Thinking about
booking passage on a space Mayflower to a new world? There are
a few things you should be aware of.
You can’t bring
it with you. Weight restrictions are stringent; you’ll barely be
able to bring more than some clothes and a few other items.
Bring tools.
Electronics are
useless. There isn’t any electrical infrastructure. We’re
talking colonial America-level of technology. If even that, it is
quite a primitive place.
You see the level
of technology that can be supported is directly proportional to the
population.
Now if there were
an advanced civilization right next door, this would be a big benefit
of course. But the distance between solar systems is vast and the
expense of traveling between them is enormous. There will not be any
trade of corn or wheat between them; it would make no economic sense.
The fact is, unless the colony could produce something very unique
and valuable all “trade” would pretty much be the importation of
people and tools, one way.
So the fact is,
if Planet Cochrane had a population of 100,000 it would pretty much
resemble rural agricultural colonial America. The colonists would
make their own homes, carve their own tables, stuff feathers into
beds, make their own candles, ground their own wheat and churn their
own butter.
In the beginning
they might have some more advanced technology but the economy does
not support mining and processing ore into needed products. It barely
supports anything. Those solar powered HAM radio sets can work until
a vacuum tube bursts or a wire shorts, then what?
So leave your
laptop at home and learn to produce some basic items and bring the
tools with you, that is a key to success in the distant colonies. At
least until someone develops warp technology and makes it easier and
cheap to travel between the stars.
Like the Plymouth
colonies life will be very rough, especially for the very first
colonists.
Any science
fiction story about distant, tough to reach colony worlds will need
to take the link between population and technology into account.
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