From: wiml@milton.u.washington.edu (William Lewis)
Subject: Re: Territorial Disputes
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1992 08:17:12 GMT


[The following is pretty much an unordered jumble of my thoughts. The
reader is enjoined to sort them in whatever way makes the most sense
to it.]

In article <1992Dec20.010428.23060@newstand.syr.edu> pksuk@mothra.syr.EDU (Peter K. Suk) writes:
>Yes, but what is your motivation for having colonies in the first place?
>
>	1) lebenstraum (sp?)
>	2) industrial base to support defense
>	3) like to collect systems
>	4) insure immortality of the species
>
>You can eliminate the need for #2 by taking on a nomadic lifestyle,
>and in doing so insure #4.  As for #1, anyone with common sense can 
>see that birth control is cheaper than the alternatives.

  For that matter, psychological conditioning is cheaper than spaceflight,
which eliminates #3. And any culture as technologically advanced as you
posit can probably insure #4 from one planet, or certainly one system.
So there's no reason to expand in the first place.

  But even assuming that our hypothetical species is too silly to 
condition itself into not wanting to expand, I think there will *always*
be depletable resources tied to some space or other. If we don't have
to worry about matter and energy, then perhaps our only want is
artistic. Still, Art(tm) has always been in short supply, and will
probably continue to be indefinitely. So it's a depletable resource
(you can only have one *original*, no matter how quark-faithful the 
copy is.)  No reason two cultures couldn't wage a war over who gets
the latest gravity-wave sculpture by Van Remstiltskin? 
  Since we seem to be assuming that travel speed is limited in some
way (maybe not by c, but still limited) then the concept of "territory"
will still exist. One gypsy ship might decide it "owns" art-producing 
planets A, B, and C, and maybe even another ship D. Ships P,Q,and R could
ally and form a cooperative to gain control of interesting-looking
nebula N. Ship S, which is in N and can't leave for 50,000 years
because of speed limitations (N is very big) gets upset at this.
Woah ... territory!
  Even if nomadic ships don't have territory, unless *everyone* is
nomadic, then the still-planetbound cultures will still be 
territorial...

>First off, the cold war is over (for the time being).  Second, 
>if one considers the BEST ways to insure safety and security,
>IMHO one will come to the same conclusions as I.  Granted, not
>everyone does things this way.  (Hardly anyone, in fact.)

I wonder why? IMHO, this is a situation akin to the Prisoner's
Dilemma. If everyone agrees that war is icky because so many people
die, and everyone lays down their arms, then the best thing for
any *one* culture to do is to defect and grab everything as soon 
as it's the only one with an army. Of course, everyone knows this,
no nobody's going to completely disarm themselves in the first place...

>If one assumes NO FTL, time and distance become very intimately related, 
>and both get really flipping BIG -- to the extent that the accumulation
>of material resources becomes impractical.  Ask yourself WHY an empire
>would form on such a scale.

Well, what if some small group decides that they can all trust each other
after all, and discard their Stell-O-Zaps .... but wait! What about
outsiders? (Whom they don't know, so they can't trust them yet.) 
So they keep a few Stell-O-Zaps in a common trust. This is essentially
an empire. You don't necessarily need to transport very much in the
way of goods or information to have an empire. I expect the interstellar 
empires of the future will have done a lot of research on distributed
computing.

As I see it, there's always a marginal gain in consolidating 2 systems,
be they interstellar empires or microscopic animals. You can eliminate
some duplicated functions like defense, leaving more spare output
for higher functions (if any). The same force drives your nomads to
cooperate as drives the cells in a sponge to band together. But
a conflict can arise if this process starts in two separate places 
simultaneously ... two chunks of macro-life (or perhaps just
macroscopic life) can engage in a war. Because they want the same
territory ... be it space, food, or just the right to create
certain patterns of magnetic fields.

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