This video is sponsored by CuriosityStream.
Get access to my streaming video service,
Nebula, when you sign up for CuriosityStream
using the link in the description.
Many things could cause people to flee to
the stars, be it a flight from ruin or pursuit
of new worlds and opportunities, but such
an Exodus might be a protracted or even perpetual
state, around which a civilization might arise.
So last week we were looking at future types
of governments and this week we’ll be continuing
that discussion as we contemplate the popular
science fiction trope of wandering fleets
with no homeworld to call their own, often
operating under some oligarchy of ship captains,
something called a Navarchy, and we’ll explore
what might cause such a civilization to exist
and how they might operate.
We see these nomadic fleet civilizations in
many a story, but two of the best known are
the remnant survivors in Battlestar Galactica,
whose homeworlds were taken away by the Cylons,
a race of artificial intelligences they had
made, and the Quarians of Mass Effect, whose
homeworld was taken away by the Geth, a race
of artificial intelligences they had made.
There are also the Eldar Craftworlds in Warhammer
40,000, giant ships that fled their old civilization’s
descent into chaotic debauchery.
Even J.R.R.
Tolkien’s classic Lord of the Rings series
mentions an island civilization called Numenor
that rose to great power on land and sea before
playing with fire and getting burned, leaving
its handful of survivors to found the ‘Realms
in Exile” of Arnor and Gondor.
Fleeing a natural disaster, an enemy, or a
civilization back home that has turned repugnant
certainly seem like good reasons to jump aboard
every available ship and make an Exodus.
Often the in-story reason for the exile or
exodus is that their civilization did something
forbidden or just very foolish, and the survivors
were those few lucky or pure enough to avoid
the calamity and flee, with some parallels
to Noah’s Ark or Lot’s flight from Sodom,
to name two of the better known tales out
of countless ones about flight from ruination.
Many of the pilgrims who settled the North
Atlantic seaboard saw themselves as fleeing
flawed civilizations, accurate or not, and
this appears to be a fairly common theme for
colonists.
As it was a driving motivation it obviously
has a big impact on how the civilization would
organize itself.
That could compound a lot too.
If your civilization was fleeing a collapse,
or perceived collapse, whose culprit was a
descent into excess and debauchery, and you’re
doing it on board a rag-tag patchwork fleet
always short of resources, your new nomad
culture probably has a double-dose of austerity
and asceticism driving it on, as you’re
afraid of too relaxed and pleasant a lifestyle
and are busy barely eking out an existence.
Emphasis on perceived descent though because
for our purposes today it doesn’t matter
if the culture actually was decadent or wicked
or being punished, just that the people fleeing
it think so at the time.
And some civilization plowing through space
for generations might come to perceive their
distant ancestors as such a civilization even
if the original folks on the ships did not.
A fleet of generation ships for instance may
have left a glorious and prosperous civilization
for a thousand year journey to spread humanity
out to new worlds and come to think of it,
after many generations, as a flight from some
calamity.
They might see themselves as spending generations
wandering the desert of space for their new
homeland, a paradise they are traveling toward.
Alternatively they might be afraid of settling
worlds, as opposed to living on ships, as
they might come to think of them as some sort
of spiritual trap, and opt not to settle their
original destination system in favor of merely
stopping to gather up raw materials.
Or they might be afraid of pursuit.
They fled and the enemy follows them, always
one step behind, so they dare not settle.
Indeed that need not be truth either, generations
of cultural mutation and existing ship hierarchies
not wanting to give up control might result
in them fleeing an enemy that long since stopped
pursuing them, or ceased existing, or had
never existed except in their shared nightmare.
There are many reasons a civilization might
exist as nomads, and it might not be perceived
as a necessity either.
Those who ply the space lanes carrying cargo
from world to world or artificial habitat
to artificial habitat might simply be a culture
that emerges all on its own.
As an example, it's popular in science fiction
for some great galactic capital world to be
a planet-wide city, an Ecumenopolis, of a
trillion citizens unable to grow their own
food and forced to import it.
As we looked at in our episodes on that topic,
that shouldn’t actually be an issue for
them, but if we assumed a fleet of ships had
to bring that food in from dedicated agricultural
worlds or space farms, they would presumably
need to bring in around a trillion tons of
cargo a year to keep that world fed.
Even if they only needed one crew member for
every thousand tons of cargo brought in per
year, that is a billion people and more than
enough for a splinter civilization all its
own or in truth several hundred.
In Battlestar Galactica we have a fleet with
50,000 people on board, and it’s easy enough
to view that as its own culture, if we’re
thinking of that in terms of a billion folks
employed for generations just running food
to a Ecumenopolis Hive World, that would be
enough for 20,000 of those Battlestar Galactica
cultures, meaning you could conceivably have
a nomad fleet culture not for running food
to one specific Ecumenopolis but one entirely
devoted to just the import of Strawberries
or Pineapples or Mangos.
Heck, they might have skirmishes between them
over docking rights, space lanes, or trying
to sabotage the supply chain of their rivals.
Alternatively, you might have mobile hydroponic
ships that grew food and delivered it to a
myriad of asteroid mines or space habitats,
wandering the space lanes for centuries without
ever stopping at the same place twice as they
sought their next customer.
Now we can snicker at that notion a bit, and
again as we saw in our episodes on planet-wide
cities, they probably would grow most of their
own food, but in something immense like a
Dyson Swarm, composed of hundreds of trillions
habitats with hundreds of thousands of people
on each, if you supply some good you could
easily visit a new habitat every week and
the Sun would burn out before you ever visited
a single percent of them.
More to the point, even if most of your commerce
and passenger ships were heavily automated
and most production was localized to each
habitat, you’d still have trillions of ships
meandering around the solar system at any
given time, and that’s just one system out
of billions in our galaxy alone.
So even without contemplating interstellar
colonial fleets or those fleeing disasters,
we’ve got plenty of room for nomadic space
fleets, but let’s contemplate that colonial
example for a moment.
In our generations ships and life in a space
colony series, we contemplate something called
a Gardener Ship, or Gardener Fleet.
This is a ship meant to travel for many decades
to reach a new system, pause to resupply and
set up a colony, then move onward to make
another, and another, and another, headed
outward slowly to the Galactic Rim on a voyage
of a million years.
This is a very different setup than the classic
colony ship or fleet because it’s not ‘leave
Earth, arrive at new home’, it’s a recognition
that an interstellar ship needs to be so good
at repairing and replacing parts, able to
manufacture any and every component they need
for the ships or the colony to be founded,
that so long as they have raw materials and
time they can even create a new ship.
Indeed, given the rates at which folks can
reproduce, they might leave Earth with a 100,000
colonists and a colonial blueprint calling
for 100,000 settlers, and arrive a century
later with 4 times that many people, given
that Earth’s population quadrupled in the
20th century.
So they arrive at the original destination
with four times as many folks as they need
and the manufacturing capability to make all
the materials those colonists would need.
They just park around some resource rich asteroid
or moon, resupply and refuel, drop off however
many folks want to stay, and depart with cargo
holds full of raw materials for them to turn
into more colonial gear at the next location.
They may even decide to build more ships,
specialized ones to become more of a fleet
or armada, or clones of a single one that
depart towards different trajectories for
other uninhabited systems.
This is a culture, and these are nomads.
They probably contain many ships, they may
occasionally be joined by faster ships with
less cargo or better drives from home or from
prior colonies, or just elements that didn’t
slow down to colonize worlds and caught up
with them eventually.
They may have pieces of the fleet that lingered
after they left and run to catch up, or vanguard
elements that raced ahead to lay groundwork,
or which broke off to settle some neighboring
stars and returned to the main fleet at the
next destination.
Due to the slow travel time through interstellar
space, such tangents and splits might last
many years or even decades before a reunion,
causing much cultural divergence inside the
fleet.
I can imagine a scenario where a large fleet
like this traveled at 10 or 20% of light speed
to a new destination a century away, while
sub-fleets broke off to get all the other
neighboring systems along the way.
Of course, we also have the option of interstellar
laser highways, which allow near-light speed
travel but must be setup at the destination
first, to slow ships down, so that a vanguard
might race ahead to a rallying point a hundred
light years ahead and build that terminus
laser highway spot to slow its siblings down
as they all spread out to settle worlds, build
pushing lasers to send them on their way to
that rally point, and all met up there over
course of a decade or so for some big festival
and council and ship-building and overhauling
enterprise before heading on to do it again.
Some might remain behind, to serve as colonists
or local interstellar commerce, others break
for another destination as a new fleet, others
might continue on with that original all the
way to the edge of the galaxy or even beyond.
It does beg the question of who is running
the show on all these ships?
And while there are many options it would
seem like the natural default path would probably
tend to be the captains and that when working
in groups they’d have some council of captains
or an admiral, appointed or elected or picked
on seniority or ship size or strength or whichever.
Incidentally, any time you have multiple ships
the person in charge is an admiral or some
other title besides captain like Commodore
and the ship they are on is called their flagship.
Bit of a tangent but something that always
irritated me about Star Trek, be it Captain
Kirk or Picard, they’re running the Federation
Flagship and always worried about getting
promoted to admiral and stuck at a desk back
on Earth.
In practice Picard for instance would have
been an admiral and Riker would have been
his Flag Captain, running and commanding the
actual ship.
Obviously future or fictional fleets can run
themselves however they like but in general
military units have a commander in charge
of a unit composed of many smaller units who
each have their own commander, the overall
commander doesn’t try to simultaneously
run one of those smaller units as they are
busy running the whole show, though of course
many are prone to micromanaging, often to
the despair of the sub-commander in charge
of whichever unit the actual commander spends
their time with.
Minor tangent but something that tends to
irritate me about a lot of science fiction
that aims for realism by borrowing modern
or recent historical examples but then misapplying
them.
This could be a bit different in some rag-tag
collection of nomad ships though, where the
guy with the biggest ship is in charge and
the setup is much more feudal.
You also don’t necessarily need an overall
commander, if the mission is conceptually
straight-forward, like colonizing, and takes
decades per stop, each ship could pretty much
run its own show and just have an informal
council of whichever ships were present when
they needed to call a meeting to pick their
next destination, and a majority vote might
not matter as if ten ships meet to they pick
their next destination and can’t agree,
six might go to one place, three to another,
and a lone ship to yet another, and those
six might get joined up by a squadron of ships
from an entirely different fleet some centuries
down the road.
Countries kind of have to work with each other,
shared borders that exist on a planet where
the geography doesn’t change much or quickly,
but ships are mobile.
Colonial gardener fleets really only require
two inputs, raw materials and information.
They need tech updates from back home and
maps, maps of new tiny things in their way
or which might be useful to them, and what
systems are getting colonized, since once
you set course in interstellar space your
trajectory could be locked in for centuries
and showing up at some system that got colonized
a decade before after you spent a century
and generations getting there is going to
be an enormous blow.
Imagine if your fathers and their fathers
and their father’s fathers had worked their
whole lives to plan out and execute a mission
to colonize HIP 41378, a system 348 light
years from Earth in the Constellation of Cancer
we found some exoplanets around a few years
back.
You’ve arrived only to pick up a signal
from them as you were approaching saying “Welcome
to Kepler Town, population one million, fuel
and resources available for a fee, resource
poachers will be treated as hostile pirates”.
Remember that you’re a mobile nation and
culture fixated for generations on this destination,
the impact is likely to be enormous and include
options like despair or rage, not a casual
shrug.
We can think of these ships as incredible
autonomous, needing no input but raw materials
abundant throughout the galaxy and information,
and even the latter is optional in that you
might have all the tech you need and be roaming
so far out there’s no information anyone
else could provide, and yet these two things
still represent a jugular vein in their own
way.
And that lets us discuss what day to day life
on a nomad ship or fleet would be like.
Obviously your tech and resources matter a
lot, you might live in some near utopia where
your only job is checking on some robots every
few weeks or you might be crammed into makeshift
apartments under some cooling ducts celebrating
that you finally managed to barter for some
cloth to hang a curtain on the duct to get
you some privacy.
Either way though, the captain – or ruling
council – has an awful lot of control over
your life because you can’t just jump ship.
Whether you’re a colonist on a century long
voyage that your great-great-grandparents
signed you up for or on some space freighter
that stops at habitats every week for trade,
while the ship is in motion you’re stuck
there and your freedoms are limited by the
ship and its needs, or what the captain says
those needs are anyway.
Let’s take a hypothetical case, your with
a colonial gardener armada traveling in deep
space at 10% of light speed on 30 light year
journey through the void from your last stop
to your next one, HIP 41378 which you plan
to name Kepler Town, when you arrive there
sometime around the year 7000 AD, it being
6700 AD right now.
You’re expecting to arrive in 300 years,
or rather your fleet was when it left a century
back and your grandfather signed up for the
trip, and it is now 6800 AD.
The fleet has gotten a tech update from Earth
for a new interstellar laser array that can
keep itself focused over light years and let
a fast vanguard ship assemble such an array
at the destination, using the technique we
looked at in Exodus Fleet, of sending sequential
solar mirrors and lasers that each slows the
next mirror down a bit more till the last
one can arrive at a safe speed and slow your
fleet down.
This will let you do future trips to new stars
faster than your old fusion drives but the
fleet determines that it can implement this
mid-flight, and shave some time off the voyage,
but that they will need a ton of aluminum
to create the giant mirror arrays that will
generate the pushing laser that will slow
the armada down at the destination and the
big solar sails those ships will need to have
for the lasers to hit.
Your ship, the Grand Pioneer, gets selected
to take on extra fuel and fusion reactors
from its sister ships to slow down mid-flight
and make a rendezvous with a large rogue body
detected about a light year ahead a light
month to the side of your fleet’s course.
The plan is for you to detour and brake to
land on that rogue body, set up fusion reactors
and mining equipment, build a giant prototype
pushing laser and process a ton of aluminum
and then fill your cargo holds full of it
and have that pushing laser shove you back
up to 30% of light speed, not the 10% the
fleet is moving at.
Once you’re up to a higher speed than the
fleet and at an overrun velocity with those
ships you’ll start dropping light sails
you manufactured behind you and bouncing the
pushing laser off your own sails to hit those
sails and slow them down to 10% of light speed
to be at a speed and position those ships
from the main fleet can snatch the sails at
and use them, then the laser you constructed
will transfer to them and push them to a higher
speed too.
The Grand Pioneer, in the meantime, will continue
ahead and arrive and begin deploying a sequence
of light sails and stellasers toward the target
sun to slow them and the fleet down.
Again see the episode Exodus Fleet for more
details on how this system works.
Now this may or may not be risky, the fleet
might have had enough reserve fuel that fueling
your ship for an early slow down and minor
course change wasn’t a worry and that they’d
still have enough fuel to slow down if the
first part of your mission failed.
The Grand Pioneer is taking a pretty big gamble
though, decelerating on its own toward a barely
known tiny rock in deep space and then trying
to race ahead of the fleet and deploy an unknown
new technology to slow down.
That main fleet might decide they don’t
want to risk accelerating with the laser until
the Pioneer has successfully used it and deployed
the terminus laser at the destination and
used it too.
For the folks on the Grand Pioneer, and its
10,000 people, the risk is not a short thing
though.
In year 1, or 101 of the main flight, they
will begin slowing down and angling off to
that rock, “Pioneer’s Gamble”, a light
year away and they will arrive in Mission
Year 112, 6812 AD.
They calculate that at the new speed possible
with the laser sail design they will still
need 70 years to travel to the Terminus Destination,
Kepler Town, and get the slow-down laser assembled,
including speeding up and slowing down that
second time.
That gives them until Mission Year 230 to
leave Pioneer’s Gamble but that’s a loose
date since if they fail, they can arrive later
as there would be a colony there, whereas
if they waited till then to leave they’d
have done the main fleet no good at all.
The captain, an old dog from Earth who has
been crewing and commanding the Grand Pioneer
since it left the Neptune dockyard a few thousand
years ago, is utterly committed to getting
this mission done as fast as possible.
The Engineer is less optimistic about time
tables, and the XO, who is a promising young
officer with an independent streak who got
transferred to Grand Pioneer in hopes it would
cool him off, resents being sent away from
the main fleet for a century or more, given
that that’s longer than he’s even been
alive.
See this fleet has life extension, as our
three thousand year old captain shows, but
most of the crew is not that old.
They all have children on a fairly modern
time table and when they arrive at new systems,
around 30 thus far, they tend to lose half
their number to that new colony and often
build new ships and break the fleet in half
too.
But a few of the original ships like the Grand
Pioneer and the Unity – flagship of a colonial
fleet running a parallel course they sometimes
exchange messages with - are still in service
and kept the same captain the whole time.
The Grand Pioneer’s captain is like an institution,
so is the Engineer, they’ve both been around
so long folks barely even remember their names
just their titles.
So when they arrive in Mission year 112, 6812
AD, they set to work.
They’re setting up fusion reactors to run
on the deuterium on this frozen rock and exploring
around for minerals, after about 8 years they
are decently setup, they have hydroponics
and power and mining going.
This is where we get some break down.
There are kids now helping on the mining who
weren’t even born till after the ship left
the fleet 20 years ago.
They’ve been raised on the whole notion
of colonizing giant planets rather than one
small ship a few kilometers long and here
they are on a giant rock hundreds of kilometers
across.
Indeed most of the ship’s crew was born
during the current fleet mission that began
120 years ago when they left the last new
colony, that’s what gardener ships do after
all, breed new colonists between stops.
So they start saying they’re all for continuing
the mission but they plan to stay here, some
of them anyway.
They’ll turn Pioneer’s Gamble into a deep
space port and laser relay and carve some
rotating habitats into it.
The Engineer is all for this as she wants
to play with the new laser technology a lot
and figures they can always build a new ship
here too and catch up to the fleet down the
road if need be, and a bigger time investment
into developing this port will let her play
with some of those applications she envisions.
The XO likes that notion too, at least when
the words ‘New Ship’ were mentioned, as
a new ship needs a new captain after all.
Now the captain doesn’t object to folks
choosing to remain behind when they leave
but all this talk of making Pioneer’s Gamble
a port worries him that it will slow down
their setup and departure.
Every day they spend here is one more day
that main fleet is moving along at 10% of
light speed, not 30%, there’s millions of
folks in that fleet living and waiting to
arrive at Kepler Town and the sooner they
get going, the sooner that fleet arrives,
and we’re talking about shaving decades
off the flight.
And to the captain it’s not just that one
colony, it’s all the future ones, and the
better this first mission performs the more
likely they are to adopt it as their future
approach.
This is already a tense situation, and that
main fleet is now over a light year away closer
to Kepler Town so communications are slow
and business-focused, folks on the Grand Pioneer
don’t really feel like part of the main
fleet’s culture anymore, 20 years after
departing it.
To make things worse, that fleet has gotten
word from the Grand Pioneer that they found
minerals on Pioneer’s Gamble and had manufacturing
setup, while at the same time the technology
has had 20 years of prototyping back on Earth
and on fleets behind them who have reported
good success and minor tweaks.
So the Admiral has decided to accelerate.
They’re moving at 10% of light speed with
enough fuel to either slow down or double
their speed but be unable to slow down.
By their calculation if they accelerate to
20% of light speed now, The Grand Pioneer
can still manufacture the light sails and
race ahead at 30% to arrive ahead of them
and still drop off the solar sails they’ll
need to accelerate even more and slow down.
The captain gets this news not long after
agreeing to push the production time table
back a little to allow more buildup of Pioneer’s
Gamble as a spaceport.
He’s obviously in a very troubling position,
he has a new calculated time sooner than planned
and he MUST leave by then or at best he’ll
be trying to chase his fleet down over centuries
to try to get ahead of them in some system
to slow or redirect them assuming they even
have enough fuel to run ship life support
that long.
Indeed the fleet wasn’t stupid, they have
a back up plan along those lines they transmitted
with another system, as the secondary rendezvous,
but he has to decide if he’s going to reverse
his position and if he’ll be obeyed if he
does.
To many of new settlers of Pioneer’s Gamble,
the fleet made its own stupid decision and
they’ll help if they can but they’re distant
people who sent them off on a risky mission,
its not their fault if they did something
dumb.
They’ve been given a time table that requires
them to be up and running and sending the
Grand Pioneer on its way in just 20 more years,
so that it can race ahead of the fleet in
time to slow them down.
It's an interesting story perhaps, but it
highlights how on even these seemingly dedicated
fleets you could have changes of interest
and perspective.
You don’t set off on a century long mission
without mutation, to them that original charter
from Earth, over 3000 years ago, is as nebulous
as something’s like Hammurabi’s laws in
ancient Babylon, and even their current mission
to Kepler Town would be as far back to them
at its inception as the year 1900 is to us.
They’ve changed, their priorities have changed.
It’s not hard to imagine this sort of event
or one’s like it happening millions of times
over thousands of scattered fleets, whether
they’re big colonial armadas or just an
actual garden ship growing produce to distribute
to asteroid mining colonies or freighters
delivering endless food to a city-planet or
moving throughout the Oort Cloud over lonely
centuries to send one icy comet after another
into the inner system for terraforming.
Ultimately it's just the nature of space and
interstellar travel that it involves timelines
so long cultures can diverge even on single
missions and scales so immense that you could
have a trillion cargo ships devoted to nothing
but carrying raw materials into some growing
Dyson Swarm whose myriad captains and crews
simply don’t feel tied to anything but their
mission and the life on their ship.
At most they might have a kinship with fellow
ships that tended to travel with them, or
with ships in general against the larger cultures
they serve or trade with, but each one would
be an island nation all to itself, be it democracy,
a dictatorship, or some form of anarchic rule,
and crews might range from millions on a single
colony ship to a single lone crewman, captain
of their own ship, and the various AI on board.
As we saw in the Ark of a Million Years, given
enough time, such ships might develop their
own unique ecosystems and for the bigger ones
even diverge into many specialized nations
and tribes all on their own inside that single
giant ship.
They might be nomadic not because they have
some distant destination in mind, some promised
paradise world, but rather because that ship
is everything and they don’t want to leave,
to them the ship is still and stationary,
and everything outside is what is migrating
and changing.
In many ways not too unlike Earth, which has
traveled around the galaxy many times and
moves through the sea of the night perpetually,
but to us is stationary.
In a way we’re all nomad civilizations,
journeying through vast tracts of space and
time.
We’ll get to our upcoming schedule in a
moment, but I did want to give quick thanks
to everyone who has signed up for our streaming
service, Nebula.
If you’re interested in signing up, we have
started putting up all our episodes there
now a couple days early and without any ads
or sponsors on them.
Nebula is an experiment I and a bunch of other
channels started up last year as an alternative
to youtube dependence and we wanted to give
an extra incentive to join up, so again the
new episodes of our show will be available
there now a day or two early and without ads
in them.
We also have some early and exclusive content
available there, like our Coexistence with
Aliens series, not too mention all the other
excellent content on there from our sibling
channels.
Now Nebula is it’s own separate streaming
service but our friends at Curiositystream
do offer it as a free add-on if you subscribe
to them, and since they have so much excellent
educational content of their own and are running
26% discount if you use the link in the description,
it’s a great deal.
It means you get a year of both Curiositystream
and Nebula for less than $15, and it helps
support this show and a lot of other educational
content which is what Curiositystream and
Nebula are all about, and again you can get
a year of both for less than $15 by using
the link in the episode’s description.
So this month will celebrate the sixth anniversary
of our show, and we'll continue next week
with our new series, Becoming an Interplanetary
Species, as we look at Colonizing Cislunar
Space and the Lagrange Points.
Then for our sixth Anniversary episode, in
two weeks, we’ll be contemplating the Future
of Fission, and in three weeks we’ll return
to the Fermi Paradox to consider whether or
not the rarity of Phosphorus or other critical
elements might be the solution for the apparent
absence of alien civilizations.
If you want alerts when those and other episodes
come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel,
and if you’d like to help support future
episodes, you can donate to us on Patreon,
or our website, IsaacArthur.net, which are
linked in the episode description below, along
with all of our various social media forums
where you can get updates and chat with others
about the concepts in the episodes and many
other futuristic ideas.
Until next time, thanks for watching, and
have a great week!
