begins to irreversibly fail.

Despite the centuries that have gone by between now and the book’s setting, we still fail to grasp what traps us in the bodies we’re given at birth.

Weak early institutions

Humanity has so far only had to compete with itself in its interstellar expansion. While the planets have not been devoid of flora or fauna, anything resembling sapient such as ourselves has yet to be observed.

One problem the gate collapse did create is stagnation, meaning that the colonies were suddenly removed from competition. While Earth was a huge benefactor from the resources and wealth brought on by the existence of the gate, the colonised worlds were themselves dependent in return.

Medicine, research, education, and even entertainment were all suddenly divorced from a significant portion of humanity. While these colonised worlds were largely self-sufficient for goods such as food or fuel, they all suffered a significant handicap when it came to anything advanced.

With a portion of humanity finding itself orphaned, it struggled to rebuild its expertise and recreate institutions while thwarting off anyone who wanted to take advantage of the situation. Many charlatans found themselves at an advantage with these young and naive governments, as they could gain access to resources by promising more than they could achieve.

However, time would pass and those with the knowhow would eventually push humanity in the right direction. It would not completely ease the pain, but the colonies would within a few centuries find themselves at parity to what was before.

Okay. What about this government?

Weeks of travel between all of humanity’s new worlds meant that no single, omnipresent government could rule. Past history back on Earth had proven that continental and maritime empires were ineffective. Prior to the gate collapse, what had existed was on already shaky ground with constant rebellions requiring dispatches to the fringes.

Additionally, cultural differences between the people who settled there also lent to the need to let these worlds rule as their own. However, Tau Ceti or “The Hub” was a shared space and thus needed to exist under its own entity.

This resulted in the formation of the Collective Commonwealth, a treaty organisation which exists to share the resources and infrastructure amongst all of its members.

Not all colonies signed onto the treaty, but those settlements within the Tau Ceti system as well as Hibernia and Augustia for example became party to it. Those who are not signatories to the treaty have a wide disparity with respect to trade and movement.

This treaty organisation has its own constitution and rules plus provides its own enforcement to ensure that spaces like The Hub could exist without requiring one single member to control any portion of the shared resource. Each member would also pay into upkeep and the organisation itself would have its own legislative body to oversee matters that encompass all members.

Under the treaty, members are provided with rules around freedom of movement, regulation on trade, research and education, construction of infrastructure, and enforcement of conduct. Each member themselves would be responsible for their own domestic affairs, but are also heavily discouraged from engaging in activities which are the business of the CC.

However, all of this is largely seen by the public, many of whom do not ever leave the worlds they reside on, as a system designed to keep member governments occupied by lineages of power. For those outside of the CC, they see it as a multilateral system to harass non-members. While the CC does not have a military on paper, it has an enforcement agency which behaves like one.

Where this all breaks down

Well, this is where the book comes in. Despite centuries passing, the stagnation remains and eventually catches up with those in the Collective Commonwealth.

And that is where I will leave this blog piece for today!